.KEYWORD tnine
.FLYINGHEAD PRODUCT REVIEW
.TITLE Replace your on-screen keyboard with T9
.OTHER
.SUMMARY Are you Graffiti-challenged? Do you sometimes hunt-and-peck away at the little Palm on-screen keyboard until your eyes cross and your brain freezes? If you’re looking for a better way to get information into your Palm device, check out a little gem called T9. It replaces the Palm’s on-screen keyboard with a large pad that resembles that of a telephone keypad. A little smart tapping, and words magically appear on your screen. In this review, A. Ron Carmichael waxes poetic on the benefits of T9.
.AUTHOR A. Ron Carmichael
I’ve owned a Palm III for a few months and have found it growing ever more indispensable. I’ve taught myself Graffiti with due diligence. Still, I’m perturbed to find that if I attempt to enter text quickly, when I am done I sometimes have trouble reading the result. This usually happens at times when I am taking notes on the phone, have the handset between shoulder and ear, and am trying to wangle the Palm III and the stylus without dropping anything.
I’ve tried several third-party tools to increase my accuracy, and to replace the default keyboard that comes with the Palm device. I very nearly bought another optimized-layout product, but didn’t like the fact that it won’t offer "guesses" to complete the word I am tapping. It was a very good product, and I found the logic of its layout design most appealing. However, I am used to shareware add-ons that run $10 to $25 dollars, and was reluctant to spend more when I wasn’t totally sure I would keep using it. But that is the beauty of shareware, especially for the Palm platform.
Then I discovered T9.
.H1 The T9 display
The T9 program is available for a number of platforms, and is now available for the Palm platform. T9 displays large buttons on the screen to encompass all letters of the alphabet. You can also select symbols and numbers by pressing the Sym and 123 buttons, respectively. T9 works by replacing the normal keyboard on your PalmPilot.
The layout of the nine T9 buttons are very similar to a telephone keypad. As you touch the buttons, T9 uses logic (and an internal word database) to figure out if the a,b,or c is the most likely letter you wanted, as shown in Figure A. It’s quite accurate and it’s fun to watch in actual operation.
.FIGPAIR A T9 looks a lot like a telephone keypad.
.H1 Using T9
Normally, you would tap on any part of the large buttons. Should you touch a word that T9 doesn’t have in it’s dictionary to offer, T9 will beep, and you can then enter the exact letters by tapping on each individual letter (rather than the larger button area).
You can also teach T9 words, such as your Internet domain name or personal name. In the beginning it didn’t recognize Carmichael, for example, but it does now. Likewise, you can have it display the punctuation choices or international symbols, or numbers in a large, easy-to-read display.
If you want to tap in all uppercase, you can tap the shift button twice quickly and T9 will lock into uppercase until you tap the shift button again. It automatically uppercases the first letter of a sentence.
It has configuration options for font and location of display. The way you configure T9 is to run a program called T9 Prefs. One note: if you want to remove T9, you must first turn it off in the preferences dialog before attempting to remove it from memory.
I am struggling to find a complaint at this point. It’s not good to write a review of a product and fail to present any negatives! Oh yeah. Here’s the worst I can say: It currently takes 174K for the install and 5K for my custom words. there. It’s HUGE!
Here’s another advantage: T9 isn’t a HackMaster hack, so even if I register it, I won’t have the hassle of having to finding and reinstalling the password to re-enable the registered version should a hard reset be performed. The shareware version gives me 55 days (!) to try it out and become hopelessly addicted. Hmmm. One more thing: T9 is a bit costly at $39.95 U.S. . Now, that’s just about the most I have seen for any add-on for the Palm device that I have wanted to buy, besides a leather cover. Unless I discover some wart that escapes me now, I will be paying that fee and registering this puppy in a week or so. ARC likes it.
.BEGIN_SIDEBAR
.H1 Product availability and resources
T9 is available from Tegic Communications at http://www.t9.com.
.END_SIDEBAR
.BIO A.Ron Carmichael is President of Austin Datasmith, Inc., a DataEase specialist. He can be reached at arc@inetport.com.
.DISCUSS http://www.component-net.com/webx?13@@.ee6c30c
