Comments on: Call 1-800-THIS-IS-THE-21ST-CENTURY

By: Andrew Pollock

Andrew Pollock — Tue, 12 May 2009 20:42:36 +0000

I used to have the same complaint about Blackberrys until someone pointed out that if you hold down the Alt key while typing in the letters of the phoneword, it’ll do the right thing.

So if you had to dial 1800-FOO-BAR, you’d dial 1800, then hold down Alt and spell out the FOO BAR

By: MZ

MZ — Mon, 11 May 2009 19:21:23 +0000

Zeek said: “Why don’t you just lobby phone companies to provide dialing based on typing too? In “text” mode, it automatically does the conversion for you, etc. It’d be trivially simple to implement.”

I was about to say this. It should be trivial to give modern phones the ability to accept letters and convert them based on traditional dial pad layouts.

By: DaCeige

DaCeige — Mon, 11 May 2009 07:47:20 +0000

It’s not that hard on a blackberry… just hit the alt key like you wanted to type numbers where you normally type text, and voila, it’ll do the reverse in a number field and type letters. It also works inside those touch tone things, like ‘type the first 4 letters of your last name’, just hold alt and hit the letters, it’ll hit the right numbers for you.

By: Mackenzie

Mackenzie — Sun, 10 May 2009 20:34:45 +0000

I still want to know what 8 year old can’t convert from letters to numbers in their head. With the death of rotary phones, I think everyone assumed they could stop putting the numbers in too.

By: Justin

Justin — Sun, 10 May 2009 07:43:21 +0000

I don’t know why everyone is dissing RIM here. With the blackberry, you can dial those numbers by using the keypad. Hold alt and use whatever letters you want (the blackberry will convert them to the number equivalents).

By: mneptok

mneptok — Sun, 10 May 2009 04:08:18 +0000

Oh, and Zeek, assuming that I’m doing this just for myself, and not for other people with the same device or physical impairments that may make dialing by letter difficult, says more about you than it does about me.

By: mneptok

mneptok — Sun, 10 May 2009 04:06:20 +0000

Adam,

Exactly. Provide the numeric equivalents for those with newer devices, voice dialing capabilities, or for those with physical impairments that require traditional numeric usability. It’s not that difficult to add.

By: mneptok

mneptok — Sun, 10 May 2009 04:04:17 +0000

Zeek,

I’m 44 years old. You?

By: Mackenzie

Mackenzie — Sun, 10 May 2009 02:41:04 +0000

I agree with Ray that it’s really easy to figure out. 3 letters per key except for weird letters like q and x which are on opposite sides of the keypad. Did you *really* need to look at the keypad to dial those letters back when you had one? It’s simple. I’m not looking at my phone at all:
[blank][abc][def]
[ghi][jkl][mno]
[pqrs][tuv][wxyz]

Blank could also be read as “punctuation”. The thing *I* find most confusing is that the order of the punctuation on the 1 key varies between handsets.

By: Adam Stovicek

Adam Stovicek — Sun, 10 May 2009 02:08:23 +0000

The problem isn’t the phone numbers but the technology of the phones we use. Many corporate phone numbers for consumer contact were purchased with the idea of making them easier to remember through the alphanumeric layout of nearly every phone ever made at the time. It’s only just recently that manufacturers have gone outside of the “mold” and added additional keys.

But really, who knew we’d end up with full qwerty keypads on these ever-shrinking cell phones? And now, with the advent of the iPhone, we may ditch keypads forever in favor of the touch screen where I’d imagine the old-standard, alphanumeric setup could easily be replicated for those of us who refuse to remember even more combinations of numbers we will hardly ever use.

In support of the nmeptok, those numbers are usually accompanied by their full numeric equivalents in smaller print, at least in my neck of the woods. That’s where I would blame a failure of the marketing departments.