Earlier quoted context omitted.
t9 was AMAZING and i miss it every day. faster and more accurate than swype for sure, especially since inputs for t9 are deterministic. very easy to text even from your pocket etc - something you cant do on a smartphone - notice texting accidents became more common with the widespread adaptation of smartphones ;)
Note that you're comparing a touchscreen to tactile keys in that statement too, though. I could text from my pocket without T9, but try doing that with a touchscreen WITH T9...
I think this feature was actually key to being able to memorize how to perform operations quickly. There's no way you can do that with modern smartphone, where every other interaction lags for anything between 10 and 1000 ms, and inputs are sometimes dropped at random. It's this non-determinism of smartphone UI that makes me look at the screen all the time when using it.