[loonster]

Pretty cool read. My biggest problem with T9word is Spelling. If you misspell something on a full keyboard, the other person may be able to ges by sounding it out. T9word would throw out a word that would be no where near what you want. 'Ges' would become 'her' and the other user would never think 'guess' was the intended word.

My 2nd biggest problem with T9word is you need to look at the screen to verify the word you wanted is the one guessed. The other t9 keyboards allowed the user to type without looking at the screen. (Such as under the desk during class )

[torvaney]

Absolutely. This will be an even bigger issue for people texting in a second or third language (which I understand is quite common among countries and communities where feature phone use is high).

As I understand it, one of the big advantages of T9 had over other, more sophisticated forms of predictive text is that each word in the dictionary can be encoded in close to 1 byte. Given the constraints faced at the time, T9 feels to me like it is close to a local optimimum.