Patent ID: 7352296

Claim:
A 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, 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: detecting an ambiguous input including at least a first input member actuation and a second input member actuation, at least one of the first and second input members having a plurality of characters assigned thereto; generating a number of prefix objects corresponding with the ambiguous input; generating a result by, for each prefix object of at least a portion of the number of prefix objects, identifying a word object corresponding with the prefix object, obtaining an associated frequency object, the associated frequency object being associated with the identified word object and having a frequency value, and associating the frequency value with the prefix object; for at least a portion of the prefix objects of the result, generating an output set of the prefix objects sorted according to the frequency values associated therewith, one of the prefix objects of the output set being the prefix object of the output set with which is associated a relatively highest frequency value among the frequency values of the output set; determining a period of elapsed time between the first input member actuation and the second input member actuation; determining that the period of elapsed time is less than a predetermined time interval; and outputting as an output a default output including the one of the prefix objects of the output set without outputting a remainder of the prefix objects of the output set.