t9Nav - Quick navigation through phone menu’s

t9Nav is a product of Nuance Communications headquartered in Massachusetts, USA which is the same company which now owns the patent for T9 (Text on 9 keys) predictive text input commonly found on mobile phones these days.

t9Nav is the latest product from this company. Simply put, t9Nav is an “Application launcher” application for mobile phones similar to what applications like Launchy do for the desktop.

The reference to “t9″ comes in the app because just like the t9 dictionary input is designed to auto-guess the correct word while typing messages and thereby make typing faster, t9Nav is designed to make navigation of phone menus faster by auto-guessing where you are headed for.

Say you can’t remember which menu Bluetooth sits under. In the phone’s idle screen, start typing “Bluetooth” like you would do while typing the word in T9 mode. Hence you press the keys “2″ (B) “5″ (L) “8″ (U) “3″ (E), and a list emerges in the background with a link to Bluetooth. Clicking on that link will take you to the Bluetooth menu on your phone! Easy! Similarly, if your contacts list has a contact named “Rahul”, typing “7″ “2″ “4″ and so on will start showing you a list of all indexed items which contain “rah” or any other combination of characters possible with these keys.

The product currently in beta, is provided as a .sis file, supported by Symbian based mobile phones. For our testing, we used the Nokia E90 Communicator, which runs the Series 60 v3 OS. On first launch, the application can be configured to start up whenever the phone is switched on. The application runs in the background and builds an index of all the content stored on your mobile phone, including your cellphone contacts, bookmarks, applications, calendar entries etc.

Building the initial index and then incrementally adding items is rapid. t9Nav continually monitors the device database for user edits, memory card or main memory updates or SIM card changes. However, the index is built from scratch each time the phone turns on.

A very useful help tutorial is built inside the application, which summarizes all features of the application in the form of a short animated tutorial. Hence you can skip the pdf’s and manuals and jump directly to the tutorial to learn about the product.

On the downside, my phone experienced a slightly sluggish performance after installing the app. This might be an issue with the t9Nav app consuming too much memory on the phone.

Overall, t9Nav is an incredibly useful app which provides a fast way to access all features, applications and content on a mobile device in just a few key presses, resulting in improved user experience, discovery and re-use of data services.