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Comment by Retr0spectrum | Hacker News Reader

I'm confused, you do realise these phones had a built-in contacts storage, right?

Yeah, the Razr was my first phone...but it was super convenient to just use the number pad to dial. I had contacts programmed in for just about all the people I called, but between favorites and dialing I didn't use them all that often.

I miss phones that let you dial the letters of the contact name to pull up that contact. Example I always thought was funny was Mom is 666.

But with that, it was faster to dial a contact name like that than their number.

My phone still let me do that, plain vanilla Samsung S8. I'd be surprised if that didn't work in the most phones on the market today.

I think all Androids let you do that, but iPhones don't.

> I miss phones that let you dial the letters of the contact name to pull up that contact.

Not sure if I understand this. If you mean start dialing by name or number, I can do this on my Android.

Each number key has three letters associated with it. So you hit the numbers that correspond to the letters in the name; presumably the phone would display a list of all the contacts that matched - with the example of typing 666 to get “Mom”, first you’d see every contact whose first letter was M, N, or O, then every contact whose second letter was also on the 6 key, and so on until you were down to one and hit the dial button.

Yeah, that still works at least on android.

T9? Yes, that's exactly how Android dialer works.

The primary mode of input was via a d-pad that was fairly small to allow room for the number pad, which is largely defunct after the initial creation of a contact.

I think what they were getting at was that dedicating space to a number pad isn't the most functional design by today's standards.

I see they responded - should've refreshed first.

I barely remember the OS on my old V3 but at a guess I'd imagine actually accessing contacts was sufficiently laborious that just memorising numbers was more convenient?

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