Nuance (the makers of T9 predictive text) just opened a one-month beta of T9 Nav. What can I say? Run, don’t walk, to sign up. I was converted with the first keypress.

What does T9 Nav do? It gives you instant search access to everything in your phone. You use the number pad to enter letters as you would with text messaging, and T9 Nav searches your phone on the fly for anything that matches.

For example, SARAH = 7-2-7-2-4. If I press just 7, I get a long list of 99+ items. When I press 2, there are still 99+. At the next 7, though, it’s down to 54, and by the time I reach the last number, 4, there are only four items to choose from. The application searches contacts, calendar and to do items, bookmarks, music and more. You can click directly on a search result item to access or open it. Stunning. Just stunning.

1. T9 Nav is really, really easy to use.

2. It doesn’t interfere with dialing, it just takes place above the dial input field.

3. Results are lightning fast, even instantaneous, and complete. A far cry from the native Nokia search, which only searches — slowly — by first name/last name OR company name (depending on how the content appears). I’ve got it loaded on a Nokia E65, by the way.

Thank you Marek of PMN for sending the link, and thank you to the great guys at Nuance for totally disrupting the mobile user interface. I doubt that I’ll ever directly access my contact list again.

Awesome stuff, friends.