New York: A 17-year-old boy who says he has "abnormally fast thumbs" has been named the fastest texter in America for the second year in a row. "It feels incredible," said Austin Wierschke of Rhinelander, Wis., after winning the sixth annual US LG National Texting Competition in Times Square on Wednesday. He gets $ 50,000 in prize money, which he says he'll save and use to pay for college, along with the $50,000 he won last year.
Eleven contestants from around the US competed, all using the same type of cellphone, an LG Optimus Zip phone with QWERTY keyboard. Cellphone-maker LG Electronics sponsored the contest.
The competition tested three skills - speed, accuracy and dexterity - on four different challenges. They were "do you know text speak?", in which contestants had to spell out text abbreviations; texting while blind-folded; "text blitz," where phrases were shown to the contestants for a length of time and they copied them as fast as they could; and texting backward, where jumbled words were given to the contestants and they had to figure out the word.
To practice for the competition, the 17-year-old champion said he sent almost 500 texts a day to his friends....
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11:02 AM, Aug 09, 2012
