iPhone 2.0 beta includes Chinese (handwriting) and Japanese input options
By Danny Mendez
Apple snuck in some Chinese handwriting recognition into the latest iPhone 2.0 beta, but the beta firmware has skipped Japanese handwriting recognition so far. Instead other options exist for Japanese input. Here’s what the options for Japanese and Chinese input look like.
Up first is handwritten Chinese courtesy of Wretch.cc, which managed to get several screenshots of Chinese handwriting in action.
It seems that as a character is written, the iPhone 2.0 beta firmware tries to guess it on the right. We’re unsure how well this works, but the iPhone seems to have guessed the character pretty accurately in the picture above. MacRumors has verified that this is indeed a part of the latest iPhone 2.0 beta update and adds that it works with both Simplified and Traditional Chinese. There are also other options for Chinese input.
This option seems to use the English keyboard to pull up options for Chinese characters.
This method seems to use the English Keyboard to pull up a table of Chinese characters. If any Chinese speaking readers understand what’s going on here, don’t be shy — leave a comment.
There is a Japanese input option that works very similarly since it also uses the English keyboard, but there’s also a Kana international keyboard for Japanese speakers. We’d like to thank MacRumors for the the pic.
This is all, of course, in the beta firmware, which means it may not make the final cut. But it seems like a lot of time and effort has gone into making the iPhone Eastern friendly, and Apple knows there’s plenty of money to be collected over there. So you can definitely bet Apple will do its best to push these input options out.
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May 31st, 2008
I live in Japan and this would be incredibly useful, if only for adding contacts to my address book when I meet people.
June 9th, 2008
I can’t believe they put a kana input system on it. Nobody uses kana input except my 70-year-old father-in-law. Nobody else can figure out how to use his computer because of this, so he’s on his own as far as support goes. No cell phone in Japan supports kana input. Japanese have been using romaji hankan since the days of dedicated word processors.
June 10th, 2008
Whats going on with the Chinese is a system called ‘pinyin’ which lrepresents Chinese words/sounds. In the example above the person typed in ‘wo’ and then was given a list of possible words that use that sound.