Slashdot Mirror
Looking for gPhone Clues in Google Patents
iced_tea writes "What do Google patents say about the company's possible plans for a Google phone? News.com took a look at some of the related technologies. Just one example: 'This image shows a diagram from a patent filed June 30, 2005 and published October 12, 2006, called "Non-Standard Locality-Based Text Entry." The inventor is listed as Shumeet Baluja, a senior staff research scientist at Google, and the assignee is listed as Google. The invention would allow an English speaker, for example, to use the keypad of any mobile phone to enter Chinese characters, according to Google patent scrutinizer Stephen Arnold.'"
Kanji and hangul support would be freaking sweet and I'd go so far as to switch mail provider in order to have that on my phone. The trouble is that kanji/hangul support isn't good enough because you need auto-completion and dictionary lookups as well. Essentially, you need something like NJstar on your phone. Or you need to go the route of the Japanese and have each key represent a sequence of kana (like a-i-u-e-o for 1, ka-ki-ku-ke-ko for 2, etc) that ties in to a dictionary-like lookup.
:)
No idea how to effectively input chinese on a phone, but 10,000 ideograph input on a phone for SMS messages seems complicated without help
Here is the article that goes with the image.
Chinese input on the mainland is actually even easier than that. You just enter the standard pinyin (minus tones) with the latin alphabet you normally have on American phones and it brings up a row of characters with that pronunciation to choose from. Even more, it offers a list after each character entry of other hanzi that can form common compunds with the preceeding one, which saves you the trouble of typing many things out. It's surprisingly fast and effective overall.