Why Texting is Annoying

The phone I currently have is Estonian, and as such, it doesn't have predictive text for English. While sending a recent text, it seemed to me that the letter that I wanted was always the third letter on the key. So I decided to test if it's true that the most used letters are in a poor position or if it was just a selection bias (i.e. I only notice when the letter is poorly placed).

I found a list of letter frequencies on Wikipedia and decided to compare it to the lay out of letters on a phone number pad. It turns out my assumption was true, the most used letters are in English are in the third position.

All things being equal, with 26 letters distributed across eight buttons, letters in the first, second, and third position should each be used 31% of the time, with those in the fourth position (S and Z) should be used 8% of the time. Instead, letters in first position are used 30% of the time, second position 31%, third position 32%, and fourth position 6%.

So not a huge difference, but it would seem that the speed and ease of texting could be greatly improved by placing the most frequently used letters in the first position. If the letters were arranged in this pattern, instead of alphabetically, first position would be used 64% of the time, second 27%, third 9%, and fourth 0.2%.

I wanted to see how other languages compared, which are the best and worst for texting. However, most have additional characters and I'm not sure how they are used in texting or if replacements are used, such as "ue" replacing "ü" in German texting.