-
Website
http://www.symbian-guru.com/ -
Original page
http://www.symbian-guru.com/welcome/2008/04/i-like-t9-how-about-you.html -
Subscribe
All Comments -
Community
-
-
Top Commenters
-
Popular Threads
All Comments
yeah man the 2, 3 and 7 are very important to type Arabic .. althuogh getting the dictionary in T9 to memorize them is a little hard .. but in plain English it is really so fast to type with it!
(they're on youtube somewhere)
For a while, my bi-textual fingers earned me the name James 'Thumbs' Whatley!
Thanks for the review, you surely helped me on this one.
I'll have to look into these.
Giovanni,
Glad we could be of any help. I am sure you will be texting your heart away in days.
AC,
Just double press the # key quickly.
With the standard keypad, it would be fairly easy to use something like this on non-qwerty Nokias, but the authors only wrote versions for Palm and Windows PDAs. :-(
I remember using tenGo myself when I had my old WM5 device. I remember trying it and not finding it a big PIA, but I didn't invest a lot of time in it to see how efficient it was. I had a Qtek9100 so it had a qwerty which made add-on on-screen keyboards kind of a waste of resources (the device wasn't great on RAM and speed).
In 90% T9 is the fastest way to get the job done, the other 10% are handled best by the external QWERTY-keyboard (long emails,...).
The only thing I dislike about T9 is that it isn't available in every textbox. That's really annoying sometimes.
I have an iGo Bluetooth keyboard for my N95-3 and just use it when I need to type something really long.
alcatraz,
Thank you :)
Now I realize how fast and sometimes without even looking at the screen or the keys, I can manage a quick SMS or note.
For one handed and short sms stuff, T9 can be better
I just have one complain with T9. On my nseries device, over a period of time, it automatically changes the suggested word when I key in a combination of keys, something that I do not want in many cases (e.g. for some reason 'much' comes as 'ouch' when i type it. I have no idea why). But I guess this is something very small and is part of nothing been perfect.
Moreover, active T9 indirectly does the spell-checking also. Whenever a word is typed wrongly-spelt, T9 intervens and doesn't allow such wrong spelling.
But still, this extremely useful software needs upgrading. Spell-check and automatic advance word suggestion should be very welcome features.
I have tried out all the currently available Nseries phones and I CANNOT buy any of them because they don't have QWERTY.
I am still living with my E61 which I am more than ready to change for something newer buy NOKIA IS NOT RELEASING THE RUMORED E71 nor the Nseries QWERTY!
I understand that for you maybe you're used to the T9 but as for me and most of us who went for the E61 we feel forgotten by Nokia because they haven't released a QWERTY model since E61i which itself was a disappointment for people like me who want the latest software. I find the situation a bit ironical: Nokia introduced me to mobile QWERTY with the E61 but now I'm thinking of switching away because Nokia has forgotten that I've come to understand that I can't live with the slow speeds of 12-keys.
I want to tell Nokia: release a QWERTY phone or you might lose a customer pretty soon. You introduced me to mobile QWERTY but then you forgot about me.
-Long time Nokia faithful
For this reason I think the best solution is a triple slider phone: normal keypad (with T9), media keys and slide-out QWERTY from the site. I guess a bit for everyone.
I've discovered that T9 in Nokia phones and SE phones is very different. In Nokia we can just press * once to move through different matching words or press # twice to activate/deactivate T9. But SE phones insist you to press and hold * to activate/deactivate T9, which is much slower and it displays an on screen list to help scrolling through matching words. This isn't very nice. However SE does remember your frequently used words (quite unreliable sometimes). You can even save words with numbers in the dictionary memory (like say mp3), unlike Nokia.
Still I'd say Nokia's system is better. Its much faster and more intuitive. Infact Nokia's text entry system is the best among all cell phone manufacturers. Period.
T9 helps to check spelling also in an indirect way. If wrong spelling is typed it refuses to provide word, thus makes aware of the mistake. And when there is confusion with the the right spelling, by typing alternatives right spelling can be checked.
But this useful software needs upgrading now. Spell-check and auto-suggestion of words will be very welcome feature.
In order to fully express yourself verbally, using wordplay and so on, you really have to use qwerty. T9 limits the personal touch of your output. Period.
Yeah yeah, you can always teach the T9, but that's a huge waste of time which you will face time and time again. Subconsciously you will limit your output to fit with the shortcomings of T9.
Qwerty - even when using just two thumbs - will always win T9 in speed.
You say it's a bliss to have only 12 buttons and therefore it being easier to memorize many symbol character. Well how about when you switch from one phone brand to another? Symbols wont reside where they used to. On qwerty the most common symbols will in most cases reside in the same location (alternate characters in the number keys).
Anyone wanna race?
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2339/2087298948_...
You cannot absolutely cannot use T9 blindfolded. T9 has this weird tendency to have words come up in a different order when you type them depending on usage frequency. It has led to many a typo and I would just lke it if the words always remained in the same place. I mean I can press * thrice no problem but a different number every time?! @&#^@*@#^ !! Better yet let me define the order in which the words appear leading to a complete win.
Thanks for reading.
you need to teach your phone words ha ha ha, talking about the learning curve. I own a treo and I'll bet you with everything I have me and the entire city I'll beat you hands on on any application blindfolded or not.
That's a good one for owners of htc touch dual where you cannot disable the bloody T9.
Godspeed
T9 is okay for one handed typing. Qwerty is great for 2 thumbed typing. But the 20 key sure-type hybrid keyboard is like the best of both worlds. You'll see that on the T-Mobile Shadow, HTC Touch Dual, and Blackberry Pearl devices. It's like T9 except with 2 letters per button instead of 3 and the letters are in a more familiar Qwerty layout as opposed to alphabetical. It makes one-handed typing easier to learn with only 8 more buttons to memorize than T9... it increases predictive accuracy since there are less letter/word combination possibilities... and you can also use two thumbs for much faster input. Do any Symbian phones use this type of keyboard yet?
But T9 isn't perfect. On my Samsung SCH-R410, there are some symbols that aren't available _AT_ALL_ via T9. I have to open up the keyboard in order to type them. And, you only have one key (#1) for symbols, making it annoying to try to type some less frequent symbols.
Overall, though, I think the best choice is what Samsung did with the R410 -- both a qwerty and a T9 keypad. There are some things I'd improve about that phone, but the keyboard/keypad layout isn't one of them.
If one feels comfortable with typing lots of text on a phone is surely also heavily depending on the feeling of the keyboard hardware. I wouldn't want to type longer texts on the K700i's keyboard (feels far too hard to me and key spacing is not big enough), while with the N82 the feeling is far better. That's why I intend to mostly replace my PDA with the N82 now and also learn T9.
One thing I miss on S60 3rd FP1 is being able to edit the list of words I added to T9 in order to correct it or remove now unused words. That's the thing that was IMHO better in the T9 implementation on my previous phone (the K700i).
If I were stuck in a cubicle, or took public transportation I think I would be able to get more done with qwerty, but... if I tried to do the driving and walking and typing, i wouldn't be alive right now ;)
But, I've never really tried... maybe i can get used to it...
but to my concern is that what does T9 actually means? anyone?
My next phone was an analog StarTAC. It couldn't do SMS, but at least it had voice coverage in most places I went (and great sound quality to boot, better than any phone i've had since). My next phone was a digital StarTAC or TimePort with an ahead-of-its-time color OLED display back when everything else was monochrome LCD. It could display four lines of text, but still didn't allow for texting until a firmware update that arrived a year after I bought it (2001 or thereabouts). I rushed to the Verizon Wireless store to get the upgrade, figuring I might use it every few weeks or so. Then I became a texting addict. It wasn't long before I started sending or receiving 100+ texts a week - sometimes a day.
Like seemingly everyone else, I bought a Moto Razr back when they were still the height of phone fashion. It turned out to be an awful phone for texting - the keys are small and poorly distinguished. I swore my next phone would have QWERTY.
I really want an iPhone, but have half a year to go on my VZW contract, so I decided to buy time by buying a used Samsung SCH-u740 (since renamed Alias), which I can switch to until my Verizon contract ends and i can change over to AT&T for the iPhone. The irony is that by the time I bought a QWERTY phone, I had become a whizbang T9er.
There are good and bad QWERTY implementations out there. Most of them are bad. A proper QWERTY keyboard has five rows of keys, but most phones have only four or three rows, and that's where the problems start. The slight offset between the rows is missing from most phone keypads as well, which further complicates typing on them.
My Samsung does have four rows of keys - no top row with numbers, so some of the letters do double duty as number keys. Hold them down for awhile and the number appears. Some of the common symbols, like parentheses, don't have their own key even when shifted. But at least the space bar is in its proper place, below the letters. Some phones, like the LG enV2, do have dedicated number keys, but no lower row for the space bar, so instead there are two small "space" keys where the shift keys normally are. The worst QWERTY keyboards are those with only three rows of keys - often sliders like the LG Rumor and Samsung Glyde - which not only ditch the top row of numbers and symbols, but often put the space bar in the center of the lower row of letter keys, pushing the B, N, and M keys way over to the right to make room for the space key. So the M is directly below the L. This totally messes with me.
Then there's the Palm Centro, which would be great if i could first shrink my fingertips to half their size (and if Palm would update their OS this decade). I'm bugged that the iPhone touchpad keys don't usually work in landscape mode, but at least its auto-correcting-as-you-type works well.
I still like the enV2 setup - it's the best of both worlds - huge outer keypad for dialing and T9, and a great QWERTY keyboard inside, all in a small, lightweight package. I just wish the phone was better.
Has anyone come across one?
Thanks :-)
http://img43.imageshack.us/img43/4134/screensho...
Feel free to post your own results! Take the test at www.iphonetypingtest.com