Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
I'm glad those days that I needed to hit the number 6 three times to get the letter o and 4 times the digit 7 to get an S are over:)
Im not missing it at all.

That's not T9, T9 is where you press the number only once and it predicts what you wanted to say. For example, if you wanted to type to word "Be" you would just hit the #2 button once, then #3 button once instead of the #2 button twice and the #3 button twice. It was much faster when you got the hang of just hitting the number once for the letter.
 
i used to be quick on T9, but after a little bit on the QWERTY keyboard on the iPhone, i'm now hugely faster than on T9. People are just afraid of change...
 
My mind is blown. I never thought anyone would want T9 over a QWERTY keyboard. T9 was a bandaid for dealing with the limitation of only having a number pad for text entry.

Do not understand

I wish the iPhone had a keypad. I like buttons. I'd also much rather have a flip/clamshell design.
 
OMG have you ever used T9 before? :)

I never did either. S%*^ like that is why I did nothing but phone calls on all phones before the iPhone.

I hated typing on those little keypads and would only text somebody if they texted me a question that I had to answer. Other than that I just stuck to calling people.

My phone didn't have a T9 keyboard, but that wouldn't have helped. It would've just been a whole new way to use something I hated. I was happy to just not use the keypad at all...I wasn't looking for new ways to use it more.

The iPhone freed me from stuff like that and I'm happy for it.
 
I never did either. S%*^ like that is why I did nothing but phone calls on all phones before the iPhone.

I hated typing on those little keypads and would only text somebody if they texted me a question that I had to answer. Other than that I just stuck to calling people.

My phone didn't have a T9 keyboard, but that wouldn't have helped. It would've just been a whole new way to use something I hated. I was happy to just not use the keypad at all...I wasn't looking for new ways to use it more.

The iPhone freed me from stuff like that and I'm happy for it.

Agreed, before I got my Motorola Q9 with its QWERTY keyboard, I didn't text that much cause it was such a pain on my LG flip phone. I would never want to go back to something that didn't have a QWERTY keyboard (on screen or physical) again.
 
any news about this yet? i still would love to get the T9 keyboard on my iphone 4
 
any news about this yet? i still would love to get the T9 keyboard on my iphone 4

The only "news" about this would probably come from Apple, or you can keep checking the app store. I'm still not sure how using this differs enough from the predictive keyboard in existence to make it easier to type like this.
 
The only "news" about this would probably come from Apple, or you can keep checking the app store. I'm still not sure how using this differs enough from the predictive keyboard in existence to make it easier to type like this.

perhaps there will be an app / tweak for this in cydia. i barley write sms anymore since i always press the wrong buttons all the time, takes forever to write sms on my iphone 4 :)
 
Just keep trying, its easy peasy to write with an iPhone keyboard, after all, highest WPM for a mobile device is on the iPhone.
 
what i want is to replace the keyboard i already have, i do not want to "open a app" to just write the T9 keyboard.

well ive been using the iphone keyboard for almost 2 years now and STILL hate it, more than ever

no offense but then why do you have an iPhone? I would never be able to use a phone if I couldn't stand the keyboard. Just get a different phone that has a physical keyboard/T9 and an iPod touch, and you'll have all the same features and probably be happier with both devices.
 
Right? I cant believe that people would prefer to type like this.

I can't believe there are so many pple who can't tell the difference between a multitap alphanumeric input & T9 predictive input!!!

no one use a prehistoric alphanumeric input anymore of course, but a T9 alphanumeric predictive input is miles ahead of any qwerty keyboard for portable device. I just hope pple get their facts right, at least tried out the true blue T9 predictive input at least once before swearing their lives on a qwerty keyboard input - they really don't know what their missing out on... I can be pretty quick on a qwerty keypad on a portable device, but I can be at lightning speed texting with a T9 keypad. a qwerty keyboard is best for a desktop or laptop, but for a portable device, one-handed operation with T9 prediction wins hands down anyway...
 
Hi,

I realise this is a fairly old thread, but there seems to be some recent activity, so I thought I'd post.

A friend and I have just recently upgraded to iPhones from entirely different phones. I had an HTC touch pro, with a hardware qwerty keyboard and have found the transition relatively easy. Although the keys on the portrait mode keyboard are too small for me to use easily, I am adapting quite quickly.

My friend however previously had a toucscreen Nokia phone, which used a large T9 predictive keypad for text input and had used this method for over 5 years. She is finding moving to a qwerty keyboard much more difficult, mainly I suspect because of the requirement to re-learn letter positions and the increased number of keys. It is also very hard to input text on a qwerty keyboard one-handed, which is how she normally does it.

I think the original posters idea for a T9 replacement app is valid. Apple think that it is easy to learn to use a qwerty keyboard and they might not be wrong, however the problem is not the ease with which you can learn, but the sudden drop in typing speed whilst you learn. My friend likens it to having to re-learn to write, despite knowing that you were perfectly good at it last week! Very frustrating.

And for those of you who think "SMS is just for short messages, what's the problem?" A lot of us over here in the UK get unlimited SMS with monthly plans. What this means is we tend to send much longer SMSs, way over the 160 character limit, almost to the point where there is little difference between a message sent via SMS and an email.

I realise there are a number of T9 app in the app store, but they all seem to just copy the text you type into the messaging app and let you send. You then have to switch back to the App to compose a reply. If you want to have a conversation via SMS (or indeed any IM app) it would be very handy indeed if there was a genuine T9 option for input.

I noticed one post about using the Japanese Kana keyboard, switched to English characters, but as it was mentioned, there is no predictive input on this. However, it does make it seem possible for Apple or an App developer to add prediction to this keyboard layout. If anyone has any thoughts on this, I might even have a go myself!

Thanks,

Richard
 
T9 is redundant and outdated. it won't be supported in devices that already used qwerty keyboards. get used to it, deal with it, adapt and move on. there are much more important issues needing to be addressed than this non-issue, such as the notifications system.

i used to use T9, it was weird then going onto the iPhone's qwerty touch screen, after a week i was used to it and now i type much faster than on a T9 and i can't even bear to use T9 anymore. stop living in the stone age.
 
T9 is redundant and outdated. it won't be supported in devices that already used qwerty keyboards. get used to it, deal with it, adapt and move on. there are much more important issues needing to be addressed than this non-issue, such as the notifications system.

i used to use T9, it was weird then going onto the iPhone's qwerty touch screen, after a week i was used to it and now i type much faster than on a T9 and i can't even bear to use T9 anymore. stop living in the stone age.

Yeah, I loved having a rotary dial phone in the mid-90's because it was cool and retro, but practical? Not so much. As others have said, once you get used to typing on the iPhone keyboard it gets exponentially easier and faster, I doubt if anything else will really cut it for me anymore. Also, how do caps, caps lock, special symbols, and switching to numbers work on T9?

I think I was faster typing with T9 than I am with QWERTY.

The main problem is when the iPhone thinks I've typed a completely different word than I actually have.

With T9, corrections were very easy because you could go back to any word and change the correction.

The iPhone doesn't offer a reliable way to solve this.

What, really? Hold, slide to the word you want and change it, as opposed to typing a backspace 30 times?
 
Last edited by a moderator:
What, really? Hold, slide to the word you want and change it, as opposed to typing a backspace 30 times?

This for the win. That's the major problem of non-touch screen keyboards for me. If you compose a huge message and find the first word is misspelled, you have to press up up up up up up up left left left left backspace backspace, etc and then retype the word.
 
What, really? Hold, slide to the word you want and change it, as opposed to typing a backspace 30 times?

T9 on the phones I've used treats each word as a word so that moving back to a previous word is very quick.

The above sentence has 22 words in it. To move back to the first word "T9" would require only 22 presses.
 
T9 on the phones I've used treats each word as a word so that moving back to a previous word is very quick.

The above sentence has 22 words in it. To move back to the first word "T9" would require only 22 presses.

I honestly hope you were being sarcastic...22 presses vs 30?
 
I think the biggest t9 plus was that I could type without even looking. And one handed. Not on the iphone.
 
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.