Today’s GTX Blog entry examines the mind-reading SMS miracle of predictive text and its installation on more than 4bn phones.
The GTX Blog mini-series continues, kicking of the new week with a look at T9 predictive text messaging.
When it first happened, it seemed like a miracle: Phones that knew what the user wanted to text. What seemed incredible at the time it first surfaced in 1999, is today a standard for most texters.
T9 was the leading technology for many years, installed on more than four billion handsets around the world, offering users alternative words based on what they’re typing.
The main feature is word completion on limited keyboards – and similar functions have been achieved in the meantime by competing systems, such as RIM’s SureType, Eatoni’s LetterWise and WordWise, and iTap by Motorola.
On touchscreens, the challenge lives on and new tweaks are continuously happening: Apple was granted a patent this year for its solution that changes the size of a virtual keyboard's buttons to help the user type with more ease based on predictive text data.
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