  The popularity of touchscreen phones has been growing around the world since
the iPhones and Android phones were released. More and more mobile phones with
large touchscreen have been produced, however, the phones with small size
displays are still in the majority of touch phones. The foremost interface on
touch smartphones is the information input module using soft keyboards.
Traditional input methods on touch phones have either too small key buttons
(such as QWERTY) or too many functions (such as 3$\times$4 keyboard), which are
inconvenient to use. Moreover, the conventional soft keyboards only use tapping
to input texts while current touch smartphones allow various gestures on the
touchscreen, such as sliding. In this paper, a novel soft keyboard called QWERT
is proposed for touchscreen-based smartphones. The users can interact with
phones via finger gestures of tapping or sliding when input text by using the
QWERT. In doing so, the interactions between users and smartphones will be
faster and easier. An experiment carried out on inexperienced human subjects
shows that they can learn very fast due to their familiarities with QWERTY. A
simulation experiment based on a cognitive architecture, ACT-R, was also
conducted to predict the movement time (MT) of experienced human subjects. The
simulation results show that the MT using QWERT outperforms other default
keyboards. These outcomes imply that the novel QWERT is a viable option for
touch smartphone users. Based on the novel design, an application is released
on Android systems. This application is expected to give better user experience
for customers who use touch smartphones.
