How to Use T9 for Text Messaging

Okay, so I'm a bit slow, I'm over the age of 30 and this whole text messaging phenomenon caught me a little unaware. I enjoy the time it saves though and have managed to catch the wave despite not having the fast paced finger skills of the under 30 crowd all around me. For a long time, I was stuck typing text messages on my numeric keypad the old fashioned way (scrolling through each one of the letters on my numbered keys). Occasionally, I'd notice my phone would be in "T9 Mode" and, as I'd begin to type a word, the phone would finish the word for me. However, the problem was that it was seldom the word I was looking for, so I'd let out a few heavy sighs, backspace the gibberish that was on my phone's screen and quickly turn off this feature and go back to the simple, but long ABC's of texting.

Imagine my surprise when I discovered that T9 actually serves a purpose and can literally save me valuable texting time. At www.T9.com I've learned how to maximize my texting skills and can text almost as fast as my eighteen year old...I said, 'almost'.

If many of you are still scratching your heads trying to figure out this whole T9 thing, let me help you out with a few tips. First, T9 stands for Texting with 9 keys. You'll notice that each numbered key on your keypad also has corresponding letters. When you're sending a text message, most phones allow you to select whether you'd like to manually type in each letter by scrolling through the alphabet or whether you'd like to send your message using the "T9 Mode". Once you've selected this mode, you can type in a word by simply tapping the letters (without scrolling through each one) and your phone will guess which word it is you're attempting to spell. Sometimes that guess is correct, but often times it isn't. For instance, when I want to spell "home", I'll type in 4663, but my phone will spell "good" instead. Since I've taken the tutorial at www.T9.com, I now know that, instead of erasing that word and going back to the old fashioned way of spelling "home" (by keying in 4466, then moving my cursor over one character and typing 6633), I can simply type in 4663 (which will give me the word "good") and then hit the "next" button on my phone (which happens to be on the number 0 on my particular model phone, but yours may vary) and the phone will go to the next word that corresponds with those numbers/letters which happens to be the word "home"!

And there's no need to worry about words which aren't in your phone's vocabulary, because with T9 most phones can be trained to spell a variety of words that you teach it. For example, I tend to type "wanna" instead of "want to" sometimes. In order to teach my phone this new word, all I had to do was go back to the "ABC" mode (the old way of scrolling through letters) and type in "9266, then move my cursor over one character and typing 662" and then give myself a space and switch my phone back to "T9 Mode". Although I've had to type it in "ABC Mode" this time, by immediately switching back to "T9 Mode", my phone has now added that word to it's dictionary. This is great for adding names or unique words that aren't in your phone's current vocabulary. So, if you're like me, don't have an alpha keypad on your phone, but still prefer sending quick text messages in lieu of spending precious moments making a phone call (where you can often get sucked into a longer conversation than planned), then head on over to www.T9.com and learn how T9 texting can simplify the whole process for you.