Regardless of whether you go for t9 or another method, can I suggest that you look at modern Nokia feature phones as an example of what not to do. The frustrating sequence of switching between predictive, lower case,upper and numbers is cumbersome. The lack of auto punctuation after double space or a full stop is irritating.
I understand the ethos of making a message be an act of paying attention to detail, but one should not have to fight against an unintuitive input method.
@iota 100% agreed - I have exactly the same gripes with the recent Nokia feature phones. I used the 2013 version of the Nokia 106 for several years and was happy with the texting experience. Having tried several of the new Nokia dumbphones, none of them come even close. (There are also several other bugs in the user interfaces of the new 105, 225 4G). Nokia’s customer support don’t seem willing to address any concerns.
If Mudita were to implement an efficient, bug-free T9, we’d be onto an absolute market winner IMO. I believe there is a definite need for T9 or similar - the non-predictive approach is simply too slow. More generally from a user experience perspective, writing a message on a keypad should be at least as efficient as people remember from the classic phones. I know I would prefer to write that text and put the phone away, rather than toil away for minutes, knowing that I could have accomplished the same task with ease on old hardware.
100% agreed! I love my Q10 that I still have, though without VoLTE, it’s days are literally numbered here on Verizon in the US. I also had a Classic for quite a while but sold it a few years ago since it wasn’t compatible with Verizon (was an AT&T model).
Who knows, perhaps in 202X we’ll see a Mudita QWERTY phone for the fans out there. I know the Unihertz Titan Pocket is new on the market, and that’s great to see. But I’d love to see something with Mudita’s approach and design paired with that experience. Till then, I’ll keep up with the Pure!
That makes me wonder about a future phone from mudita. If the screen is not used for media consumption, it becomes less important which way it is orientated. The conventional screen above buttons may not be the best way.
You could have a square device with qwerty underneath a golden-ratio rectangular screen. Or, another rectangle rotated 90degrees with the screen located between each half of a qwerty keyboard (think n-gage).
If you guys will implement predictive text let me say this. The best T9 I have seen in modern feature phones is in Nokia 225 (4G). You can take a look at that one to see how it’s done. (AFAIK, the original T9 is still patented). However, even that one has a bit of a downgrade from the phones of 2000’s. Here is a link to a post on Nokia’s community website where some user explained the issue:
Here is the relevant parts of the issue:
[…] there seems to be one massive UI flaw: When pressing the # key, the text entry modes cycle through as follows:
T9 Abc
T9 abc
T9 ABC
Non-T9 Abc
Non-T9 abc
Non-T9 ABC
[…] But what if you want to capitalise the first letter of someone’s name mid-sentence? If you’re using T9, you have to press # five times, to get from mode 2 to mode 1. The ordering is far more intuitive (and less work) on my old Nokia 106.1:
T9 abc
T9 Abc
T9 ABC
Non-T9 abc
Non-T9 Abc
Non-T9 ABC
Highlighted parts are mine.
Please take this into consideration when/if (hopefully) implementing T9.
As a side-note (warning: going off-topic here) 2 other users (including the one from above) complained about inability to access SIM contacts:
I didn’t find a way to use the SIM to store contacts, instead I had to copy them to the device first.
No option to use contacts from SIM which is supported on all Nokia feature phones till now.
(Highlighting is not mine).
I made a post about it, asking if being able to support SIM contacts natively is going to be in Mudita phone. I just wanted to point out that this is important, fundamental feature of the phone and people complain when it’s lacking.
@alexlya I am the author of that post on the Nokia forums. Well, I would actually say that the Nokia 225 4G can possibly be improved further still. Instead of having the # key cycle through all the modes as above, make long # press switch between T9 and non-predictive modes. That’s how I remember it was on the older models, which seems more sensible IMO. I don’t have a 225 available to test, but I also seem to remember that there was something to be improved about the way the * and 1 keys worked as well for entering special characters. Insofar, I agree with what @iota said - in the new phones the know-how about how to make a good T9 seems to have been lost.
Do you know if T9 is really still patented? The Wikipedia page says the patents already expired.
Wow. Small world!
Yeah, it’s been a long time since I used original T9. Don’t remember exactly how it works.
In 225 while in T9 mode pressing 1 creates a dot. Then you have to use down/up key to select a different symbol. If you will press 1 for the second time it displays some emojis and some useless (I think) symbol combinations like this:
“:)” “:(” [some more emojis] “…” “.,” “.-” “.?”. Again, you need to switch to down/up key to select. If you press 1 for the third time it displays list of pure emojis which you have to select with down/up keys. Pressing 1 for the 4th time insert “:-)” emoji and inserts a dot.
-_-
I think pressing 1 should just go to the next symbol like this:
. --> , --> - --> ? --> … and so on.
Pressing * displays a grid of symbols, which I do like actually.
Holding # bring up that menu where you adjust volume, brightness, bluetooth, data on/of and predictive text. Not useful at all. It would be more convenient to switch between T9 and Abc, I agree.
Yeah, if wiki says T9 patents expired then it’s probably correct. I looked at patent website - it’s not obviously clear what the expiration date is.
@boneblack We are finalizing all the details on the predictive texting. One item of news that I was able to get out of our team is that predictive texting will be a feature that the user can enable or disable.
PS: Sorry for the late reply- I was on vacation
@kirkmahoneyphd I’m going to tag @Wojciech_Cichon, the product lead for Mudita Pure in this question. He knows everything there is to know about the phone
We’re currently supporting Bluetooth Audio Input and Output devices. We’ll see how big will be the number of requests for supporting external keyboards and investigate accordingly. I hope that answers your question for now
I managed to give this article a look through and I gotta say the correlation is misleading at best. Obviously in this regards, it’s related to smart phones. To do predictive text on a T9 keypad, you need to know what letters correspond with what number and in what combination to make a specific word. A totally different process than using QWERTY on a smart phone. If anything, T9 really encourages me to know how to spell a word so that the T9 works. In regards to not wanting to do long texts and call instead. I’m 30, it’s 2021, people don’t really call each other anymore. Life is so busy for so many people and everyone has grown accustomed to messaging and not calling. I like to call people, but my friends find it weird. Also, depending on the job, calls cannot be taken, but a message can be quickly read from their computer, phone or smartwatch. Just makes sense to me to implement the predictive text because even with it, it still takes a much longer time to get out a message than with QWERTY.
Well, I would actually say that the Nokia 225 4G can possibly be improved further still. Instead of having the # key cycle through all the modes as above, make long # press switch between T9 and non-predictive modes. That’s how I remember it was on the older models, which seems more sensible IMO. I don’t have a 225 available to test, but I also seem to remember that there was something to be improved about the way the * and 1 keys worked as well for entering special characters. Insofar, I agree with what 
