SMS Poll

[jducoeur]

Okay, here's an odd-sounding question for all those of you who use SMS, aka text messaging from your phone -- specifically, those who have ordinary cell phones with normal number pads, not full keyboards. (Those of us with Treos are assumed to not be the usual case.)

We're trying to come up with a concise and easy-to-type SMS syntax -- which means I need to check out what's actually easy to type. So I'd like to know what's under your buttons. If you could take a minute or two to look at your phone and answer this, I'd appreciate it.

I think of the "common" mobile-phone letter layout as being:

• 2: abc


• 3: def


• 4: ghi


• 5: jkl


• 6: mno


• 7: pqrs


• 8: tuv


• 9: wxyz

[Poll #1089759]

Comments

[jducoeur]

Oh, I understand. I'm mostly treating it as an intellectual exercise -- it's an interesting idea, with some pros and cons balancing each other.

It's not actually relevant to what I'm doing -- we're focused on the *numbers*, not the letters. Under some circumstances, the user will need to type a short numeric code; the question is whether it is practical for us to allow them to type letters instead, to make it quicker. So if someone types "ad", I know that that's actually code "23" -- the main point of the poll is to check whether I can reliably count on that mapping. But the numbers are the point, so we're going to be using most of the keypad. (The codes are short, though, so I don't expect that to be a big issue.)