this post was submitted on 31 May 2024
89 points (77.0% liked)
Asklemmy
43742 readers
1427 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- [email protected]: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
This seems to stem from when we had dumbphones that didn't even have T9 predictive spelling.
Meaning that if you just wanted to type a common message like "I am on the train, 25 min away" would mean pressing the following keys:
Empty spaces is use to indicate a slight pause.
4,4,4,0,2,6,0,6,6,6, ,6,6,0,8,4,4,3,3,0,8,7,7,7,2,4,4,4,,,0,2,2,2,2,5,5,5,5,0,6,4,4,4,6,6,0,2,9,2,9,9,9
I used t9 in high school. In retrospect it's obviously unusably clunky, but I do miss being able to text totally blindly in my pocket or something.
I tried using T9 from time to time, but it often sucked for me, probably because I needed to use it in Swedish and it wasn't that well developed for it.
T9 was so bad that I don't even understand that they threw these phones on the market.
I was there for the whole GSM phone era and the most obvious thing would have been to release a blackberry type thing with a slide out keyboard.
T9 just adapted the earlier lettering that phones already had on the numbers. '1-800-COL-LECT' Never intended you to type it as '1-800-222666555-555332228', you'd just dial 1-800-265-5328. but that's what you'd have to do to write it with T9.
Well, that is not all it did, it had a dictionary to do predictive text, and the Swedish one was never really good.
The trend was to make the phone as small as possible and it would have been hard to do that with extra keys. You could make them smaller keys, but then it's almost as hard to use just by virtue of being too tiny tiny to type on.
I always thought t9 was pretty great but I do remember it being frustrating when you needed to type something it was never going to get and it wasn't always convenient to switch to regular keying temporarily.
I always read now and even back then people complaining about t9 and how shitty it is...
I don't know, I loved it on my Sony Ericssons. The implementation of it was really nice.
Granted, I did use it on my native language, so maybe in English, it is shitty, but it was a must have thing to turn on for me after a while (when I discovered and realized how it works. before that, it was just some strange black magic)
Just started typing, and if I waited a bit, a list of words came up and could use the dpad or joystick to select a word. only annoying thing was a popup, if the word did not exists I was trying to type, but then I could just add it with two button presses and that's it.
ikr!