I could T9 an SMS message while holding eye contact with a person. Right down to knowing certain words were “press buttons, down twice”.

I can almost blind type on a touch screen with both thumbs, too. However, it’s no where near as good as I was with hard buttons and Motorola’s particular dialect of T9. Towards the end, Motorola tried to get clever and start reordering the words based on MRU and it played havoc with my muscle memory.

99.5% of the time I only call my wife, my parents, my sisters, and my four best friends. That's 9 people. With my so much missed flip-phone I could do this, check it out:

Walk around the city with phone in pocket. Need to call one of them: pick phone from pocket (without looking), thumb-flick the screen open (without looking), thumb-press the person's speed dial number (without looking), done.

or

Walk around the city with phone in pocket. Phone vibrates. pick phone from pocket (without looking), glance at front screen for 1/3 sec to see who it was. If wanted to take the call, thumb-flick the screen open (without looking) while raising phone to ear (without looking), done. If not, toss phone back in pocket.

There was also the cost-of-phone factor. The thing was so cheap, I treated it like there was an old crumpled piece of paper in my pocket, never worried if it would get scratched or if the screen would crack. The constant worry when my smarphone falls on the floor sucks. I never had a better phone experience than with my flip-phone. Sadly, recently Whatsapp became so ubiquitous here, that people stopped calling and only texted, and eventually I had to upgrade.

I'm blind and I could call people whose numbers I know even on a dumb phone with no accessibility. At the moment, some strange failure of the phone screen reader, accidental switch off of volume or whatever and it is game over. Try to restart by the hardware keys and pray that you are not left with a thousand dollar brick in the middle of a trans-continental trip. Real story with my first touch phone with the only difference that at the time I didn't know the hardware keys to restart the brick.

I could do it while driving. It was much easier to do than you would imagine. The keypad only had 9 keys and if you would put the base of your thumb lightly on the 2 key you could reach the whole keypad without issue. Just about everyone learned to do this without trying. People who had predictive text like T9 had to work at it a little, but it was like riding a bicycle.

Texting while driving was safe! Kind of. You could sense what key you were touching and how many times you touched it. "ha" would be "442" - two presses to get to H, one press for A. "lol" was 555666555. Still safer than Swype and looking down to see the several autocorrect options it gives you, or wondering if your grip was proper for your usual thumb motion. Even if you don't like the reference to driving, this was still convenient. Go watch "The Departed" from 2006 and see how Leo's character types in his pocket.

It's the same justification for keeping radio and climate controls, as well as needed safety buttons like hazard lights, as physically actuated. It is much easier and safer than having to look at an ever-changing panel.

Imagine if your climate control knobs moved around your center console by several inches every time you used them. Was that fan control, or temperature?

Yes, touch typing is a thing, for many people who aren't "[b]usy Wall Street types".

I can still dial on an analog button phone faster than I can look up and dial a person on my iPhone, and I haven't done the former in 20-some years. Muscle memory is quite powerful.

Yeah. You could basically rest your fingers on a keypad like home keys and dial blind.

Actually very useful when looking at a phone number, and a great deal faster

Typing SMSes in school and college was easy with a classic keypad, and the error rates were very low... now even with watching the screen I make more mistakes than then.

On my BlackBerry, I could set the keys to dial individual phone numbers with a single long press. The FJ bumps made it easy to do without looking. I sure miss that.

More than numbers. We would write text messages without looking at the keypad. This required a lot more key presses than a number.

I could text while shifting but it wasn’t till touchscreens that everyone decided laws needed to be passed.

I miss k9. There were somehow fewer typos.

I could text and drive without ever taking my eyes off the road. Probably still not the safest, but I constantly see people staring down into their lap while driving now.

My friend in college broke his phone's screen. But he kept using it for about a year without problems. He had every phone number memorised and could type messages without needing to look at the keyboard or the screen. You would be talking to him face to face and he could be typing out a message with his phone in his hand, inside his pocket.

it was something literally every teenager and adult did. anybody who'd been using a phone for more than a year.