On: There was a stretch where phone design went bananas

[awkward]

Late Nokia phones had this feature where you could enter numbers and the phone would autocomplete based on the numeric character codes. So 4 [GHI] 3 [DEF] 5 [JKL] would give "Hello" as the first option, and so on. It's still the best typing experience I've had on a phone.

[atestu → awkward]

Do you mean T9? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T9_(predictive_text)

[jeroenhd → awkward]

There are T9 phone keyboards on the Play Store and almost all phones (with Apple being the notable exception) also incorporate T9 into their dialers.

T9 worked great for words in the dictionary. When your word wasn't in the (often limited) dictionary, though...