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