A hand-held communication device provides navigation key-based predictive text entry. The hand-held communication device includes a housing generally sized to be held in a human hand having a display disposed for displaying characters selectable for entry in a character position of a text string being entered and a navigation key assembly for scrolling through and selecting from the characters displayed by the display. The characters displayed by the display during text entry are arranged according to the probability of selection of each character for entry in the character position so that the character with the highest probability of selection is selected with a single input from the navigation key assembly.