You don't need three taps per letter, they had T9 [1], you only had to hit the key with the letter you wanted once, it predicted which letter you actually wanted, and worked surprisingly well. Once you got used to it you could type messages very quickly.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T9_(predictive_text)

Yes exactly. Also three taps per letter was worst case scenario. 1/3 of the letters were only one tap, and 1/3 were two taps.

Ackshully, worse case is four taps for S or Z

You didn't tap three time. You type out a few button that contained the letters for the first few letters of the word and then jabbed the "next" button until it gave you the right word. You could do a very long word with just a few keypresses.

i'd say predictive text/t9 was way faster than any other phone input method ever for texting. nothing else comes close imo, not even blackberry keyboards (unless you need more fine control over capitalisation and punctuation and stuff e.g work emails)

I've used them all and THE fastest and most accurate entry on mobile by far was the psuedo-t9 keyboard on the Blackberry 7130. It was so good that it was frustrating to use the full keyboard on later Blackberry models.

I wonder how many people actually experienced this keyboard in the world, perhaps only in the thousands?*

Seems they had a name for it, SureType:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_BlackBerry_products#Fi...

edit: ah I see it was used on other more popular models, too. Blackberry Pearl users should chime in!

Lookup a stenographer’s keyboard. There is a learning curve but a chorded keyboard can exceed typical typing speeds. I imagine a T9 isn’t too different in this regard.

I use one. I don't think that it would be a good substitute for this use case. You can try and do steno on your phone with Dotterel but it's not a good experience - you're better off using a swiping keyboard. I've not used a T9 system in my life, but I can imagine that it's a system that would let you input anything just typing with your thumbs. To have a good time doing steno, you have to exercise all of your fingers on both your hands. That's not quite so nice on your phone.

I could easily type blindly on those, the Nokia days

It's one press per key, even if the letter you want is the third letter.

Well now I feel dumb. So it's like Minuum but way earlier. That's pretty cool, then, and I can definitely see how it would be faster.

I loved Minuum's one-dimensional keyboard! The app disappeared from the iOS App Store, but looks like it still exists for Android in the Google Play Store (last updated in 2017). Did the developer go out of business?

http://minuum.com/

It's especially easy to doubt it if you don't understand how t9 keyboards work :)

Seconded, I could text from within my pocket if needed.