Touch, Lebanon’s leading mobile operator, promises a new world of innovation.
Touch created leb keys, a mobile app that carries a 3rd party keyboard. A Latin Arabic mobile Keyboard. The Keyboard was created by identifying the letters that the Lebanese don’t use when chatting in Latin Arabic (Q,P,X,V) and replacing them with the numbers they do use (3,2,7,5).
The app was then placed on google play and the app store. Once downloaded, users install the keyboard and it becomes part of their phone’s preset keyboard menu, ready to use for anything they want to write on social media or text.
That’s how touch turned a complicated chat into a seamless one. Leb keys also saves the Lebanese Millions of hours lost fetching numbers. But it also gives them a sense of up-to-date-ness. They as Lebanese, have a keyboard they can call their own, on which they can express their every emotion in the language they like to chat in vs. adapting to others. Touch also made the keyboard available to all Lebanese, touch users or not. And so, it subtly penetrated its competitor’s territory and its user’s mobile devices. The best part is, leb keys is here to stay.
The Lebanese often need to adapt to the technologies that come from more developed countries. On the social media platforms they use and in the hardware. Here, we’re talking about keyboards. When keyboards were first designed, they took into account English speakers. The Lebanese had to adapt to the qwerty keyboard, and since their language has letters that don’t exist in Latin, they recreated them out of numbers. This is called Latin Arabic. Today, it is the most used chat language in Lebanon. But it comes with compromise. The numbers used in almost every word are on the second page of the English keyboard. Each time they want to write, they have to go back and forth on the English keyboard to fetch numbers. They lose 2seconds per number fetched. That’s 1min lost every 30words. If they are heavy chatters, that number can go up to almost 30min lost everyday.