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Huh?

The great thing about T9 (certainly on the Nokia 3210 and 8210) back in the day was you could type messages fast with few k/s without looking. As long as you had enough experience to know the word combos.

Ive never found a t9 system as good as the Nokia implementation. In some respects its better than qwerty for short messages. And don’t get me started on apples fundamentally broken auto correct system. People dont know any better these days. There’s actual adults walking today that have never typed on a real keyboard.



T9 works good for English and simple texts. If you need some other language, declensions, conjugations and non-Latin script things are no longer good.


Ericsson had a really good implementation for German. I would write entire text messages without looking.


Eh you would abbreviate things to hell to get around it. Helped with sms prices on those days too!


Which makes T9 fail miserably because it works with a non-abbreviated words.

Later there were adaptive versions which had an auto-populated user dictionary but that made "a blind T9ing" prone to errors.


I want to say you could add custom words no problem? But it's been a hot minute, so I might be misremembering.


Meh, Imma team Moto and I don't remember it well anymore, 20 years give or take.

Yes, the later variants both had a custom/user dictionary and could learn %he new words from the input. The latter could add the uncertainty in the input.


I remember it would always default to book instead of cool


you make the point very well! You can still remember, what, 20 years later ?

On the nokia you'd press the button and it would cycle through the options. Once you knew all the words you could type really very fast indeed, and blind.

Someone asked about custom words below. You could definitely add custom words. I think you had to switch out of T9, key the word the old way and then switch back then 'add' to dictionary, but once in it would stay in the dictionary. I'm sure the amount of memory for custom words was quoted in marketing material at somepoint.


A mate would regularly ask if I fancied a "riot" - was always disappointed when it turned out he was actually after a drink ("pint"!)




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