Common word keys

My last mobile phone choice was based on one thing - I wanted one that would vibrate, since I was always missing calls when I had my previous phone set to 'silent' or 'discreet'. I was just about to get a Nokia 3310 when I saw that it has a special 'SMS chat feature'... something that displays your text messages like chat. Hmmm. I thought this was a thinly veiled ploy to encourage the user to send more text messages. I saw a different phone, and realised that I could have WAP for the same price so why should I waste my time on the 3310?

Now that I think about it (and inspired by annotations here describing the ineffectiveness of using two thumbs to type messages), would it really be much trouble to add another few keys (perhaps on the back or the side of the phone) with commonly used words? I'd like a button for 'question' words (where, when, how, why, what), one for answer words (yes, no, maybe, perhaps), a pronouns key (the, he, she, it, etc. (I'm not all that clear about pronouns!)), and so on.

I think six of these common word keys (CMK) would be enough - three or four like I've described, and maybe another two that 'learn' from the most used words I tend to write in text messages? Like normal letter/number keys do now, if you press CMK1 once, you see "where" on the screen, if you press it twice you get "why" (or by scrolling through the options, as happens with predictive text). When SMS-ing, the star key on my phone has 48 options (it's the special characters key) - others have six different letters you could use (if you count accented ones)... when I've written a word and predictive text is switched on, it may give me ten options to scroll through, and it will learn other words I write myself. Surely a small number of CMKs would speed up a large part of our text messaging time, and would enable Instant Messaging or other chat systems to be developed for WAP.

(This is a longwinded idea I know. I tried to keep it down.)