HP close to gesture-based keyboard deal

HP Labs is close to finalising a deal with a leading mobile vendor to license its gesture-based keypad for mobile users in India, besides rolling out a new range of HP iPAQs that are equipped with the same.

The gesture-based keyboard, priced at Rs 2,500, is an electronic pen-based device that can be used to create texts in languages that use phonetic scripts, rather than the Roman alphabet that's common in Western languages. With the keyboard, users can enter data the way most people learn to write "" with a pen. At present, the keyboard is being licensed by a small Bangalore-based company Prodigy that claims to have sold around 500 units till date. But HP is also mulling over plans to market the gesture-based products on its own, along with its personal computing products like laptops and personal computers.

Ajay Gupta, Lab director, HP Labs, said: "We are in the advanced stages of rounding off a commercial deal with the largest handset vendor in India to license GKB for mobile handsets, for languages including Bengali, Kannada, Hindi and Malayalam." While refusing to comment on whether the vendor was Nokia in India, he confirmed that the deal would be finalised this year. Many leading keyboard manufacturers had also expressed interest in licensing the technology in India, the company said.

With a near 98 per cent accuracy in identifying the alphabets scribbled, the gesture-based keyboard can potentially wipe out the last-mile hurdle in the regional linguistics market. "It is radically different from the regular keyboard as the letters (consonants) are arranged alphabetically on GKB and require only phonetic modifiers. This effectively means that the device can be used by anyone who doesn't know English and cannot type. The device also helps to shorten the writing time for first-time users of computers," claimed Gupta. The gesture-based mobile keypads can be used for most Indic (Indo-Aryan) languages derived from Devanagari scripts, thus benefitting over 1.5 billion non-English-speaking people "" including Indian, Nepalese, Sri Lankan and Bangladeshi script users.