I got a new phone. (Yea!)
It has predictive texting. (Boo!)
I fixed it by holding down #. (Yea!)

There’s the text-friendly version of this week’s Byte. The longer story… I did get a new phone and mostly I like it. I’m not a big texter but I like to text occasionally. I tried to send a text with my new phone but it had predictive texting set up, which works like auto-fill. The phone tries to guess what word I’m typing as I type it. It wasn’t ever close – and I couldn’t get it to stop. So I looked it up online and the answer, if you have a Samsung phone, is to hold down the pound key before you try to start a text. It seems like I might need to do that each time I send a text. Maybe it learns my words as I type and will be useful in 6 months – but I was so happy to find a fix I had to share the info.

It seems as if this is a little bit of a standard – but AT&T has aggregated instructions for a few types of phone:
http://www.wireless.att.com/learn/messaging-internet/messaging/predictive-text-manufacturer-instructions.jsp

I hope this will save someone some sad texting.