Among Text Messengers, New 'Slanguage' Crops Up, and Not Just With Teens

Business Wire, Sept 9, 2004

T9 Text Input is available in 44 languages, including Afrikaans, Arabic, Bengali, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean (Hangul), Latvian, Lithuanian, Malay, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Tagalog, Tamil, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian and Vietnamese. T9 Text Input supports Simplified and Traditional stroke-based Chinese, as well as phonetic Pinyin, BoPoMoFo, and Phrasal Text Input. Language support is continually expanding, with more languages to be released later this year.

There are more than 800 mobile phone models available throughout the world today that include T9 Text Input and the technology has been licensed to major consumer electronics and communications equipment manufacturers representing more than 90 percent of annual mobile phone production worldwide.

For more information about T9 Text Input, visit www.t9.com or AOL Keyword: T9 Text Input.

About Tegic Communications

Tegic Communications, a wholly owned subsidiary of America Online, Inc., was founded in 1995 to develop and market communication technologies for the telecommunications and computing industries. The company is headquartered in Seattle and has offices in Paris, Tokyo, and Beijing.

About America Online, Inc.

America Online, Inc. is a wholly owned subsidiary of Time Warner Inc. Based in Dulles, Virginia, America Online is the world's leader in interactive services, Web brands, Internet technologies and e-commerce services.

(1) SMS text messaging and mobile instant messaging requires a text- or Web-enabled device and wireless service plan. Additional charges from wireless carrier may apply.

TAFN: (That's All For Now)

Editor's Note: To request a hard copy or a hi-res image of the T9 Dictionary, media may contact Jeff Seedman at (949) 224-4031 or by e-mail at jseedman@olearypr.com.