51.1 wpm on a PalmPilot
	by Noah Bergevin

I decided to try my luck at the speed contest the FITALY people were putting on. (Who can pass up free software?) They give you 40 words to type/tap in (FITALY, Qwerty, Graffiti) as fast as you can. When I first tried it out with the FITALY keyboard, I got about 86 seconds. I kept practicing the text over and over, and was able to do it in 65 sec., and just recently, pulled it down to 47 sec (51.1 wpm!).

It was "hunt, hunt, hunt, and peck" for a while, and then in turned into "hunt, hunt, peck", and then "hunt, peck, peck, peck, peck". It turned into being able to tap a word from a tight area because most of the time the next letter was very close to the last one.

What really helped was practicing on the same text over and over to get used to the placement of the major letters and the patterns of some of the key combinations. All I can say is practice. Get a good jump-start by trying a good sample text over and over, and then try to use it in the real world.

I have to admit that it may not the best text entry method in the world. But when trying to hammer out a lengthly Email on a small device that gives you Graffiti or a soft-QWERTY that was made for two hands, the FITALY just makes sense.

Noah Bergevin
Groupware Solutions
Shared Medical Systems