T9: What's on my phone?

The word consisting of only two letters, which you can see in the title of this article, has been heard by many people, and its greatest popularity seems to be in the nineties. Why? Now you will understand from our explanation.

T9 is a predictive writing system designed specifically for mobile phones. The first phone to have the T9 was the Sagem MC 850, which hit the market in 1999. A few years later, most phones had T9 support.

T9 means "Text on 9 keys", that is, to type with 9 keys. The idea is that when a user types a word, the system tries to guess the word they are typing. This type of typing significantly reduces the number of keystrokes. The letters themselves are reflected in the keys:

Now for the interesting thing: if the T9 is used in pushbutton telephones, why is the word often mentioned in the context of mobile telephones? The answer is obvious: many people are so used to the word T9 that they also call it the keyboard prompts when entering text. Also in mobile phones there is a self-correction system.

If for any reason these systems are deactivated on your mobile phone, we will show you how to activate them. An example is based on the popular Gboard keyboard.

Open the settings.

Then "advanced settings".

Here - «Language and entrance».

Or use the search for the keyword "language" (without quotes).

The current keyboard is selected.

Next, «Correction of the text».

The tooltip line is activated with the switch.

You can also activate automatic text correction.

In general, there are many keyboard configurations, you can change many things to your liking.