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Handwriting Recognition on DS
JamesO writes "Zi Corporation has announced a licensing agreement with Nintendo that will allow developers to make use of handwriting recognition.
PDAs have been offering handwriting recognition for some time and with the DS's touch screen it seemed inevitable that the console would eventually gain handwriting recognition technology. An agreement between Zi Corporation and Nintendo means that DS developers will be able to utilise Zi Decuma handwriting recognition technology when creating software for the handheld."
What kind of SDK is available for the DS? What language(s) can you use?
On a side note, are there any phones / pdas that have a Python sdk available?
This certainly makes the DS more interesting to me (not that I'd use it as a PDA or anything). But if you can jot notes into the thing, and have it OCR'd for you, it would make it a lot handier than it is right now. Can anyone comment intelligently on how the DS CPU would handle such a thing?
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
This is going to make 'up up down down left right left right b a b a select start' a pain to enter
Now I can trash talk other people in multiplayer mode!
The NDS main CPU is pretty slow- 66 MHz. I've used Decuma on Palm OS on a 200 MHz ARM (Sony Clie NX70v), and used Decuma fine, albeit a bit slowly, with the Clie underclocked at 100 MHz to save power. Decuma is decent HWR; it is in between the character-based stuff like Graffiti and the proper and good word-sentence based real HWR of the Newton or PocketPC's Transcriber or Calligrapher. It makes you write in a box- but you write a full word, it recognizes it letter by letter, and then you have to press a button to actually accept/write the text. Or make corrections, overwriting maybe 'e' for the misrecognized 'o'; then you press that button. On Palm OS, Decuma is about the best you're going to get if you want real HWR, but it isn't too horrible.
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
I sure hope they put this to good use in Animal Crossing DS, it was a pain in the butt to use the controller to write letters to the villagers.
There's already a Japanese-English dictionary for the DS, but it's so so at best. A good handwriting system for the machine would be an incredible boon - often times I'm presented with a kanji I simply don't know the reading for (and I can't input it into my electronic dictionary's QWERTY interface). I do know enough kanji to be able to copy many down by writing them, so being able to write say a compund and having the DS spit out a list of possible readings and defintions would be amazing and would help me learn Japanese in the real world (here in Japan anyway) more easily as I could begin decoding stuff in the world witout need of my onerous New Nelson Kanji dictionary.
"There is no time, sir, at which ties do not matter," Jeeves, (Jeeves and the Impending Doom)
Welcane aur new hondwriting recogmition ouerlonds!
The Nintendo DS is falling behind in sales against the superior Sony PSP.
From a Gamespot article:
"Recent sales figures provided by Dengeki Online revealed that cumulative shipments of the DS have nearly doubled those of the PSP in Japan since both launched in the country last December. As of the end of September 2005, Nintendo sold 3.2 million units of its DS handheld in Japan, while Sony Computer Entertainment shipped only 1.7 million units."
. Dependency on Cartridges: The age of the game cartridge has come and gone. The overwhelming success of the Sony Playstation and its "intellegent" use of CD-ROM based media effectively killed the cartridges as a viable media format for software.
Maybe for home consoles. But do you really want something portable that has moving parts? No matter how damn hard you try, you're going to treat anything handheld pretty badly.
3. Lack of Wi-Fi Internet Connectivity: The DS only allows for multiplayer games via its wi-fi connection with oher DS units but users cannot access public wi-fi drops like with the PSP and different PDA models. Because of this it would be impossible to sync data on the DS and a PC or another PDA because of this design.
And just how much more convenient is it to browse the web with a PSP? Ever heard of something called "input"? Besides, what's McDonald's for? Or the 50-dollar Mario Kart/Wi-Fi dongle package.
4, No Support for Storage Media: The DS does not natively support any form of flash media cards for storing data.
Just how "universal" is the so-called Universal Media Disc? Seen any blanks on sale recently?
5. Dominant Childen Marketing Angle:(not even going to bother with this one...)
Quantity doesn't really matter if Nintendo is the only one who can stay in black. So what if games are aimed for chilren? I don't think adults have gone "Eww" at Mario Party.
The company is too slow to change and adapt with the current market and current technology.
Who came up with Rumble? Who came up with the analog stick? Who came up with the shoulder buttons? Rather, just look at the fscking Revolution controller.
It's flaimbait, it's troll, but I bit.
I actually created an account on slash dot just to reply to this initial posting. It seems to me that everyone of his/her comments was inaccurate. The DS is outselling the PSP. Cartridges load much faster and hence the DS does not have the crippling load times of the PSP. The wireless is standard 802.11b and hence it can connect to the PC if the software was written for it. And yes, the DS can play only, as we will all be doing when Mario Kart comes out! Don't even get me started on keeping up with current technology. Nintendo invents the new technology... The examples of analong stick, shoulder buttons, rumble and more are all good examples of that. Just because the didn't use DVD or CD? They might be easy to create, but they are also just as easy to copy! No wonder they are trying to stay away.