Adaptxt is an application from the company Keypoint Technologies and is available for Symbian-powered handsets and Windows Mobile. The purpose of the application is to make adaptive text on these handsets a better experience. This is done by the application by getting text from your messages, email, contacts and some selected application that it can read text from. It also has the ability to import words to make out context from social networks. We’ve taken a look into the application to see if it performs these tasks well. The application is currently still in beta and therefore it is to be expected that it has some small flaws. We’ve obviously tested the Symbian version of the application.
First look
The application comes in a size of about 2 Mb and features three components the application itself, Adaptxt, Adaptxt FEP and the same License Manager from Openbit which can be found in e.g. Nokia Maps. Installation is therefore not the smoothest experience as you have to click through a couple of screens along the way to fully install the application. The well known notifications that pops up when installing something on our Symbian-powered handsets is not their fault so here they are excused. Their disclaimer however is very long and detailed and if you are one of those that likes to read through these you have found yourself the right application. After that comes the notification that you can only install the application on the phone memory, ok go on. Another notification pops up saying that if you should uninstall the application you should disable the application before doing so. A third notification pops up saying that you should restart your phone after installation of the application. The total time of install till you can load the application is therefore between 3 – 5 minutes depending on which phone model you have. The extensive notifications are in my opinion a bit too much, but it does help the user to be able to troubleshoot the application along the installation if something should go wrong. Let’s be honest how many of us reads the help inside an application?
First start of the application
Starting the application you are met with a privacy statement. Here you get to learn that the application will learn new text entries from words and text you type in your phone and that information from password fields won’t be gathered. With an email address shown as being suppport@adaptxt.com you can send them an email if your paranoia becomes too much, when using this application. I don’t quite know if I should find that a joke or not, but I do know people that have a bit too much paranoia, so I’ll just let this rest.
A kindly “Would you like to start the application when turning on your phone” greets you after the privacy statement and if that wasn’t enough you are met with two new screens one saying that the application can learn profiles from social networking sites and the other one saying that it can learn names from SMS, contacts and other PIM information on your phone. Luckily you can hide the two last notifications and I’ve stopped counting how many I’ve got so far.
Application in use
The main screen presents you with nine icons in a grid setup, each with its own functions. Colors are not too flashy and the icons are understandable and quite intuitive and to go in to the different functions you use the center D-pad. The my dictionary shows you the dictionary inside this particular application and is not interconnected to the the T9 on your handset. Trying to enter a word here will not get any hits.You can set the size of the dictionary, the default being 2500 words. Language lets you only choose between two “languages”, one being English (UK) and SMS, obviously it learns the language from your text messages. Here you can move the languages up or down after your own taste. The display settings lets you set number of suggestions showing up with a maximum being 4, toggle on or off phrase display and the font size to maximum 12.
Applications lets you choose the applications on your phone this application should be active in and you can only choose between four other applications. Social lets you connect to the only service being facebook where Adaptxt will try to pull your profile information to learn new contexts. Despite not assigning Adaptxt to be active on Web and font size set to 8, it still took control when inputting text and showed up the symbols with a very large font size. Choosing buy addons it again launches Web connecting to their store. Here you can choose between dictionaries from different categories as well as selecting many different languages for them. Add-On Manager lets you install or remove different addons. As I didn’t have any installed it was empty so nothing was worth seeing there.
PIM lets you choose what Adaptxt should scan such as SMS, emails, contacts, calendar and domains. Here you can add information manually or select them from your contact list.
Final encounters
After being quite disappointed I hesitantly pressed the left key bringing up the options. Here you get to disable Adaptxt, the autostart function and the usual about and help options. The interesting one I found here was learn which lets you import a file from either phone memory or memory card. I tried to import some words I had written on a text file and it imported it successfully. Going back to my dictionary I found that my dictionary had grown from 0 at initial start to 805 words. Unfortunately it had pulled down many weird words and names from Facebook, even some Russian, but the words from the text file was gladly also imported. Fortunately you can mark words you want to delete by selecting them using the center D-pad or use the delete all words function.
Some things I noticed was that it occupies quite a lot of the resources on the handset. Having only Screenshot, Adaptxt and Web running on the N95, either Adaptxt or Screenshot closed itself if not also Web. On my N82 it went better but having the application open and the screensaver kicking in, it takes a couple of extra seconds before the main screen of Adaptxt is displayed again. The learn function should be placed either as an own option with its own icon, placed higher up on the option list in the main screen and also be placed under option in the my dictionary. Hiding this function away won’t do the application any good and users won’t be tempted to purchase your dictionaries either. Purchase of dictionary can be a factor of this choice, but in my opinion a bad one. And please fix the application so it runs better.
All in all the application has great potential and if you are interested in trying the free beta with it’s mentioned flaws don’t hesitate to download the application from their website. Another application that comes into my mind is Quickwrite from our Symbian-Guru Store with spelling dictionaries in 6 languages that also is an aid in doing predictive texting. It does however not have the import function but it’s stable and fast.
