How to achieve 20 words per minute with Predictive Text!

[slitchfield]

Power users of S60 smartphones look away now. The rest of you, here's my tutorial on getting started and productive with Nokia's S60 predictive text system. If you're already a predictive text wiz then why not print it out for your partner, friend, colleague or mum?

Read on in the full article.

[jrmt]

Also, if you press the 1 key two or three times, you'll get either :) or :-) (at least on my 6670 that happens)

[elp]

Nice article. I always wondered why so many teenagers wrote their SMS in "SMS style" which is pretty much impossible to do with T9. I found the answer when my parents got my teenage sister her first mobile. They don't user T9! Instead they use the ABC mode which results in them spending 3 times more time to write a text while still ending up with something ugly and barely readable. I doesn't make any sense to me (I suppose that this is yet another sign that i'm getting old ). It still amazes me though to see how many people still struggle and spend ages to write text messages in ABC mode when it would only take them 5 minutes and a few texts to get up to speed with T9.

Anyway. There are a few things that i think sould be mentionned in this article and without which T9 is a real pain:
- you can type a full stop by simply pressing 1 followed by a space. No need to display the special caracters list
- you can type ! ? and other common punctuation signs by pressing 1 then * to go through all the punctuation caracters until you've found the one you were looking for
- you can enter a digit by pressing and holding any digit key (1-9)
- you can enter a "new line" (or "return") caracter by pressing the '0' key three times in quick succession (at least, that's how it works on my X).

[slitchfield]

Thanks, keep the comments coming, I'll roll them into a revised version of the tutorial in a day or so's time! (Love the 000 tip for carriage return!)

Steve

[Burcrim]

If you want to type unusual or longer words (words not present in the dictionary) quickly you can enter them in sections of 1-4 characters that do correspond to existing words and then pressing the right arrow once to enter the next section.

e.g. Nottingham is not in the dictionary.

Enter 6,6,8 for "Not" and press right
Enter 8,4,6,4 for "ting" and press right
Enter 4,2,6 for "ham" and press "*" once to change "ibm" into "ham".
Word now appears as Nottingham without having to enter and then retype using the spell option.

[Nikyzf]

Just to mention a few differences applicable to the Sendo X, for the few that own one!

There is no New Line symbol in the grid for special characters/punctuation, so 000 is the only way to get a NL as far as I know.

The * key changes the input mode.

Holding the # key down gives the special character grid; a normal press gives a space.

The 0 (zero) key steps through the alternative word choices.