Comment by alias_neo
6 years ago
You press the number on the dial pad which also has the letter in question. Just once.
This is just a popular (in the US?) way to make numbers easier to remember.
6 years ago
You press the number on the dial pad which also has the letter in question. Just once.
This is just a popular (in the US?) way to make numbers easier to remember.
I see, so it's not like in the old mobile phones where you have to press a bunch of times to get a letter, just once. It's a clever custom.
It's not a "custom". The reason keypads have letters is precisely because the letters are mnemonics for the real number. This usage predates mobile phones, and is not US-specific.
They were originally used for area codes (Wikipedia lists a UK example of 0AY6, ie 0296, for Aylesbury), then later for mnemonic numbers like the one from the article. Mobile phones inherited the lettered keypad from landlines and also started using it for typing text messages.
It is definitely a custom limited to some particular countries.
Wikipedia: The use of alphanumeric codes for exchanges was abandoned in Europe when international direct dialing was introduced in the 1960s, because, for example, dialing VIC 8900 on a Danish telephone would result in a different number to dialling it on a British telephone. At the same time letters were no longer placed on the dials of new telephones.
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> This usage predates mobile phones
Indeed -- it dates back to the 1920s. At that time, phone numbers in the US started to be formed from a 2-letter exchange code followed by 5 (or sometimes 4) digits. For instance, "PEnnsylvania 6-5000" (dialled 736-5000) was the number of the Hotel Pennsylvania in New York City, and also the title of a 1940 hit song.
Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_number
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Well, I've never seen this in Spain or any other country I've been in continental europe. It could just be that I didn't pay attention though.
You're thinking of T9, which is for typing text. When you dial 800-AAAAAAA, you're not typing, you're dialing. The "A" character is just on the same button as the "2". So when you press "A" seven times you're really pressing "2" seven times. You end up dialing 800-2222222. There's nothing funny happening, "A" is just another symbol printed on the "2" button.
I think your example would be better if you used B, as A only takes a single press in T9.
Mobile phones took this cue from telephones, which have had this kind of notion of an associated set of alphabetic characters since at least the eighties or nineties.
Since the 1920s actually, for the US.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_number#United_States
>In the most areas of North America, telephone numbers in metropolitan communities consisted of a combination of digits and letters, starting in the 1920s until the 1960s. Letters were translated to dialed digits, a mapping that was displayed directly on the telephone dial.
Much earlier. Except that in most of the world they fell out of use before telephones became a common household item, so for people who grew up between, very roughly, the 60s and early 90s, mobile phones were the first phones with letters on them. We had heard about those strange phone "numbers" with letters in them via American television shows, of course.
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