T9 Nav is an awesome S60 shortcut/app launcher for N95

I absolutely love little utilities that make life a little easier and Nuance’s T9 Nav is exactly that. It basically puts nearly everything on your N95 just a few keypresses away. No more hunting through menus to find the application, contact, appointment, etc. you are looking for.

When you first start T9 Nav up, it goes through your phone and creates an index of media, music, calendar, messages, bookmarks, and applications. (I turn off media, music and messages in the options because they tend to clutter the results, but that’s just my preference.)

Once the indexing is done all you do is type what you are looking for T9 style at the Standby screen. So, let’s say you were looking for a plummer. You would type 7582 (aka p, l, u, m) A list would pop up with anything on your phone that has something corresponding to the T9 7852. You can type more numbers to further narrow the results.

A small icon appears on the left to let you know if the entry is a contact, application, bookmark, etc. You can also cycle through tabs where each type of item is grouped together on one tab.

It’s sound like a really crazy way to get at things, but it is very effective and fast. If I’m trying to remember when my haircut appointment is I start typing 4247 and up it pops. If I want the Podcast app, I type 763 and, boom, it’s there. You get the picture. Often, it only takes about 3 characters to narrow it down to where what you want is near the top of the list.

T9 Nav is highly recommended. The cost is 17 euros or about US$22 and is available through the Nokia Software Marketplace. Somehow I got a 15% discount for registering on the site, so I got a slight discount.

UPDATE:
Apparently, T9 Nav can cause your battery to drain more rapidly. According to the techsupport:

We’ve found that sometimes T9 Nav interacts badly with applications that make frequent changes such as RSS readers or mail sync programs. They cause T9 Nav to re-index because of the updates they make to the file system. If this is applicable, then you may consider disabling another applications and seeing if it continues to happen. Depending on what the interaction problem is and which application combination is causing the issue, we may be able to suggest a work-around.

I can’t really figure out what app I’m running that would be causing this. Hopefully, they can figure out some type of workaround. My suggestion was to have a maximum update interval, like don’t update more then once a hour.