For those of you who drive, admit it. You text while driving. And you’ve had a couple of close shaves at one time or another as your attention was distracted by the novel-sized SMS message that you were composing on your phone. No surprise that texting-while-driving road accidents have been fodder for news stories over the past few years.

There are two ways of approaching this problem — one, treat text-drivers as criminals and penalize them, hopefully making them too scared to reply to text messages while they’re on the road.

But doing so goes against the role of technology as an enabler. I would therefore prefer to take the tech route — namely, mobile phone companies should come up with a way for us to easily send text messages without us having to take our eyes off the road.

Predictive vs. Multitap
I’ve never been completely comfortable with predictive text messaging technologies, such as T9 (found in most mobile phones) and iTAP (found in Motorola units). Especially when driving. And the reason is that predictive texting does not give you full control over what’s being typed out. You’re typing CARD and you have to change the T9-generated word seven times (CARE, CASE, BASE, ACRE, BARD, BARE, CAPE…) before you hit it. More to the point, you have to be staring at your phone to find the proper word. In the case of iTAP it can get even trickier as iTAP constantly changes its word menu based on your usage. So you can’t just, say, remember that the second word for the 2-2-7-3 keypad sequence is CASE.

You don’t want to be staring at your phone while you text and drive. You’d want an interface that allows you to text without having to look at your phone.

Which is why I normally prefer Multitap mode. Multitap is the dumb text mode, where you punch the number 5 three times to get the letter L, for instance. It takes much longer to type sentences using Multitap, but you have full control over your compositions because the phone is not making any decisions for you. In short, so long as you’ve memorized your phone’s letter placements, you know exactly what you’re typing and you can basically punch out an entire novella without once having to look at your phone.

Bigger buttons please
I used to be the king of multitapping. With my ancient Nokia 5110, I could compose text messages at lightning speed even with the phone behind my back. But that was because the 5110 had large and distinct buttons that you could navigate by feel.

The problem with most phones today is that, with size becoming paramount in design, keypads have been sacrificed. Individual keys have been jammed tightly together so that you can’t tell one key from another, preventing you from typing out messages by feel. Worse, most keypads are now practically flat surfaces (witness the Motorola RAZR) so that touch-typing is becoming a thing of the past. And at the extreme end would be PDA-phones that have no keys at all and which demand that you compose messages via a stylus. Well, maybe this is a safety feature because nobody in his right mind should try scripting a message into a PDA while driving.

Solutions
Here’s where technology should be helping us by giving us phones that can actually be used for texting while driving, without forcing us to take our eyes off the road.

I’d like to see bigger, more distinct buttons on phones. If only so that I can get back to the good old days when I multitapped my messages with brute force.

On the other hand, for predictive-text equipped phones, perhaps future models should come equipped with voice readouts so your phone would tell you what word is being predicted at any point.

In the future, your phone would probably be more tightly wedded to your car via Bluetooth. In which case we’d be seeing heads-up displays similar to those seen in fighter jets, with your text messages being displayed right there on your windshield so that you don’t have to take your eyes off the road anymore. Of course, this would make life hell if you were actually texting embarrasing love notes while your gang was riding with you.

Sooner or later, mobile phone manufacturers are bound to address the Great Philippine Tech Dilemma of texting while driving. After all, that’s what technology is for.

In the meantime, if all else fails… heck, just take a cab.