What is it about the text messages and emails sent by older people that make me feel like I’m having a stroke?
Maybe they’re used to various shortcuts in their writing that they picked up before autocorrect became common, but these habits are too idiosyncratic for autocorrect to handle properly. However, that doesn’t explain the emails I’ve had to decipher that were typed on desktop keyboards. Has anyone else younger than 45 or so felt similarly frustrated with geriatrics’ messages?
This seems to stem from when we had dumbphones that didn’t even have T9 predictive spelling.
Meaning that if you just wanted to type a common message like “I am on the train, 25 min away” would mean pressing the following keys:
Empty spaces is use to indicate a slight pause.
4,4,4,0,2,6,0,6,6,6, ,6,6,0,8,4,4,3,3,0,8,7,7,7,2,4,4,4,*,*,0,2,2,2,2,5,5,5,5,0,6,4,4,4,6,6,0,2,9,2,9,9,9
I used t9 in high school. In retrospect it’s obviously unusably clunky, but I do miss being able to text totally blindly in my pocket or something.
I tried using T9 from time to time, but it often sucked for me, probably because I needed to use it in Swedish and it wasn’t that well developed for it.
T9 was so bad that I don’t even understand that they threw these phones on the market.
I was there for the whole GSM phone era and the most obvious thing would have been to release a blackberry type thing with a slide out keyboard.
I always read now and even back then people complaining about t9 and how shitty it is…
I don’t know, I loved it on my Sony Ericssons. The implementation of it was really nice.
Granted, I did use it on my native language, so maybe in English, it is shitty, but it was a must have thing to turn on for me after a while (when I discovered and realized how it works. before that, it was just some strange black magic)
Just started typing, and if I waited a bit, a list of words came up and could use the dpad or joystick to select a word. only annoying thing was a popup, if the word did not exists I was trying to type, but then I could just add it with two button presses and that’s it.
