input

T9 — the old text input from our trusty Nokia phones from the 1990s — is one of those throwbacks. Direction 9 is a startup that is eager to introduce it to your television, so you can use the directional pad on your remote to enter text. They showed it off at CES, and… I’d be extremely surprised if it ever makes much headway. You have to focus up and down, and you can’t do blind typing,” explains Leon Chang, founder at Direction 9. It seems unlikely that they’d be willing to add 20-50% to its cost just to add a new text input as a feature.