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Comment by drakonka | Hacker News Reader

What I want is a physical smartphone keyboard with nine keys. The one with three letters per key. I've never been faster and more accurate at typing on my phone than when these were a thing. I have pretty small hands, but even for me those full-size mini-keyboards are too imprecise to make them much better than a touch keyboard.

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It doesn't even need to be physical - You should definitely give Type Nine a try ( https://typenineapp.com ) - (disclaimer - I'm the author). There are some promo codes below so you can try it out:

I've used this since 2014 when I made the first version, and I have yet to meet anyone typing faster with the stock iPhone qwerty keyboard.

7AMYNPKN63KY EMMHTLRA9399 Y4TPAXMJFHLL 4F3Y4JJ3RHME YREJF6L4TYE7 KWM9LRRXJEXW Y6JJRM99NYLM KRJXYPLE666L 43Y3EANXXW9F 9H99XY3FTT7L

This looks great! I'd try it for sure if I was on iPhone. Do you have any plans to release this for Android as well at some point?

Looks awesome! I've missed t9 typing ever since I got my first smart phone. I just bought your keyboard.

Question: When I try to type the word "a" (by pressing the ABC key then space) it defaults to "c". Will it relearn that I actually want to type "a" if I correct it enough? No idea why it's defaulting to "c".

Type Nine looks awesome! I just bought it. I've become increasingly frustrated with the default iPhone keyboard and looking for something more reliable and deterministic.

Your onboarding tutorial was excellent. Much more thorough and polished than I expected. One issue: I advanced through all the tutorial screens until the end of the "manual" tutorial, but it wasn't obvious that was the end because there was no "next tutorial" or "quit tutorial" button after watching the "see how" animation.

Feature request: include emojis in the suggestions like the iOS keyboard does: when you type "heart", it offers a suggestion to replace the word "heart" with the heart emoji.

I see there's a T9 keyboard app (RetroBoard) for the Apple Watch. Have you looked into supporting Type Nine on Apple Watch?

Also, the suggestions seem to be confused by contractions when swiping, defaulting to "didnt" or "doesnt" even when the list of suggestions includes "didn't" or "doesn't".

The lists of suggestions also include a lot of non-English or nonsense words (like “diwn” and “dizoo”), even though I'm using an English dictionary.

The punctuation screen doesn’t include some punctuation available on the Apple keyboard like (parentheses). It would be nice if there was a second screen for less-common punctuation like how the emoji screen works.

Oh - Just checked, you're right these words are reversed in the default dictionary. They'll be right there in front the first time you use them thought, and I'll look into seeing if I can find a good rule for improving the preference by default.

The dictionaries are compiled from large known corpuses, wikipedia and movie subtitles, to ensure most words are available, but it does also mean that some weird words sneak in. That shouldn't matter much since it's very quick to adjust to your usage, and due to the usage sorting the weird words should never come first.

About the punctuation you just need to scroll the symbols window to get to the rest ;)

Thanks a lot! That's some good feedback. (you wrote in the app support chat too right?)

Wrt. Apple Watch, there is unfortunately no support for custom input support, so it has to be a weird hack where you type in one app and copy paste to another or such shenanigans. At least it was the last time I checked.

Thanks! Insta-bought this. Really anything that can spare me the hell of Apple's keyboard that is possessed by Satan when I attempt to try swiping on it. No amount of resetting keyboard settings or anything else can stop it from turning a swipe of "you" into "your" literally every single time.

I missed out on the codes, of course, but bought it anyway. Interesting so far; not fast yet, but more accurate as the larger keys are easier to hit - I struggle with most phone keyboards. Can't find the brackets though...

Is there any chance of a Welsh language pack, please?

Sounds like what you're looking for is the Qin F22 Pro[1]

It's got a cult following among dumbphone and dumb-er-phone enthusiasts (think Lightphone, Punkt, etc) and has personally tempted me, but I'm put off by it being a Xiaomi product and haven't been able to decide if that hardware is safe enough for me to consider using after a ROM swap.

[1] https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256804386537909.html?gateway...

I don’t believe you. There’s no way you type faster with up to three taps needed per letter. What a disgusting monstrosity those things were.

I could easily type blindly on those, the Nokia days

Seconded, I could text from within my pocket if needed.

If the claim is

> I've never been faster and more accurate at typing on my phone than when these were a thing.

It's easy to believe the accuracy claim (after all, you can feel the keys and there's fewer of them) while doubting the speed claim (since you have to perform 1-3x the number of keypresses to get the same result).

It's one press per key, even if the letter you want is the third letter.

Well now I feel dumb. So it's like Minuum but way earlier. That's pretty cool, then, and I can definitely see how it would be faster.

I loved Minuum's one-dimensional keyboard! The app disappeared from the iOS App Store, but looks like it still exists for Android in the Google Play Store (last updated in 2017). Did the developer go out of business?

http://minuum.com/

It's especially easy to doubt it if you don't understand how t9 keyboards work :)

You didn't tap three time. You type out a few button that contained the letters for the first few letters of the word and then jabbed the "next" button until it gave you the right word. You could do a very long word with just a few keypresses.

You don't need three taps per letter, they had T9 [1], you only had to hit the key with the letter you wanted once, it predicted which letter you actually wanted, and worked surprisingly well. Once you got used to it you could type messages very quickly.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T9_(predictive_text)

Yes exactly. Also three taps per letter was worst case scenario. 1/3 of the letters were only one tap, and 1/3 were two taps.

Ackshully, worse case is four taps for S or Z

Lookup a stenographer’s keyboard. There is a learning curve but a chorded keyboard can exceed typical typing speeds. I imagine a T9 isn’t too different in this regard.

I use one. I don't think that it would be a good substitute for this use case. You can try and do steno on your phone with Dotterel but it's not a good experience - you're better off using a swiping keyboard. I've not used a T9 system in my life, but I can imagine that it's a system that would let you input anything just typing with your thumbs. To have a good time doing steno, you have to exercise all of your fingers on both your hands. That's not quite so nice on your phone.

i'd say predictive text/t9 was way faster than any other phone input method ever for texting. nothing else comes close imo, not even blackberry keyboards (unless you need more fine control over capitalisation and punctuation and stuff e.g work emails)

I've used them all and THE fastest and most accurate entry on mobile by far was the psuedo-t9 keyboard on the Blackberry 7130. It was so good that it was frustrating to use the full keyboard on later Blackberry models.

I wonder how many people actually experienced this keyboard in the world, perhaps only in the thousands?*

Seems they had a name for it, SureType:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_BlackBerry_products#Fi...

edit: ah I see it was used on other more popular models, too. Blackberry Pearl users should chime in!

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