Treo 650 sets New Speed-Typing Guinness World Record!!!

As part of palmOne's official UK Treo 650 launch with Orange yesterday in London, I had the opportunity to be present as Arttu Harkki of Finland (pictured below) set a new speed-typing Guinness World Record using a Treo 650!

Arttu (who previously held the Guinness World Record for SMS texting in 2001) finished typing a 55 word text on his Treo 650 using only one hand and one thumb in 2 minutes 22.9 seconds thus winning a place in the Guinness Book of Records for the fastest speed-typing using a phone that incorporates a QWERTY keyboard.

As he later stated, it is obvious that his timing could have been even faster had he been allowed to use both thumbs but the official adjudicator from Guinness World Records noted that the reason that only one thumb was allowed is that "there are a lot of phones that incorporate QWERTY keyboards, and we need to make sure that the record is standard across all models".

The full specifications of the record text are: 1 paragraph, 55 words, 264 characters (no spaces), 318 characters (with spaces).  Therefore Arttu was typing at about 23.3 words per minute and 136 characters per minute.

Since yesterday I have naturally been curious to see how close my own typing would come to this record  and so I set out to conduct a little test.  First I typed the above text in a Memo on my Treo exactly as per the record with one thumb and managed (no practice) to do 4 mins. 39 secs. or about half as fast as Arttu's record.  Secondly I typed using two thumbs (as the Treo should be used) with KeyCaps enabled and managed 2 mins. 45 secs. - coming very close to the record.  Finally, to get a benchmark against 'normal' keyboard entry, I typed it using palmOne's Infrared Wireless Keyboard and managed 1 mins. 26 secs. - I know, I'm a fast typist...

I am naturally over the moon with Arttu's record using our Treo 650 and I hope that this will finally put the people in the "my BlackBerry keyboard is better than yours" camp in a very quiet room now that we're also the champions when it comes to mobile speed-typing.

If you'd like to have a go at the record yourself, here's a copy of the official text:

The telephone was invented by Alexander Graham Bell (UK), who filed his patent for the telephone on 14 February 1876 at the New York Patent Office, USA. The first intelligible call occurred in March 1876 in Boston, Massachusetts, when Bell phoned his assistant in a nearby room and said ‘Come here Watson, I want you.’

Treonauts will always be winners...