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Comment by the_duke | Hacker News Reader

Not just to save space.

Typing with T9 was much more time-consuming that our autocomplete touch keyboards.

Are you sure you're not thinking of multi-tap on a keypad and not T9?

Once you've learned T9 (the one where you tap a key a single time for each letter in the word and a lookup is made based on the combination). You can surely be faster than Qwerty.

This was also the reason I developed https://typenineapp.com [1] for iPhone once they allowed custom keyboards.

I am on average 20wpm faster (50wpm for english, 60wpm for my native language danish) with Type Nine on my iPhone compared to the apple qwerty keyboard.

Even though you don't have the tactile feedback of the previous T9 phones on the iPhone I can type without looking just the same way as on a phone with a physical keyboard.

[1] More on my thoughts here - https://medium.com/porsager/a-better-iphone-typing-experienc...

This perpetuated myth has annoyed me greatly. Somehow, very few people actually know how a T9 keyboard actually works.

In fact, T9 is one of the last few reasons why I only VERY recently got myself an iPhone. T9 is superior in almost every way to a full touch-based QWERTY when writing texts.

So, great idea and product, mate. This is a buy from me.

But it could be done without looking. Driving home, reach for phone in the other seat, unlock, go to your contact (you remember the phonebook position of your frequent contacts), choose send sms, type the message fairly quickly, send. This could all be done fast and reliable without one look, perhaps one last glance before sending to make sure it looks right.

Even easier to do that now. "Ok Google/Hey Siri send $contact $message" <confirm message via voice read back and send>.

Yes, if you don't have the radio on, if other people aren't talking, if your car isn't loud and rattling, if you don't mind sharing the data with google and of course if the voice recognition and app interfacing works at all. Not all of the above are always true.

But I know, things are not all bad. I'm only a bit saddened by the disappearance of the reliable deterministic haptic-only control that older phones had.

I really don't think so, or at least not when you're a "power user". I used T9 when I was a teenager glued to his phone, and was definitely way faster to type than I am now with a touchscreen and autocompletion.

I was also faster than my friends that did not use T9 but wrote in "txt spk"

I'd say it was on par with non-Swype Android keyboards. One button press per letter, fewer buttons to choose between and tactile physical buttons to push, so more accurate presses. Correcting a wrong word was about the same effort.

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