What has two thumbs and types like a fiend? This Brazilian 16-year-old.
Marcel Fernandes Filho has set the Guinness World Record for the fastest texting on a smartphone touchscreen. Guinness officially crowned Fernandes the texting king on Thursday, after he set the record on April 25 in New York City.
Fernandes came to New York on the dime of touchscreen-keyboard startup Fleksy, which the teen has used since 2012 — including to type out his record-breaking text.
It was no “hi how r u” message, either.
The standard 25-word phrase Guinness uses for the text record-setting is a mouthful: “The razor-toothed piranhas of the genera Serrasalmus and Pygocentrus are the most ferocious freshwater fish in the world. In reality they seldom attack a human.”
Fernandes typed out the strange sentences — with perfect spelling and capitalization as required — in a speedy 18.19 seconds, just edging out the previous record of 18.44 set by a 15-year-old using a Microsoft phone at the company’s office in January.
The teen told TODAY via email that he has been “fascinated by Guinness World Records” since childhood, often searching online for strange and interesting records.
Fernandes insisted that he isn’t “addicted” to texting, and he doesn’t spend all day on his phone. That’s because he’s too busy studying physics at Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina in southern Brazil.
But he’s been an avid phone user since 2009, when he smashed his laptop with a hammer out of frustration because it was so slow — an impulsive act that he didn’t know would set him on the path to a world record.
Source: Today