Last week at the Mobile World Congress 2009, the GSMA announced the winner of the 2009 Mobile Innovation Global Award. After a year-long search and four regional tournaments, soft keyboard for touchscreens supplier CooTek has been named the Global Champion of this most influential innovation award in the mobile industry.

CooTek’s winning innovation is called TouchPal, a soft keyboard for touchscreen devices. Its mistyping correction and many other unique technologies make TouchPal one of the most popular keyboard software in the world, with more than 2,000,000 downloads last year. CooTek claims that an experienced user can type as fast as 400 characters/min. on a touchscreen with TouchPal.

Touchscreen phones are getting popular these years. But typing on touchscreen is no fun. Many iPhone users, for example, have complaints about its onscreen keyboard. Due to the small buttons and the lack of key-pressing feedback, users are more likely to press wrong keys on a virtual keyboard than on a real keyboard.

TouchPal was carefully designed to resolve these issues by introducing many breakthrough technologies. One example is the impressive mistyping correction technology — even if a user mistypes all the letters in a word, it can still predict the correct word. One can thus type much faster without even looking at the keyboard. Another eye-catching feature is called “mixed language input” — for example, a user can input German and English at the same time, without switching languages. TouchPal also recognizes gestures on the touchscreen to quickly input uppercase letters or symbols.

The continuous innovation and the significant user impact of this piece of innovative work impressed the judges’ panel consisting of the senior executives from mobile operators, industry suppliers and venture capital organizations. TouchPal supports 20+ languages and is available on Windows Mobile and Google Android phones. End users can download and try it for free from CooTek’s website: https://www.cootek.com