iPhone firmware 2.0 adds Chinese handwriting recognition, Newton sweats

Screen shots posted on Chinese site wretch.cc allege that iPhone firmware 2.0 has added support for Chinese handwriting recognition in addition to a revamped (albeit non-recognition) Japanese interface. While that's still light years from an Apple admission that not everyone is in love with the on-screen keyboard, it's one small step toward functionality that seems to make boatloads of sense -- in any language -- given the phone's generously proportioned touchscreen and its reluctant but unavoidable nomination as the Newton's spiritual successor. What isn't clear is how folks are expected to draw characters, seeing how there's no provision for an on-board stylus, the entire interface is designed for finger use, and we don't see many owner rushing out for a Pogo. However Apple intends for this feature to be used, the implementation looks pretty hot, capable of operating in both portrait and landscape modes. Sadly, it seems that Chinese is the one and only language supported at the moment; sure you don't want to let everyone in on the Graffiti-esque retro fun here, guys?

[Via Mac Rumors]

[apeguero @ May 5th 2008 1:21PM]

There's a cell service called Kenneth?

[crow610 @ May 5th 2008 1:24PM]

Ya..do you want to know what the frequency is Kenneth?

[Rainier @ May 5th 2008 1:32PM]

@crow610

Nice!

[sircastor @ May 5th 2008 4:15PM]

There was a hack produced a while ago that allowed you to change the carrier name listed. The data is stored in the user directory so it isn't written over when the system software is update.

[Sean @ May 5th 2008 4:47PM]

sorry just wanted to reply to the top.
i don't know if it's going to be in the fw 2.0, i doubt it won't. but one of the chinese input WeFit has already had it, it's not official yet, but here is the video from WeiPhone forum
http://www.weiphone.com/thread-92898-1-1.html
it was posted 1 month ago, and wretch.cc is just a blog site from Taiwan, like my space, so source is not reliable, it could be in the official fw, but i rather believe it's "another WeFit" for traditional chinese.

[w00t @ May 5th 2008 1:23PM]

Hehe, I thought that was a Meizu M8 screenshot for a second there :)

[Bad Beaver @ May 5th 2008 1:25PM]

*flips open Newton MP2100*
*backlight-immmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm*
*does this, does that*

Nope. That phone thingy still has a long way to go.

[Aaron Wanker @ May 5th 2008 1:28PM]

If they would bring this feature to the US, that would be awesome! I myself don't have an iPhone, but I have a good friend who got an iPhone, and for him not being able to take notes in a meeting is the only reason he is keeping his PDA. So hopefully it we get it soon.

[JSM @ May 5th 2008 1:56PM]

exactly, this was a monumental gaffe - you can argue about the inclusion or lack of a keyboard, but leaving out the ability to take notes on a pda is just stunning. Heck I would have hoped that apple would have pulled some of their interface design magic a produced a hand written note product that actually did what we've always wanted. Power users keep non-handwriting recognition notes on their pda to replace the thousand of bits of paper and margin jots that quickly get lost and misfiled. Unfortunately, no note taking software provides the desktop integration and filing system that would step the utility up to another level (ie. presenting you with all your notes when you dock and giving you the opportunity to file them with appropriate subjects, add notes to schedule or rolodex or crm software, etc.)

[crow610 @ May 5th 2008 1:29PM]

Might work for simple characters like the one above but for one of those 10+ stroke characters might be a problem with recognition.

[JAmerican @ May 5th 2008 6:12PM]

That's when you need to take out the nail sharpener!

[Flashpoint @ May 5th 2008 1:30PM]

If you have the INSTALLER, you can download iChinese right now.

but, the problem with these softwares is that you MUST know the stroke order or your characters OR, you must know pin yin in order to lookup symbols.

Unles you have extensive language immersion in Chinese - forget this one.

[DefPo3t @ May 5th 2008 1:32PM]

If you add the source to installer iphonecake.com/src/all
then download HWpen it gives you the smae thing but with support for english letters and numbers

[SimonRichards @ May 5th 2008 1:33PM]

"Eat Up Martha"

[sully @ May 5th 2008 1:41PM]

Can they finally add freaking Spanish. I don't get how they can have a phone in the US market and not have a Spanish keyboard.

[Aaron Wanker @ May 5th 2008 1:46PM]

because, it's the US market.

believe me, I'm not a cultural bigot... but I don't like the idea that just because it's in the US means that it should support spanish... really it wouldn't bother me if the iPhone did have a spanish keyboard... it's mainly just the spanish labels, signs and such at stores (Lowes, Wal-Mart, etc.) that bother me.

[Alex @ May 5th 2008 1:54PM]

It doesn't have a dedicated Spanish keyboard, for the reason Mr. Wanker said above, but it does have all of the characters I believe. If you hold down on N then ñ will show up

[Flashpoint @ May 5th 2008 1:54PM]

AMERICA SHOULD NEVER MAKE SPANISH A 2nd OFFICIAL LANGUAGE

besides the legal implications of doing that (contracts, death notices,etc) it would cause many different groups to sue the government claiming that "they were being discriminated against".

America's official language should REMAIN American English.

Anyone who comes here should be tested before given entry. They should know American currency and they should know how to read English signs, and maps.

[sully @ May 5th 2008 1:59PM]

Thanks Alex,

I hadn't realized one could do that. I have needed accent marks and the like plenty in the past.

This wasn't political. Just that a lot of us in the USA speak Spanish.

And Flashpoint, the USA has NO official language.

[NeoteriX @ May 5th 2008 2:53PM]

@Flashpoint,

Next thing you know, they'll have an "intelligence" requirement prior to the allowance of entry into the USA. The fortunate consequence is the denial of your entry.

Fun Facts you should know about:

a) There is *no* official language for the USA. Sorry, but true.

b) There is no country "America." There is the "United States of America" or "United States", but when you say "American" you should also know you're including our friends to the north, the Canadians.

c) re: legal implications, believe it or not, the government decides when to let itself get sued. Furthermore, please go to law school or consult your own attorney when discussing the legal ramifications of "anti-discrimination" laws in the US. They're not as broad as you think they are.

d) re: testing before entry, and if we allowed someone like you to be in control of national policy... well we could kiss our tourism industry good bye (and scare away loads of international talent, etc. etc.) See, "weak dollar", "international tourism", "international brain drain"

[Andrew @ May 5th 2008 4:27PM]

Flashpoint:
You are a dolt. First of all, as others have said, there is no official language of the United States. Secondly, Spanish will never become a "2nd OFFICIAL LANGUAGE," so calm down. Do you really think the people in charge of our country would let that happen?

Last, but certainly not least, if we had the kind of testing that you think is such a great idea, we would turn away a great many number of people who are unfamiliar with our American ways yet have potentially substantial contributions to fields of mathematics and science. Plus, God save us from that exam ever being applied to Americans themselves. You'd deport half the country for not knowing where the USA was on a map of the world, let alone anyplace else.

[Adam @ May 5th 2008 5:00PM]

Want a spanish keyboard? Switch your system language to spanish! Here ya go! http://appleguru.org/spanish_kb.PNG

Only difference between US KB and Spanish one? The label on the space bar. Hence, there is NO need for a "spanish keyboard" option; the standard US works just fine for spanish. Hold down A for access to á, hold down E for access to é, hold down n for access to ñ.. what more do you need?

[Oliver @ May 5th 2008 1:52PM]

the thing about chinese is that every character is written with the same order of strokes. for instance, usually the vertical stroke is written first, and then the horizontal strokes.

to illustrate this, allow me to demonstrate the writing of the letter T. To write the letter T, one could begin with the horizontal stroke and then draw the stem, or they could draw the stem from the bottom up..

with chinese characters, there is only one way to write each character...

the iphone will probably take the order of strokes into account, so it will be much easier than imagined to write a complex character, no matter how sloppy it is.

however, there is a cursive version of chinese which much more resembles scribbles, and seeing as most people like to write that way (it saves time), i'm not sure the phone will be able to recognize that.

[Richard Lai @ May 5th 2008 2:36PM]

I doubt the order is taken into account - if you try the Windows built-in handwriting recognition tool, it will recognise characters regardless of the order of strokes.

[joe23521 @ May 5th 2008 3:33PM]

I don't think the handwriting recognition app would take stroke orders into account. There is an input method with only uses strokes and stroke orders - as seen in most cell phones in China. Nokia has the best system where only 5 keys and one thumb are used. There's also third-part apps that do the same on the iPhone right now.

[TIMMAH! @ May 5th 2008 2:04PM]

Now they just need multi-touch character writing to maximize hand contortion trauma...

[Phoenix @ May 5th 2008 2:10PM]

Riiiiiiiiiight... To get an idea of how to do this you'd need to write with a finger.

Everyone, let's try strapping pens to our fingers for a few days. See how well we right.

[Phoenix @ May 5th 2008 2:11PM]

*write

Feck.

[DT @ May 5th 2008 2:18PM]

Yeah, apparently the whole keyboard thing isn't working too well for you either.

[Phoenix @ May 5th 2008 2:23PM]

I'm using a shit laptop.

Seriously, I hate curved keyboards :P

[Phoenix @ May 5th 2008 2:23PM]

And APPARENTLY the reply system doesn't like me

[Pingmeister @ May 5th 2008 3:17PM]

Until I got Tablet XP I had never run into a system that translated my handwriting as well as the Newton did.

Good times, good times.

[ck @ May 5th 2008 4:52PM]

Every time someone mention the Newton, I'm reminded of this:

Q: How many Apple Newton users does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: Foux! There to eat lemons, axe gravy soup.

[qrius @ May 5th 2008 4:32PM]

If they're going to support chinese, might as well support english!

[Kizul Emeraldfire @ May 5th 2008 4:41PM]

@NeoteriX
Okay, then what are we supposed to say instead of 'Americans' when we're merely specifying those of us in the U.S.? 'United-Statesians'?

People in Canada = Canadians. People in the U.S.A. = Americans. People in Mexico = Mexicans.

I do, however, agree with the rest of your post. :)

[Kizul Emeraldfire @ May 5th 2008 4:42PM]

D'oh, meant to reply to that top thread. >.

[Laura @ May 5th 2008 5:51PM]

yanks.

:)

or 'burger-eating invasion monkeys' as someone on the television just said lol.

i see your predicament though. while 'american' isn't politically correct to use, there isn't really another name for you.

[Ray @ May 5th 2008 5:59PM]

For this issue, Dr. Edward T. Hall's researches' may give you an idea on how other people on the American Continent think.

Just like a Chinese person might be referred as an Asian; a Mexican may also be referred as an American.

As for the Chinese Handwriting Recognition functionality, it would be useful for users that do not want to learn to use an Input Method Editor or having troubles in using Input Method Editor for various reasons. (For example, Hong Kong people who generally do not use any kind of phonemic system but rather a graphological-base Input Method Editor to enter Chinese on computers. That does require some learning effort.)

Although WeFit and NativeCN already provides different kinds of IME to be use with iPhone's native English (U.S) keyboard, the icons for each key is rather small to accommodate the marking for different IME systems.

There's one more thing, in busy cities like Hong Kong or Taipei, people often type messages when they are taking subway trains or other public transportation; iPhones' little on screen keys are not easy to be hit on accurately (especially when the train is moving).

In contrast, an advance enough Chinese handwriting recognition software would be able to guess the correct word, or even word group that the user are trying to write by evaluating many factors, including the shape, the strokes order, the meaning connection between the last word entered and the current word that the user write, the word usage habit and frequency for the current user.

Chinese handwriting recognition products for computers has been on the market for quite a long time and the products leading vendors of that business (e.g. PenPower) DO perform the evaluations I mentioned above. After a extend period of usage, those products are able to pick up your writing habit and make better guess of what you are writing.

I am not sure if the iPhone's implementation will be as advance as what I mentioned above, but I think it should perform as least as capable as phones from Nokia, or Sony Ericsson with that functionality.

(Wow, did I seem to talk too much !?)

[YoMomma @ May 5th 2008 4:55PM]

Guys thats not the Iphone thats the Meizu.

[Danny @ May 5th 2008 5:01PM]

I don't see how this can work well without a stylus but maybe that's just my doltish fingers. On the other hand, I have seen this idea working well with a stylus before. In china the big smartphone there 2 years or so ago was the Moto Ming which did this exact thing except it also translated. The screen was very similar - I could draw something in English and it would generate the characters and my agent could draw something in Chinese and get the english word. It's biz card picture taking import thing also worked surprisingly well.

[Dian @ May 5th 2008 5:07PM]

I think that's wicked cool,
I probably could buy a couple and peddle them off to my relatives

[cc @ May 5th 2008 5:31PM]

The Japanese character recognition is what interests me... I think they're doing it so they can push out the 3G iPhone in Japan finally. The previous firmware (at least in the Japanese iPod Touch) made you type stuff in romanized Japanese then convert, similar how to Japanese is entered on a computer keyboard, but now they've converted it to a syllabic method more similar to how cell phone keypads work, which is a superior method for a mobile device...

[Jose @ May 5th 2008 6:15PM]

The Chinese handwriting recognition only works for Chinese Traditional of Taiwan. Chinese Simplefied of China still uses keyboard input. ;)

[johnny hates waiting @ May 5th 2008 6:56PM]

Jose - not true. I use it for both on my WM PDA. Yes you can use the pinyin for both too. However if you don't know what a character is (i.e. don't know the sound) then you have to write it out or know how too look it up by the radical and strokes.

[johnny hates waiting @ May 5th 2008 6:54PM]

this is good new I guess for Mike Love over at Pleco, should make his job much easier.

[TTPPPS @ May 5th 2008 8:17PM]

As a Chinese American, this is the dealbreaker for me. As soon as the new iPhone comes out I'm buying it. I'm tired of typing Chinese the Hong Kong keypad way ugh

[SiLo @ May 5th 2008 8:34PM]

My apologies if this has already been said but my skimming of the comments seems to lack mentioning this great program by the name of NativeCN: http://www.iphone.org.hk/cgi-bin/ch/topic_show.cgi?id=1319&h=1&bpg=1&age=0

NativeCN not only enables Chinese and Japanese input, but allows Chinese input by virtually any text method you'd like (Pinyin, Wubi, Zhuyin). The nice part is that when you enable any of the Chinese input methods, you ALWAYS have Japanese enabled too, however the Japanese will only recognize your text as Hiragana characters/syllables and not give you Kanji options unless Japanese is the main IME.

I use HwPen for the the character writing recognition which has just been updated in the newest version to include both Simplified and Traditional characters (it will display 繁体 [sic] or 简体 instead of just 中文 now). It is very intelligent and seems to not only understand stroke order but many "shorthand" notations. For example, if you write similar to 歹 it will also give you 餐 as an option. I believe it also understands "script" as Oliver was stating as I wrote 明 in a sloppy script-style and it did indeed give me that as one of the choices.

Both of these applications are pretty nice and used in conjunction can be all you need for Chinese/Japanese IME until a more "official" input method is released. Honestly, I could live with these two, they are pretty neat, especially NativeCN.

The only quirky issue seems to be encoding. I haven't investigated it totally but it seems if you are using Chinese instead of Japanese and send an email with Japanese and Kanji, the Kanji (Chinese characters) may be excluded but the Hiragana will remain. I believe that's due to reading the email with the wrong encoding instead of UTF-8. I haven't tested this enough to be sure what the problem is but I have heard reports of this.

Have fun.

[bohemianx @ May 5th 2008 9:51PM]

Hi, on the screen shot it indicates the firmware version is iPhone 2.0 5A258f . And the carrier is FarEastTone... Kenneth MIGHT be a mod from the author... :p

Supported languages are Norwegian, Dutch, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Swedish, Simplified Chinese, and Traditional Chinese...

[fever @ May 6th 2008 12:44AM]

Why would the iPhone need a stylus onboard? You should be expected
to carry them separate if you want to get any work done. They could
call it the iPhone Air.

[afro_thunder @ May 6th 2008 8:43PM]

I dont know why everyone rips on the iphone's keyboard. My ipod touch only gives me errors when i spell something wrong (I'm writing from it now so I might). Otherwise the typing is so fluent i can type faster on here than on my Tilt which has a physical keyboard. AND I have fat fingers. So please enlighten me as to who has trouble typing on an iphone? Its too easy it's idiot proof.