The first versions of t9 were entirely predictable and hardcoded so the words were always in the same order when pressing star. Later versions had some optimisations that mad it change, but it settled quite quickly to your writing style.
I'm always surprised how few countries adopted t9... I'd Denmark literally everyone used t9. Even my mom. And you were weird if not using it. It wa also stupid fast to type on.
I am 18 and have owned 2 such phones. Where I grew up, it was kind of a luxury to own a smartphone in the early 2010s, so I've never really thought of these as some kind of ancient technology.
I'm 30 and remember my parents having these and my first two phones were Motorola razors. It was weird for most kids to have a phone until they could drive. Funny how quick it went from kids don't need phones, to well I guess they should if they're driving, to probably should be able to reach them anywhere but they don't need the smart one lol
Yeah, but the whole five of us in the school could text each other without needing to take it out of our pockets so the teachers wouldn't take it away. Kids these days won't have those awesomely useless skills.
I can happily say that I never did this. Not because I'm not old but because I was poor as fuck. My first mobile phone with any sort of text based plan was a company provided BlackBerry.
What blows my mind is the (muscle) memory involved in this. I’m using touchscreen based phones for ~10-15 years and my last phones had a QWERTY keyboard (Hardware buttons!).
can still write texts like I never stopped using these phones. Using T9 I may be even faster than on my smartphone today. I really miss those tactile buttons…
We have some Cisco 8xxx wireless phones at work. Setting them up from factory is great, cause you gotta input the ssid and whatnot using the keypad. Muscle memory is right lol
Likely because you could, in most normal conversational speaking cases. With T9 you didn’t have to press the number multiple times unless it wasn’t picking up the word you needed but at a high rate of correct predictability, only pressing 10 different buttons would be a lot faster than typing on the whole keyboard. The software being fast enough to keep up is a little less likely compared to modern smartphones but hey, at least you could send a confidently correct text with your phone in your pocket.