How Do You Dial 800-FLOWERS On A Smartphone?
Since the Samsung Blackjack and other Smartphones have QWERTY pads, they lose the standard letter-number associations that have been on phones for decades. Many phone numbers are published as letters, such as 1-800-FLOWERS, or 1-800-LIVE-LOB (Lobster Gram), which makes them easy to remember. However, that does you no good if your phone doesn’t have the letters printed on the right keys.
There is also the problem of having to enter a name to navigate a phone directory in a voicemail system. It will ask you to enter the first several letters of the name of the person you wish to reach on your keypad. How can you do that if you don’t know which numbers map to which letters?
Dialing Letters on a Smartphone
There are several approaches to this problem.
One solution is to memorize which letters go with which numbers. ABC=2, DEF=3, and so on. This is great, except that it gets a little tricky with 7-8. 7=PQRS, 8=TUV, and 9=WXYZ. It really isn’t too bad:
The letters start at 2 (abc) and continue with three letters per number until the last row, where 7, 8, and 9 are a symetrical four, three, and four letters each.
Another solution is to save the information as a wallpaper or background image for the dialing screen, or to print out an image and keep it handy.
And yet another possibility is to download and install software like Alphadial. I have not used this and can not vouch for it. Use at your own risk. Etc etc. One downside is that you have to run it separately, so it isn’t really all that handy for entering letters during a call.
QWERTY is Great, But It’s Still A Phone
It’s nice to have a QWERTY keypad, but the primary function of the phone is to function as a phone. Phone manufacturers are welcome to add features, but in the process they shouldn’t take away other, important features. Dialing for flowers or lobsters is not that critical, but navigating a phone directory is, or at least it can be.
