Panasonic Press Release

Eatoni and Panasonic anounce adoption of Eatoni's LetterWise text-entry solution on Panasonic Cordless DECT Phones

SMS Text-entry in 24 languages available on new Panasonic DECT phones

NEW YORK, March 13 - Today at the 2002 CeBIT Conference in Hannover, Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. Ltd. (Panasonic) announced the use of Eatoni Ergonomics' LetterWise predictive texting solution for sending SMS messages on Panasonic cordless DECT phones, said Howard Gutowitz, Eatoni Ergonomics CEO.

LetterWise will offer predictive-text support for 24 different languages on the Panasonic phones, marking a major step towards bringing the SMS market into landline-based home telephones, Gutowitz said.

The new phones, Panasonic models KX-TCD755 and KX-TCD 775, will be the most linguistically diverse text-entry of any phones on the market, Gutowitz said. These Panasonic phones offer SMS texting in: Basque, Catalan, Croatian Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Greek, Hungarian, Irish, Italian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Scottish, Slovak, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish and Welsh. "This is a significant evolutionary step in the development of text-based interactive communication," Gutowitz said. "Today Panasonic, one of the leading consumer brands in the world, ushers in a new era for consumers that will make it easy to send text messages from home and office phones, in 24 different languages."

"Adding LetterWise to our DECT phones makes our phones more attractive to millions of users, because it is so easy to use, and requires very little memory," said Jan Böttcher, Panasonic Deutschland GmbH. "No other DECT or mobile phone on the market has predictive text support for so many languages, and no other texting software could provide this many using so little memory."

As text messaging explodes worldwide the need to provide software in local languages has dramatically increased. Eatoni has solved many of the localization issues such as language-specific keypad layouts and language specific characters, as well as backward compatibility with manufacturer's key-assignment heritage, Gutowitz said.

"We've overcome a key design constraint faced by manufacturers: memory usage," Gutowitz said. "Our suggested database size for LetterWise is a mere 3k, and we are able to optimally scale the databases to fit within a memory budget provided by a manufacturer." Easy to use, LetterWise flawlessly inputs slang, proper names and URLs, because it is not dictionary based.

"Eatoni's text entry software resolves the worldwide problem of entering URL's, proper names, abbreviations and addresses during mobile texting," said Gutowitz. "It's linguistically based predictive text-entry solutions make text entry on a standard telephone keypad feel like typing on a full typewriter keyboard. Simply stated, it is the key to opening the door to successful typing of wireless text, be it SMS messaging, e-mail, instant messaging, web surfing or beyond."

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