ThickButtons to make touchscreen typing a breeze!

Paul Nesbitt

A four man Ukrainian company has developed ThickButtons, an Android app, which makes touchscreen typing much easier by predicting which letters you are about to type and enlarging them. Less likely letters are shrunk.

ThickButtons is an ingenious reworking of the idea of predictive texting systems, like T9, and one which reviewers have complimented for its unintrusive ease of use. If ThickButtons takes off, it could prompt a fundamental shift away from smartphones with physical keyboards to those with touchscreen keyboards.

ThickButtons is available as a free of charge beta (version 0.6) app from the Android Marketplace, and a version for Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 is under development. The developers have also promised a version for Palm webOS handsets if there is sufficient customer demand.

Ironically, ThickButtons will not be developed for Apple's iPhone, the smartphone, which essentially created the market for the touchscreen smartphone.

'[We] would love to make it for iPhone but Apple has a very strict policy for the keyboard applications, so there is no chance to publish it in the AppStore. If you will help us to negotiate with Steve Jobs on that I promise, we will make version for iPhone as well!,' wrote Dimitri Lisitski, the company's co-founder on theThickButtons website.