In a terribly unscientific test, the guys at The Symbian Blog wanted to find out whether it would be faster to send text messages using a T9-equipped phone or a QWERTY-equipped phone. In my own personal experience, QWERTY is just a lot more convenient, but a good T9 predictive text system could be just as fast. So, who won the unofficial shootout?

Well, The Symbian Blog decided to put three phones into the competition. First, they had the Nokia E71 with its BlackBerry-style QWERTY keyboard. Second, they used the Nokia E90 with its landscape-oriented QWERTY keyboard. And third, they had the Nokia N95 with the conventional numeric keypad as the T9 representative. Putting the three phones through a series of tests, the net result isn’t all that exciting.

As it turns out, the difference in speed is pretty negligible across all three form factors, coming out in the neighborhood of 36 words per minute when you have text only. The Nokia E90 was marginally faster with mixed content.