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Comment by phpnode | Hacker News Reader

I still really prefer a hardware keyboard and miss my android G1 in many ways. I'm typing this on my touch screen phone and it's so much slower than texting was even on an ordinary numeric keypad with predictive text. For me touch screens ended productivity on phones and they solely became consumption devices

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I'm surprised nobody has implement something like the numpad + predictive text on a touch screen. It would make a lot of sense having less buttons to mis touch.

There are Android keyboards that replicate it. I tried a few but for whatever reason they still couldn't replicate the experience. I suspect it's the lack of hard buttons - I could type out an entire message without looking at the screen with a T9 keypad.

I've ended up switching to a swipe keyboard which I find efficient but it in an entirely different way to T9.

For some inexplicable reason new Nokias seem to have ditched T9. The one feature that gives 'dumb' phones an edge over touchscreens has been abandoned. The replacement is a horrid, crappy and eminently useless home - grown editor that is worse in every way. It seems Nokia execs enjoy shooting themselves in the foot. But anyway, their phones are irrelevant, it's just a pity that they seem to be going backwards.

The Microsoft-Nokia didn't want to maintain the old OSs so went with a licensed clone of Series 30, and then post-Microsoft went with KaiOS (though newer ones seem to be back on the Series 30 clone, which is frankly a better experience than KaiOS was). Like, I was never a big fan of Series 30 or 40 but they had an awful lot of iterative improvement over the years and they just pissed that all away.

KaiOS (if that's what it's called) is crap and almost unusable. The Symbian series and more basic OSs were pretty complete and nice to use. Nokia no longer make good phones, or even mediocre phones.

From Wikipedia:

> Such T9 formats for text entry therefore remain available in all latest [as of August 2020] iterations of LG keyboards, certain Samsung keyboards, and third party T9 keyboards such as Go keyboard for Androids and Type Nine for iPhones, as shown on this LG V60.

Also, there was another method of touch input that used swipe gestures to write words, I can't remember the name, but I remember that it was far from intuitive to use.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T9_(predictive_text)#Successor...

No I loved those buttons, and find miss-touching a screen so much easier! I could bash out messages on my Nokia 8250 without looking at all, and could type away with the phone in my bag. I'd love to know what my typing speed was actually like back then, but it sure felt fast!

Back when touchscreen phones were new, Nokia 5800 had a T9 keyboard you could use instead of qwerty.

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