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Resurrecting flip phone typing as a Linux driver

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Re: Resurrecting flip phone typing as a Linux driver

#21

Post by kevincox »

nkrisc wrote: post #20
bee_rider wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bet it just felt fast (there are lots of repeated key-hits, right?). I remember around that time (maybe a little later) I had a slide-out keyboard Samsung of some sort. I got a reputation for writing long texts, haha.

I liked T9 but one of those Samsung phones you’re talking about were the last phone I had before I bought my first smartphone. Of course the one I had still had a keypad on the front so I could still type using T9 without looking.

Yeah, I had this too. T9 on the keypad was great for typing one handed without really looking while the keyboard was excellent for longer messages when you had two hands available.

Re: Resurrecting flip phone typing as a Linux driver

#22

Post by Dilettante_ »

justsomehnguy wrote: post #10
spookie wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh you would abbreviate things to hell to get around it. Helped with sms prices on those days too!

Which makes T9 fail miserably because it works with a non-abbreviated words. Later there were adaptive versions which had an auto-populated user dictionary but that made "a blind T9ing" prone to errors.

I want to say you could add custom words no problem? But it's been a hot minute, so I might be misremembering.

Re: Resurrecting flip phone typing as a Linux driver

#24

Post by crmi »

humanfromearth9 wrote: post #8

Blind-typing an SMS on a Nokia 3310 was so fast... or at least that was the feeling. I still regularly miss those keyboards, in particular when I hesitate between swiping a word or typing it, guessing how autocorrect will fail if I don't type... This never happened with my 3310, and there was no need for it at all.

Some of the young team haven't seen a rotary phone before.. Using t9 typing must seem like encryption to them.

Re: Resurrecting flip phone typing as a Linux driver

#25

Post by zzo38computer »

akdev1l wrote: post #14

Why we don’t have t9 support on tv remotes??? I gotta aim and peck some bullshit or open up some app with a QR code instead. Give me T9

If you are doing searching, then a variant can be that it does not need to predict what words you meant, but will search for all words that match the numbers you pushed.

For example, if you try to search for a title and one of the words in your search is entered "223", then either "ace" or "bad" can be in that position, and if there is a title with "ace" matching in that position and a title with "bad" matching in that position, both are displayed.

So, this variant is you enter the entire title (or a substring of the title) first before it predicts what words you meant. After it is entered then all results are displayed, with a number next to each one, and then you must push the number corresponding to the one that you want.

Re: Resurrecting flip phone typing as a Linux driver

#26

Post by o11c »

bee_rider wrote: post #13
humanfromearth9 wrote: post #8

Blind-typing an SMS on a Nokia 3310 was so fast... or at least that was the feeling. I still regularly miss those keyboards, in particular when I hesitate between swiping a word or typing it, guessing how autocorrect will fail if I don't type... This never happened with my 3310, and there was no need for it at all.

I bet it just felt fast (there are lots of repeated key-hits, right?). I remember around that time (maybe a little later) I had a slide-out keyboard Samsung of some sort. I got a reputation for writing long texts, haha.

You're thinking of the inferior system that predated T-9. The whole point of T-9 was using a language-specific word frequency list so that words can be entered with just one digit per letter.

The main word pairs that this often fails for are "me/of" and "no/on" (edit: other super-common words are "go/in", "he/if", and "up/us"; "am/an" isn't a problem since you usually write "I'm"); prefixes that can end with "-er" or "-es" are also ambiguous. For those you need to press the arrows to select a possibility manually. If there's an ambiguity for longer words (usually, if the word you're looking for is not in the dictionary), you might have to use the arrows ahead of time and then keep typing before the space; it will try to complete suffixes that go after that prefix.

There are only around 2000 ambiguous digit sequences after excluding the -er/-es pair, and for most of those at most one is likely to be used in texting even if they're "common" in English.

The most ambiguous sets, with 6-8 "common" "words", are:

  2253 able bake bald bale cake calf
  22537 abler bake[rs] balds bales cakes calfs
  2273 acre bard bare base cape card care case
  22737 acres bards bare[rs] base[rs] cape[rs] cards cares cases
  24337 aides bides cheep cheer chefs cider
  269 any bow box boy cow cox coy
  4663 gone good goof home hone hood hoof
  46637 goner goods goofs homes hones hoods hoofs inner
  7243 page paid rage raid sage said
  727733 parred parsed passed rapped rasped sapped
  7277464 parring parsing passing rapping rasping sapping
  729 paw pay raw ray saw say
  7327 pear peas reap rear sear seas
  74337 ride[rs] rifer sheds sheep sheer sides
  7627 roar robs snap soap soar sobs
  7673 pope pore pose rope rose sore
  (no +7 since "popes" isn't common)
  78337 puffs queer ruder ruffs steep steer
  7867 pump puns rump rums runs stop sums suns
  787433 purged pushed rushed stride strife surged
Think about how often, while texting, you actually use the second-most-common of a given word set.

Re: Resurrecting flip phone typing as a Linux driver

#27

Post by Izkata »

bee_rider wrote: post #13
humanfromearth9 wrote: post #8

Blind-typing an SMS on a Nokia 3310 was so fast... or at least that was the feeling. I still regularly miss those keyboards, in particular when I hesitate between swiping a word or typing it, guessing how autocorrect will fail if I don't type... This never happened with my 3310, and there was no need for it at all.

I bet it just felt fast (there are lots of repeated key-hits, right?). I remember around that time (maybe a little later) I had a slide-out keyboard Samsung of some sort. I got a reputation for writing long texts, haha.

> there are lots of repeated key-hits, right?

Nope, one key per letter. T9 uses an internal dictionary to figure which word you meant, with some memory for preferred words when there's multiple matches and adding custom words.

Re: Resurrecting flip phone typing as a Linux driver

#28

Post by 49531 »

Izkata wrote: post #27
bee_rider wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bet it just felt fast (there are lots of repeated key-hits, right?). I remember around that time (maybe a little later) I had a slide-out keyboard Samsung of some sort. I got a reputation for writing long texts, haha.

> there are lots of repeated key-hits, right? Nope, one key per letter. T9 uses an internal dictionary to figure which word you meant, with some memory for preferred words when there's multiple matches and adding custom words.

Exactly this, and occasionally you'd have multiple words come up for the same number combo, but in a consistent manner where the user could learn how many times you needed to hit the 'next' button to get the word you wanted.

Re: Resurrecting flip phone typing as a Linux driver

#29

Post by GauntletWizard »

zzo38computer wrote: post #25
akdev1l wrote: post #14

Why we don’t have t9 support on tv remotes??? I gotta aim and peck some bullshit or open up some app with a QR code instead. Give me T9

If you are doing searching, then a variant can be that it does not need to predict what words you meant, but will search for all words that match the numbers you pushed. For example, if you try to search for a title and one of the words in your search is entered "223", then either "ace" or "bad" can be in that position, and if there is a title with "ace" matching in that position and a title with "bad" matching in th…

I'd take multitap any day over the terrible systems that we have now, with faux QWERTY keyboards displayed on screen (or worse, the whole alphabet in a line on Apple TV devices)

Re: Resurrecting flip phone typing as a Linux driver

#30

Post by franga2000 »

jesprenj wrote: post #7

I never saw anyone use T9 in Slovenia, but from being online and watching american movies I noticed it's used almost universally. I guess it works for typing English but Slovene didn't get such good support. Plus it was never enabled by default so people (myself included) just learned to get fast fingers.

I remember disabling T9 as the first step when getting any "new" phone, so it must've been enabled on some. Then again, I rarely got phones new from the store, so this might have been because they were factory reset.

I don't think I ever really knew what it was, other than "that thing that made typing difficult". I doubt any phone shipped with a Slovene dictionary for T9, so it was probably just doing its best trying to map my seemingly nonsensical keypresses onto English words.

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