Canadian company works to simplify cell phone menus

• Booth after booth at the CTIA Wireless 2005 show, which opened here Monday, is devoted to cell- phone pictures, music, e-mail, instant messaging, calendars, contacts, TV and video games.
• Nestled amid all those multimedia displays is a small Canadian company named Zi Corp. that offers a way to simplify the maze of navigation on a tiny device.
• Zi's new program "Qix" (pronounced quicks) creates an index of everything on the phone, including address book entries, Web bookmarks and applications such as a specific video game from one of dozens of mobile content providers featured on today's phones.
• To access the index, you use the phone's keypad to type in the first few letters of a particular application or a contact name or phone number.
• For example, when the "9/WXYZ" key is pressed followed by the "3/DEF" key, Qix will produce a list of contacts, individuals or companies, whose names or numbers begin with these combinations.
• Another company using this week's wireless show to push cellular simplicity is Eastman Kodak Co., whose top executive delivered a keynote during Monday's opening.
• Kodak hopes to make it easier for camera phone users to print their photos - with Kodak printers on Kodak paper - rather than just sharing them as a digital attachment via wireless messaging, especially now that picture resolution is improving to a level comparable to stand-alone digital cameras.
• People want to hold and touch and archive their pictures."
• To that end, Kodak was demonstrating a cell-phone attachment for its EasyShare Printer Dock Plus, which is designed to print digital pictures directly from a Kodak camera.
• The attachment, essentially a cell-phone cradle, was designed to connect directly with the data port on a Nokia handset.