Russell Shaw flags a monstrous U.S. patent application by Research in Motion that outlines plans to bring a lot of autoformatting features to the Blackberry.
File this patent under "annoying." While Russell notes RIM's patent is designed to cut back on keystrokes--more like thumb strokes--and auto format certain inputs. It all sounds very Microsoft Word-ish.
There's a reason I'm writing this post in Notepad--Microsoft Word autoformats everything. Smart quotes? Hate them. Completing sentences? Word stinks. Aside from spell check I'm not sure what Microsoft Word is good for.
Now RIM is going down the same path. A few excerpts compiled by Russell:
Those aforementioned items scare the hell out of me. Part of the appeal of emails sent via Blackberry is the brevity and thumbish punctuation--or lack of it. Now RIM is going to make mobile email look more professional by correcting us nonstop.
RIM assures us that "all automatic formatting features of the user interface and autotext engines such as autocapitalization, autopunctuation and phrase substitution may be overridden."
Let's hope there's an easy override included. After all, I could undo all the autoformatting in Microsoft Word too, but I'd prefer to use Notepad, which didn't use all that mumbo jumbo in the first place.