![]() Several phones at last week's wireless industry trade show in New Orleans were using T9. Nokia OY, Motorola Inc., Mitsubishi Corp., Sony Corp., Samsung Co., Philips Electronics NV and others already have signed on. Its product, called T9 (after the nine buttons on a phone that spell the alphabet), is being rapidly adopted by cell phone equipment makers and will appear on many popular-branded phones in the next year. Tegic, founded by a trio of linguists whose previous work involved making it easier for the disabled to communicate, has developed advanced linguistic databases that vastly speed the process of spelling out words on a touch-tone keypad. A small, privately held Seattle company called Tegic Communications has found a way around the problem, not by abandoning the touch-tone keypad, which now is the most ubiquitous information entry system in the world, but by embracing it and making it faster. The result is a phone that's too big and a keyboard that's too small. The Nokia 9000 has a clamshell design that opens to reveal a small screen and keyboard. Some have tried cramming a full QWERTY keyboard into a wireless phone. Imagine writing an entire e-mail message that way. That's 13 total pushes of the buttons, not counting waiting for the cursor to move to the next letter. ![]() The letter "L" requires three presses on number 5, etc. Letter "A" also is on number 2, press once. Let's spell "CALL ME" on my Sony cell phone: To get to the letter "C" I have to hit number 2 three times (to advance from "A" to "B" to "C"). But spelling out words is a headache, with each number key responsible for three letters - ABC, DEF, GHI, etc. Sure, punching in a phone number is simple. What's the biggest barrier preventing pocket phones from being used as e-mail devices? It's those dreaded touch-tone alpha-numeric keypads.
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