They just need to work on getting consumers educated more than T9 did. It's amazing how many times I have explained and demo'd T9 to people--vast numbers of people just don't get it and use multi-tap instead. After a couple of minutes T9 is way faster, but there is usually no tutorial and people get frustrated when it's not doing what they think it should (multitap).
as a foreigner, I hate T9. The first thing I do when I start using a new phone is to turn it off. It just doesn't work with short names, foreign words (or my name), or common sms slang.
Multi-language support is tough, but some implementations are better than others (there are lots of different versions of T9, you're just stuck with whatever your phone has). The latest version of T9 has support for using multiple languages at once, but most phone makers don't advertise what version of T9 they ship.
Actually, I'm a foreigner and I find typing using T9 much faster, especially because there are not as many ambiguous words (when using numeric pad) as in English.
