For us old farts, T9 texting still has a sort of nostalgic allure. Now a new iPhone keyboard allows you to text message your friends like it’s 1999 all over again.
If you’re too young to remember T9 texting, it was a way to type text on a mobile phone that didn’t have a full QWERTY keyboard, but instead had a simple number pad. It worked like this:
Do you see how this works? Each key on the number pad has three or four letters associated with it. To type out a letter, then, you’d hit whatever number was associated with that key x number of times, where x represents its position. So, for example, if I wanted to type in ‘Hi’, I’d hit the number 4 three times (H), wait a minute, than hit 4 another 4 times. (I)
T9 texting also had a predictive aspect, which made it easy to save some keystrokes, but that was the basic principle of how it worked. All of which is beautifully recreated in Type 9, an iOS 8 keyboard that recreates the experience of using a vintage Motorola Razr.
At $0.99, Text 9 isn’t expensive, and in my experience, it works pretty well. But as it turns out, my nostalgia for T9 texting is pretty overblown: as annoying as I find typing out text on my iPhone to be, Text 9 is about ten times worse. So this one’s for nostalgic die-hards only.
