The dialpad in Calls shows letters. But they are not accessible, except of the + on the “0” key, right?
If so, it might be better to hide them, until this feature is implemented.
Ed
I think that they are meant as mnemonic reference for phone numbers written as words, which is common in advertising in the USA. For example, the ad for a food delivery service would say to call 800-123-FOOD, but the customer would call 800-123-3663.
Of course, I haven’t set up digital voice yet… maybe you need access to letters for that. 
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That’s right. There’s no such thing as letters in phone numbers (maybe aside of ABCDpw, but that’s a different thing).
Since this is just a visual reference for the user, there’s no feature to implement there and no reason to hide these letters.
The letters are meant for saying to someone: please dial me at SOFTCON and you remember this string, use the letters of the word SOFTCON and marking these letters on the dialpad will give 7638266 which is more difficult to remember than SOFTCON.
You are right,… you might wonder, what I mean …
On my OnePlus-Device, which I used until it fell in the water, 2-weeks ago, I just had to type 33946 and it found my name “Edwin” in the linked contacts.
That’s what I’m searching for, the link between Dialpad and saved contacts.
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Typing 3-3-9-4-6 could mean a lot of words, for example also D-F-W-H-M, i.e. a lot of nonsense words. The match between 33496 and your name Edwin can only be done in some database of contacts.
That’s true but …
This is the way predictive text used to work in the good old days - and that is out of a dictionary that is much larger than your database of contacts. So it seems like for most people this should work fine if only searching through contacts.
Is it needed? I’m not so sure. You can already search within contacts and then dial from there. Sure it’s an extra touch or two.
I note also that in my contacts database, “Edwin” has all of: his home fixed line, his mobile and his work fixed line.
So even if this searching worked as described, I would still need to touch to select which number I wanted to call him on.
Anyway, why stop there? Back in the day you could do Voice Activated Dialing i.e. you just say “Edwin” and it finds him in your address book.
For me (@ehoff) this is definitely a nice idea that surely some customers will use but … there are a lot of other missing features that would be a higher priority for me personally. So … are you volunteering to implement it??
I do not understand your use case. Is it: I see somewhere a number, for example on an old phone without contacts, you take these numbers and want to see, if it has an entry in your hundreds of contacts, is it like this? The contacts on my Ubuntu phone allows to search with the number, not from the dialpad, but from the contacts app. This must work on the L5 too, it does not always work it seems.
The letters on the dialpad is for another usecase I described: dial a number based on a word.
The term for the function you’re looking for is “T9 Dialing”.
I have found that those whom are used to it find it to be invaluable due to the convenience and those whom are not used to it don’t see the point.
It is extremely convenient and for those of us that experienced the revolution that was T9 for writing sms messages and other text on older phones it is extremely natural to use. For the younger crowd, it’s rare to dial at all because they use contacts not memorized numbers and for those older that skipped T9 straight to blackberry and treo with their full keyboards if they’re at the dialer they’re only dialing a memorized number so there’s no perceived value. As such there’s only a small window of time where T9 was relevant and in turn a small amount of us that value T9 dialing as a way to only go to the dialer and be able to either dial a memorized number or lookup a contact from that one location. Everyone else either uses that location solely for dialing or not at all.
I hope that this functionality will make its way to calls, but I wouldn’t expect it to be anytime soon unless there’s a dev at just the right age to value this and add it for themselves witheveryone else benefiting as a side effect.
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Now I understand this use case (even if I’m 66). This would be nice to have in the Calls app.
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O.k., it’s old, but it’s fast and it gives direct access to my contacts. And I only need it for this access, not for T9-typing text messages. It was perfectly implemented in my drowned OnePlus N100 (from 2021) (soo old-fashioned) So simple and fast. The principle of reducing alternatives with every single input is convincing!
And, yes, the teens are alright. Teens Try Texting With T9 [Technically Speaking]