T9 wouldn't be good

T9 wouldn’t be good on e-ink since T9 relies so heavily on visual feedback which isn’t possible on e-ink. So while there are some things that I wish were a li’l different, this isn’t one. If you have your computer nearby, you can type the messages on there.

On T9 you need to see what you’re doing. You need to look at the screen to select the words or to see that the default suggested word is good. It requires fast visual feedback.

On multi-tap, you can type out several letters in advance without looking. If I want to tap out “hi there” I can go 44 44408443377733. Cumbersome, yes, but I don’t need to see the screen.

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Oh, so you would need to get a screen refresh each character change (in the same position)?
Would frequently cycling through characters not cause the same issue?

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No, that’s not the problem. I was unclear. The problem is that you can’t use T9 without constantly looking at the screen, without constant visual feedback. You can use multitap without synchronized visual feedback since there is input buffering.

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Ok, thanks for clarifying. It’s been a while since I’ve used t9 myself so I’m having trouble visualising the difference and difficulty. I think I got spoilt by my old blackberry kb.

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Disagree. You only need to look at the screen to make sure you get correct suggestion. And if T9 is good - sometimes you can trust the suggestion. I remember in mid 2000 typing entire message in a pocket, then taking phone out, double checking if all good and it was most of the time.

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OK, that’s good to know. Maybe I have a warped view of T9 since I need to deal with many languages, some of which map very poorly and ambiguously to T9.

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Being able to type a message without looking at the screen with little effort is actually the main reason ehy I wish this phone had T9. I could type blindly on my Nokia 15 years ago with reliable T9. Touchscreens are horrible for this use case on the other hand.

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@thinkround For me it’s about quickly getting info out. I’m not a fan of texting back & forth, having a conversation, just via text message. For me it’s quicker to call & get it all out, then keep going back & forth via text, wasting time .

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