The good old days

I hate that it uses spaces instead of 0

But you could also wait a little and it would space out the next word
- Takes too long. Who has that second or two? I've typed the next two words in that time.

It reached a stage where I can type messages without looking at the phone ne at all. Tactile keys has it's advantages too.

Yeah, silently texting during class with one hand. Those were good days. When I got a smart phone without keys I was pretty annoyed texting.
- I still am.
I'm a little surprised that tiny Bluetooth keypads aren't more of a thing. I guess people have just adapted to the touchscreen completely.

I could still read this from the numbers alone. I’m close to death aren’t I?

There once was a time I had that proficiency, I can't do it anymore though

t9 was a gamechanger

You could seriously text without looking at your phone screen. It was awesome!
- Tbh I could do that on a plain numeric keypad. I remember blindly texting under my desk in school. I wouldn't be able to do it nowadays though.
I am evidently young enough that I tried to figure it out using T9 in my head, and just got confused. So a partial win.
Eh. I never used it. I could type without looking without T9. T9 was faster, but then I had to pay attention to the predictions.
- The first versions of t9 were entirely predictable and hardcoded so the words were always in the same order when pressing star. Later versions had some optimisations that mad it change, but it settled quite quickly to your writing style. I'm always surprised how few countries adopted t9... I'd Denmark literally everyone used t9. Even my mom. And you were weird if not using it. It wa also stupid fast to type on.
I would love t9 on iOS. It's so much faster than qwerty with two fingers

The morse code of our age.

Although morse code is way faster than t9

Saved you a minute of staring at the keypad: It spells out “you are old”

I thought it was a a song.
- that's 9988 999 888 999, 9988 999 88 987

I'm not old. I just know how to read numpad.

Thanks. This comment put my brain in the right mode to realize what the post was saying.
I had initially thought it was one of those things where you play a song with the DTMF tones that the keypad would make.... Silly me.

"You are old"

youareold

:(

I am 18 and have owned 2 such phones. Where I grew up, it was kind of a luxury to own a smartphone in the early 2010s, so I've never really thought of these as some kind of ancient technology.

I'm 30 and remember my parents having these and my first two phones were Motorola razors. It was weird for most kids to have a phone until they could drive. Funny how quick it went from kids don't need phones, to well I guess they should if they're driving, to probably should be able to reach them anywhere but they don't need the smart one lol
Where are you from?
- A relatively small city in Bulgaria. The situation might have been different in larger cities.

.

Not quite, with age comes experience. Learning from that experience is wisdom.
- Not quite. Actually putting into practice what has been learned is true wisdom.
  https://www.dictionary.com/e/wisdom-vs-knowledge/
  OK, enough wisecracking. 😇
- When do You learn that nobody actually listens to the uhm ackchually guy?

Yeah, but the whole five of us in the school could text each other without needing to take it out of our pockets so the teachers wouldn't take it away. Kids these days won't have those awesomely useless skills.

I can type an entire sentence without looking at my phone with swipe to text ¯⁠\⁠_⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯
- Plot twist: it's only one sentence.
- Yeah, but slant it tends to name lots of misjudged? Whenever I type out with selling, or trends to auricular to the wing words.
  Of chase, you might simply be better at it than me.
  (Yeah, but doesn't it tend to make lots of mistakes? Whenever I type out with swiping, it tends to autocorrect to the wrong words.
  Of course, you might simply be better at it then me. )
- I could never get the hang of that, that's a whole other kind of skill level I was lacking.
- Just need autocorrect and it’s not that hard on the default keyboard

The spaces should be 0

I can happily say that I never did this. Not because I'm not old but because I was poor as fuck. My first mobile phone with any sort of text based plan was a company provided BlackBerry.

I get it. I'm angry, but I get it.

No I am not.

I actually thought it was supposed to be a song played with the dial tones until I saw a comment about what it spelled out

Does that make me medium old? Old young?

Nah, you can be old. We played music with the buttons all the time.

What blows my mind is the (muscle) memory involved in this. I’m using touchscreen based phones for ~10-15 years and my last phones had a QWERTY keyboard (Hardware buttons!).

can still write texts like I never stopped using these phones. Using T9 I may be even faster than on my smartphone today. I really miss those tactile buttons…

We have some Cisco 8xxx wireless phones at work. Setting them up from factory is great, cause you gotta input the ssid and whatnot using the keypad. Muscle memory is right lol

66 666 88

I'm still not as fast with swipe as I was with t9... It was great

3338822255099966688 😁

444 0 9 666 66 8 0 3 666 0 9 44 2 8 0 999 666 88 0 8 33 555 555 0 6 33

I can't even vote. How am I old?

96802730653

For my T9 homies

Yes, I am

66 33 888 33 777 0 4 666 66 66 2 0 4 444 888 33 0 999 666 88 0 88 7 0 66 33 888 33 777 0 4 666 66 66 2 0 555 33 8 0 999 666 88 0 3 666 9 66

I had a hunch that was confirmed with the first three letters.
3338822255099966688

You really didn't even need to type all the numbers with nokia predictive text, it was a pretty goog precursor to autofill.

I'm so old I knew what the message said the moment I looked at it

Listen here you fucking guy...

0118999881999119725 3

Came here to post the same thing but somehow overlooked your's.
Fire!

And the battery lasted forever

The Nokia Code

I could still text using this by muscle memory

I was so fast at these bad boys

668844 8844

This Pic makes me feel like. It!

My hacker ass typing that into a DTMF generator to hear what it sounds like.

7777 33 66 3 0 66 88 3 33 7777

444026

translation please

"you are old"
- doh!

0118 999 88199 9119 725 3

Type that into the default android dialler and it has a little easter egg.

:-(

I'm proud to say I had to work out each letter slowly. I think I'd really be old if I didn't even have to think about it. Anyone got any more copium?

... 3.

I got really good at T9 texting. I don’t think I’ve ever been able to type as fast as I was able to do that.

Likely because you could, in most normal conversational speaking cases. With T9 you didn’t have to press the number multiple times unless it wasn’t picking up the word you needed but at a high rate of correct predictability, only pressing 10 different buttons would be a lot faster than typing on the whole keyboard. The software being fast enough to keep up is a little less likely compared to modern smartphones but hey, at least you could send a confidently correct text with your phone in your pocket.