The keyboard and mouse as input devices have revolutionized the computer interaction for decades now. Perhaps, nothing could make me realize the profound effect these input methods have on the new generation, until I heard a friend’s daughter ask matter-of-factly, “Why do we have five fingers, when the mouse has only 2-buttons?”

With more than three billion mobile phones in the world today, analysts predict that the number of mobile devices accessing the Internet will cross the one billion mark over the next four years.

With the wealth of information and services available from almost everywhere, Internet-connected mobile devices are reshaping the way we go about our personal and professional lives. According to John Gantz, Chief Research Officer at IDC, “With an explosion in applications for mobile devices underway, the next several years will witness another sea change in the way users interact with the Internet and further blur the lines between personal and professional.”

During the early years of mobile Internet, the industry focused primarily on trying to fit the existing web sites on to a small mobile screen, through a process called transcoding (translation + encoding). This process essentially involved the translating of the existing HTML pages of Web-sites into the Wireless Markup Language (WML) pages, with some image re-sizing capability. But, the market quickly realized this did not really help adoption of mobile internet, due to lack of the convenient interface to interact with the Internet applications using the phone keypad. In those days, users had to press each key up to three times to select the desired alphabet to input.

Then came the Research In Motion’s (RIM) Blackberry as a mobile email appliance with a QWERTY keypad that quickly became popular with users as they could read and reply to the emails without having to carry bulky laptop computers for email access outside their homes and offices. While many loyal users of Blackberry swear by the convenience of a track-wheel (mouse) and keypad, the primary use of that interface could not help increase the use of mobile internet access beyond email.