Amidst the flair of big name brands like Samsung, LG, and Nokia are the more invisible ingredients to the dish. These are the small things you barely notice when you buy a phone — smaller even than the Carl Zeiss lens you see on your camera. Take T9 for instance.
T9, that little mode you have on your phone that activates predictive texting. Who uses that? I remember my very first phone was a Nokia 3210, the first phone to have moving graphics and predictive text input. In the short run, texting became so much easier with T9 mode turned on.
Last year, I met James Young who showed me the T9 update for Windows Mobile. Last week, I met with Ray Tsuchiyama, the marketing director for T9 and he showed me a lightweight but powerful new product called T9 Nav. There are two components to the new software which will soon be in all S60, Windows Mobile and Android phones: On Site Search (the “Spotlight” of mobile phones ) and Off Site Search (the keyword optimization tool for telcos):