Zi Corporation continues to sow its multimodal text input software throughout the Linux mobile phone community. At Access Day 2007 in Tokyo today it showed off the technology pre-integrated into the Access Linux Platform (ALP) mobile phone stack.

(Click for larger image of Zi Decuma on a mobile phone)

ALP screenshot (Click for details)

Sponsored by Access Co., Ltd., a Japanese firm known for its mobile phone browser and other software, the event unveiled applications developed for ALP 1.0, which was acquired when Access bought out PalmSource, the software-only offspring of Palm. The Linux phone stack was released in February, but has not yet arrived in production devices.

At the show, Calgary-based Zi Corporation demonstrated its eZiText and Decuma text-input software for mobile phones. According to Zi, eZiText and Decuma help users draft and send text messages quickly. eZiText offers word completion and text prediction — along with automatic correction — for devices with keypad text input. Decuma combines handwriting recognition software with word completion / text prediction (for alphabetic languages).

EziText (left) and Decuma (right)
Customized for the Japanese market, Zi's software reportedly was demonstrated running on a variety of ALP-based mobile devices, PDAs, and games consoles. Together, the technologies greatly speed messaging on mobile devices, the company claims.

Milos Djokovic, Zi's President and CEO, noted the year-old partnership has proved strategic for his company. “Access Linux Platform has opened up new business channels and expanded our reach in the smartphone and wireless device markets,” he stated.

In December of last year, Zi announced availability of a similar pre-integration with mobile phone stacks from Trolltech, including Qtopia 2.x, 4.x, and “Jupiter.” Zi is competing in the mobile multimodal input market with vendors such as VisionObjects and Tegic, which recently was acquired by Nuance and is marketed under the name T9 Solutions.

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