Is it true that Apple has bought software for that enables handwritten input for the iPhone? Rumors have been circulating about a handwritten code that was supposedly purchased by Apple for the iPhone OS 2.0.

Naturally Apple isn’t talking. A Chinese third party developer recently made these claims regarding this technology. The developer is unwilling to talk about this citing a non-disclosure agreement with Apple. He has gone one step further and has sent requests to forums asking them to stop publishing screenshots of his third party application that was previously free.

Screenshots of an iPhone OS 2.0 build that incorporated Chinese characters emerged a few weeks ago. Reports claimed that Apple has stripped English character input from the tool, choosing only Chinese character recognition for the iPhone OS 2.0. The third party application dubbed “HWPen”.

For those of you who don’t know handwritten technology is already part of the Mac OS. Apple added Newton handwritten technology in Mac OS X 10.2. A major annoyance for some who have used Newton handwritten technology is that you have to train the device. After continual use, the handwritten recognition becomes better and it is even capable of correcting its own mistakes.

Interestingly HWPen is still available as a third party application for jailbroken iPhones.

If this rumor is true perhaps Steve Jobs will announce this at the WWDC 2008? We don’t have long to wait WWDC 2008 is June 9-13.

Related:

Entry was posted on Thursday, May 29th, 2008 at 5:16 pm under iPhone.  Print This Post

Read more entries by Opal Tribble.