Patent ID: 7994943

Claim:
A processor-implemented method of disambiguating an input into a handheld electronic device including an input apparatus, an output apparatus, and a memory having stored therein a plurality of objects including a plurality of language objects and a plurality of frequency objects, at least some of the language objects each being associated with an associated frequency object, the plurality of language objects including a plurality of word objects and a plurality of n-gram objects with the word objects and n-gram objects being stored in separate data tables, substantially each n-gram object including at least a first character, the input apparatus including a plurality of input members, at least some of the input members each having a plurality of characters assigned thereto, the method comprising steps performed by the processor of: detecting an ambiguous input of a plurality of input member actuations; generating a number of prefix objects corresponding with the ambiguous input; identifying for each of at least some of the prefix objects, a corresponding language object associated with a frequency object having a frequency value; outputting at least some of the prefix objects as a default output and one or more variant outputs in descending order of frequency value of the identified language objects; detecting a selection input with respect to one of the variant outputs; detecting another input member actuation that is entered at the end of the selected variant object; and outputting, in response to the another input member actuation, one or more artificial variants that do not correspond to any of the plurality of word objects.