A handheld electronic device includes a reduced QWERTY keyboard and is enabled with text disambiguation software. The device provides output in the form of a default output and a number of variants. The output is based largely upon the frequency, i.e., the likelihood that a user intended a particular output, but various features of the device provide additional variants that are not based solely on frequency and rather are provided by various logic structures resident on the device. The device includes a number of non-alphabetic characters that are assigned to keys and that can be accessed directly by the text disambiguation software without the need to active a non-alphabetic input routine or to additionally actuate and key or an key, for instance.