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Resurrecting flip phone typing as a Linux driver
- fimdomeio 1y agoThe great thing about those keyboards was that a lot of people could just turn off text prediction and type text with a single hand without looking at the screen.
- jaffa2 1y agoHuh? The great thing about T9 (certainly on the Nokia 3210 and 8210) back in the day was you could type messages fast with few k/s without looking. As long as you had enough experience to know the word combos. Ive never found a t9 system as good as the Nokia implementation. In some respects its better than qwerty for short messages. And don’t get me started on apples fundamentally broken auto correct system. People dont know any better these days. There’s actual adults walking today that have never typed on a real keyboard.
- justsomehnguy 1y agoT9 works good for English and simple texts. If you need some other language, declensions, conjugations and non-Latin script things are no longer good.
- spookie 1y agoEh you would abbreviate things to hell to get around it. Helped with sms prices on those days too!
- justsomehnguy 1y agoWhich makes T9 fail miserably because it works with a non-abbreviated words. Later there were adaptive versions which had an auto-populated user dictionary but that made "a blind T9ing" prone to errors.
- Dilettante_ 1y agoI want to say you could add custom words no problem? But it's been a hot minute, so I might be misremembering.
- justsomehnguy 1y agoMeh, Imma team Moto and I don't remember it well anymore, 20 years give or take. Yes, the later variants both had a custom/user dictionary and could learn %he new words from the input. The latter could add the uncertainty in the input.
- gmueckl 1y agoEricsson had a really good implementation for German. I would write entire text messages without looking.
- kfarr 1y agoI remember it would always default to book instead of cool
- nmstoker 1y agoA mate would regularly ask if I fancied a "riot" - was always disappointed when it turned out he was actually after a drink ("pint"!)
- jaffa2 1y agoyou make the point very well! You can still remember, what, 20 years later ? On the nokia you'd press the button and it would cycle through the options. Once you knew all the words you could type really very fast indeed, and blind. Someone asked about custom words below. You could definitely add custom words. I think you had to switch out of T9, key the word the old way and then switch back then 'add' to dictionary, but once in it would stay in the dictionary. I'm sure the amount of memory for custom words was quoted in marketing material at somepoint.
- strathmeyer 1y agoT9wording is still the easiest way to text while working a stick shift.
- wkirby 1y agoI dream of building an apple watch case that adds a T9 bluetooth keyboard. Turn the standalone Apple Watch into the dumbphone I've always wanted.
- jorvi 1y agoThis is exactly my dream too, especially after seeing the Apple Watch prototype dumbphone cases they used to conceal them in public[0]. It would be a glorious re-purposing of the Apple Watch to serve the most diehard fans of the killed iPhone Mini. Sadly the Apple Watch doesn't do proper external text input. You can connect a bluetooth keyboard, but it works by sending all input via the VoiceOver accessibility feature, which is slow and fidgety. [0]https://cdn.idropnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/15092544/Apple-Watch-Prototype-Brick-Style-Phone.jpg https://cdn.idropnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/1509254...
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- jesprenj 1y agoI never saw anyone use T9 in Slovenia, but from being online and watching american movies I noticed it's used almost universally. I guess it works for typing English but Slovene didn't get such good support. Plus it was never enabled by default so people (myself included) just learned to get fast fingers.
- franga2000 1y agoI remember disabling T9 as the first step when getting any "new" phone, so it must've been enabled on some. Then again, I rarely got phones new from the store, so this might have been because they were factory reset. I don't think I ever really knew what it was, other than "that thing that made typing difficult". I doubt any phone shipped with a Slovene dictionary for T9, so it was probably just doing its best trying to map my seemingly nonsensical keypresses onto English words.
- Cene12 1y agoI want to provide a counterexample: my Sony Ericsson W... something had a decent T9 Slovene dictionary. If I manage to turn it on, I'll let you know:)
- humanfromearth9 1y agoBlind-typing an SMS on a Nokia 3310 was so fast... or at least that was the feeling. I still regularly miss those keyboards, in particular when I hesitate between swiping a word or typing it, guessing how autocorrect will fail if I don't type... This never happened with my 3310, and there was no need for it at all.
- bee_rider 1y agoI bet it just felt fast (there are lots of repeated key-hits, right?). I remember around that time (maybe a little later) I had a slide-out keyboard Samsung of some sort. I got a reputation for writing long texts, haha.
- nkrisc 1y agoI liked T9 but one of those Samsung phones you’re talking about were the last phone I had before I bought my first smartphone. Of course the one I had still had a keypad on the front so I could still type using T9 without looking.
- kevincox 1y agoYeah, I had this too. T9 on the keypad was great for typing one handed without really looking while the keyboard was excellent for longer messages when you had two hands available.
- o11c 1y agoYou're thinking of the inferior system that predated T-9. The whole point of T-9 was using a language-specific word frequency list so that words can be entered with just one digit per letter. The main word pairs that this often fails for are "me/of" and "no/on" (edit: other super-common words are "go/in", "he/if", and "up/us"; "am/an" isn't a problem since you usually write "I'm"); prefixes that can end with "-er" or "-es" are also ambiguous. For those you need to press the arrows to select a possibility manually. If there's an ambiguity for longer words (usually, if the word you're looking for is not in the dictionary), you might have to use the arrows ahead of time and then keep typing before the space; it will try to complete suffixes that go after that prefix. There are only around 2000 ambiguous digit sequences after excluding the -er/-es pair, and for most of those at most one is likely to be used in texting even if they're "common" in English. The most ambiguous sets, with 6-8 "common" "words", are: 2253 able bake bald bale cake calf 22537 abler bake[rs] balds bales cakes calfs 2273 acre bard bare base cape card care case 22737 acres bards bare[rs] base[rs] cape[rs] cards cares cases 24337 aides bides cheep cheer chefs cider 269 any bow box boy cow cox coy 4663 gone good goof home hone hood hoof 46637 goner goods goofs homes hones hoods hoofs inner 7243 page paid rage raid sage said 727733 parred parsed passed rapped rasped sapped 7277464 parring parsing passing rapping rasping sapping 729 paw pay raw ray saw say 7327 pear peas reap rear sear seas 74337 ride[rs] rifer sheds sheep sheer sides 7627 roar robs snap soap soar sobs 7673 pope pore pose rope rose sore (no +7 since "popes" isn't common) 78337 puffs queer ruder ruffs steep steer 7867 pump puns rump rums runs stop sums suns 787433 purged pushed rushed stride strife surged Think about how often, while texting, you actually use the second-most-common of a given word set.
- lexiciccone 1y ago[flagged]
- akdev1l 1y agoWhy we don’t have t9 support on tv remotes??? I gotta aim and peck some bullshit or open up some app with a QR code instead. Give me T9
- dsp_person 1y agosmart tvs too busy adding spyware and AI bloat maybe streamio + unified remote?
- zzo38computer 1y agoIf you are doing searching, then a variant can be that it does not need to predict what words you meant, but will search for all words that match the numbers you pushed. For example, if you try to search for a title and one of the words in your search is entered "223", then either "ace" or "bad" can be in that position, and if there is a title with "ace" matching in that position and a title with "bad" matching in that position, both are displayed. So, this variant is you enter the entire title (or a substring of the title) first before it predicts what words you meant. After it is entered then all results are displayed, with a number next to each one, and then you must push the number corresponding to the one that you want.
- GauntletWizard 1y agoI'd take multitap any day over the terrible systems that we have now, with faux QWERTY keyboards displayed on screen (or worse, the whole alphabet in a line on Apple TV devices)
- im3w1l 1y agoThis sounds like it would be mostly great but occasionally really awful if you get a lot of matches.
- ortusdux 1y agoSome phone directories use this method. "Please dial the numbers that correspond to the the first 4 letters of the last name of the person you would like to reach."
- 1y ago
- throw0101c 1y ago"Flip phone typing" = T9: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T9_(predictive_text) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T9_(predictive_text)
- rfl890 1y agothe library is named libt9, I believe the author is aware of this...
- szszrk 1y agoThen why is a flip phone in the title? That was not specific to flip phones at all.
- stronglikedan 1y agoBecause vastly more people will know what "flip phone typing" is over "T9 typing".
- thfuran 1y agoWill they? I don't think I've ever heard it called that before.
- 0x445442 1y agoYes they will. I'd never heard the term T9 before this thread. If I saw it on its own I'd think Arnold was attempting to make another Terminator movie.
- jmbwell 1y agoI figured other way around… Kids These Days might be more likely to have heard of a “flip phone” than “t9” and thus “engage” with this “content”
- foxmoss 1y ago
- jauntywundrkind 1y agoHow does the web demo work? I can enter numbers but where do we see resolved words? https://foxmoss.github.io/libt9/ https://foxmoss.github.io/libt9/
- foxmoss 1y agoPlease submit an issue on the Github repo! This is a bug, it should automatically show with words as you type. Include platform details, console logs, etc. I am unable to test every platform alone sadly.
- cortesoft 1y agoI never learned how to type fast on those old phones because I couldn't afford to send text messages.
- bux93 1y agoThere's also a T9 keyboard for android on the f-droid store https://f-droid.org/en/packages/io.github.sspanak.tt9/ https://f-droid.org/en/packages/io.github.sspanak.tt9/
- gaazoh 1y agoVery cool, I implemented this once in python, it's a fun exercise, and knowledge that is gradually disappearing (modern phones with 12-key physical keyboards usually don't even have a T9 implementation, and when they do it doesn't perform well, even higher-tech KaiOS phones). Although I appreciate the effort, I see a couple of issues with this implementation: * The demo doesn't seem to work properly, the first thing I tried to type was "hello world", but it didn't recognize "hello" and I got "43556" instead. * The word list is generated generated C code, which makes it hard to use other dictionaries (languages) or to add words during use (you can't add all place and people names to the list, but people are going to want to reference a handful of them many times). Loading from and appending to a plain text word list would make more sense, and maybe additionally use a custom binary format for the trie structure for fast loading into memory once a word list is imported on first use (hardware that would benefit from T9 might not be fast enough for conversion to be "instant") * Non-latin script support would be nice. Although I have no knowledge whether Greek or Cyrillic languages used a T9 mechanism, it would be a minor change to define. Korean 12-key typing is also very cool, but I don't know whether that counts as T9.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]