Manufacturers of mobile devices have dealt with a vexing issue in recent years: the expansion of the area needed to accommodate keypads with the diametrically opposed goal of shrinking the overall size of the devices. For example, many manufacturers have implemented full QWERTY-type keypads in their mobile devices. While enabling quick and efficient entry of data into the device, this type of keypad requires a relatively large amount of space. One way developers have solved this problem is through the introduction of slide-style mobile devices. Slide-style mobile devices, however, are complicated to manufacture.
Some mobile devices rely on keypads that have keys that share alphanumeric characters, which reduces the number of keys required for the keypad. For example, many of these keypads include a 4 rows by 3 columns (“4×3”) array in which multiple letters and a single number are associated with most of the keys. To move from one letter to the next on a particular key, an operator typically presses the relevant key multiple times until the desired letter appears on the display. At this point, the operator can move onto the next letter, which may also require multiple presses of the same button. As such, the operator may be required to make numerous button presses to generate a text message or some other display of the characters on the keys. This process can be quite tedious for the operator.
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