Cell phones should offer the option of using T9-style searching of a user's phone directory. Here's how it should work:

<ol><li>Press the down arrow to activate the phone book (this is pretty much the standard short cut on most cell phones)</li><li>One of the soft keys should toggle between "normal" mode and "T9" mode. By default it should be set to the user's last choice. Most user's will set this just once.</li><li>In "normal" mode, to find someone named "Steve Williamson", you would type 7-7-7-7-8-3-3-8-8-8, etc. This is how all cell phones work today. Notice how many keys I had to hit!</li><li>In "T9" mode, to find someone named "Steve Williamson", you would type 7-8-3-8.</li></ol>

Power-User Feature:To further narrow down the search you should be able to enter the first few letters of a person's first name AND last name. This could be done by recognizing the # key as "skip to last name". So to find "Steve Williamson", you would type 7-8-#-9-4

As cell phones have increasingly larger phone book capacities, the current standard method of searching is painful. A T9-style input method works perfectly for this since the dictionary of "words" T9 needs to recognize is limited to the names in your phone book.

As far as I know, NO cell phone does this yet.

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