It used to be that I hammered out text messages each letter at a time, manually typing rather than mess with that “T9 crap” and then I discovered how it worked. That’s right, I did it the hard way for a long time until I took the time to learn how to text faster.

To my credit I got extremely fast tapping out texts the old fashioned way. But it was still slower than I was with T9.

On my old Sprint phone the T9 was pretty awesome, it learned easily and it had a good algorithm. When I switched to T-mobile the new phone took some getting used to and I discovered it’s T9 is strictly worse than Sprint’s. How?

It goes purely alphabetically regardless of how long the word it’s guessing is. That means that if I’m trying to type something out, if my target word is five letters long, but it knows a word that is seven letters long but comes before it alphabetically it shows me the first five letters of the longer word.

And the second sin is that it doesn’t provide the full word it’s suggesting. So if I’m trying to type “Astronaut” and it gets to “Astron” where there aren’t any other similar words in its dictionary, it doesn’t provide the “aut” requiring me to type three more letters.

And the third sin is the sometimes unusual dictionary. Training it the manual way is too much work, there should be a much easier answer. And there is. I figured it out.

A service that takes all your tweets on twitter and parses the text to build out a dictionary for use on your phone. Include the top 100 most common words, or whatever number is proven to be best, but a personalized dictionary is invaluable in texting.

Twitter could even take this idea and parse all the Tweets it takes in, then provide keyword information to vendors (cha-ching business plan!) so they can make better phones from the factory. Alas though, neither of these will probably come to fruition.

Unless Android from Google hits a stable version and can be distributed on phones, then the sky is the limit.

kthxbai