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Apple Losing Touchscreen War
An anonymous reader writes "While Apple's iPhone may be the first device most people call to mind when they think of a touch interface mobile, the 3G device is still lagging behind in the touchscreen shifting stakes — it's getting a sound thrashing from Moto and Samsung, who've cornered the Asian market where touchscreens are popular for their ability to let users input Asian languages without all that fiddly Qwerty nonsense."
Steve Jobs is not a human with a reality distortion field, Steve Jobs is a reality distortion field with a human body inside.
This sig does not contain any SCO code.
Hopefully before that day comes, Apple will start making tablets again --- I really need a replacement for my Newton MessagePad and my Fujitsu Stylistic is just too big to travel w/ me constantly as the MP did (and my Sony PRS-505 ebook reader does --- something that size, w/ pen input would be perfect).
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
Apple Fanbois, attack!
"All the other handset vendors - including Apple - are essentially niche players," ABI Research noted.
For some background, I'm in IT and I work almost exclusively on Microsoft products and groan all you want but I'm a fan of theirs. I recently wanted to buy a smart phone. Mostly, something that was good at general web surfing, reading email and more. I saw my friends' iPhones and it was exactly what I was looking for but I have a natural anti-Apple bias so I didn't get one.
Then I started a search for a phone that met the requirements I have that didn't have an Apple on the back of it. Last Friday, I eliminated the final contender (AT&T Tilt) and gave up and bought an iPhone 3G.
It's not perfect, but it is amazingly good. I've yet to see a Windows Mobile device come close to it. The Samsung Omnia and Nokia Tube mentioned in the article don't appear to be available and to be honest, I didn't realize the other Windows Mobile devices sucked until I held them in my hand.
Does anyone know of a Windows Mobile device that matches the iPhone in web surfing? I'd love to hear about it.
I'm a big tall mofo.
I was under the impression that it did, and that it even used its predictive-text system with the pictogram-style input ?
Add that to the question: "What the hell has Apple got to "lose" regarding touch-screens anyway?" and it looks to me like someone wanted some hits, and Apple is a good brand-name to use to get them....
Simon the cynic.
Physicists get Hadrons!
"While Apple's iPhone may be the first device most people call to mind when they think of a touch interface mobile, the 3G device is still lagging behind in the touchscreen shifting stakes â" it's getting a sound thrashing from Moto and Samsung, who've cornered the Asian market where touchscreens are popular for their ability to let users input Asian language without all that fiddly Qwerty nonsense."
As opposed to PDAs using a stylus.
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
On my iPod Touch, I can enter Chinese without all that fiddly Qwerty nonsense...
For those of us with fingers larger than pencil points, QWERTY is just a waste of precious real estate.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
I would probably be more compelled to use on if the icons were tattoos on 's thighs and it gently moaned when you did things...
This article fails to address anything meaningful. It has no facts, no helpful statistics, and no meaningful analysis. The real questions are:
1. What are the touch screen statistics in the United States? What share does Apple hold domestically?
2. Is there some reason why Apple is not competing in the international market? Is Apple having their lunch eaten by companies that are "household names" in Asia, or is the product inferrior? What is Apple's penetration in those markets over the past year?
3. How do these numbers change if were to include things like Black Berrys and other "smart" phone without touch screens?
4. Why are 80 percent of touch screen phones marketed in Asia? Why aren't the touch screens being created for the Asian market showing up here? I find it hard to believe that ease of displaying Asian fonts is the only reason. Is there some lack of American infrastructure? Lack of interest from American consumers?
As someone who loves bleeding edge technology, I'm frustrated by the lack of options in the US and find the whole international marketing strategy wonderfully interesting. But this article is a slow boat of fail because it lacks any analysis or insight.
If Motorola and Samsung have the market sewn up, essentially, what are they doing it with? This is the first time I had even heard Motorola *had* a touch screen phone.
Also, why aren't they sold in the US, then? I read about Motorola wanting to spin off their phone division, all the problems they've had, then I'm told they have these phones that I might be interested in (I don't have AT&T so no iPhone for me) but don't seem to be available.
Apple really had nothing to do with the new touch screen technologies. The just happened to be in the right place at the right time as third party companies came about perfecting them. The only reason multi touch has become so prevalent now is because patents on them have expired so they are effectively free game. Apple can't hold onto it, and everyone else is free to exploit it.
This is excellent. Competition in the consumer-grade cell market will only make the products better and less expensive. These are exciting times.
In other news, Apple doesn't make the greatest media players, and their laptops are significantly slower than other lower-priced options on the market.
Though you could hack it in, it wasn't officially added until the iPhone 3G came out, at which point I think the old iPhones got the capability in a software update.
I believe said capability also included a non-qwerty interface. It could be that Apple was waiting to perfect that interface before unleashing the Asian language input.
If I get two Qwerty phones together will they form a philotic bond allowing for instant communication across the cosmos?
My wife and I are excruciatingly unhappy owners of Samsung Glydes. The touch screens are nothing short of possessed.
* The screens randomly accept commands, often registering touches inches away from the actual contact
* The screens often refuse to acknowledge any contact whatsoever
* Worst of all, they're prone to poltergeist behaviors. While placed on a conference table in a meeting, for example, mine started self-executing commands. After much laughter, the assistant director of a government agency who happened to be in the room received a call from my phone (much to the delight of the attendees).
While that example was humorous, the phone has executed deletes of several important contacts, downloaded software, and refused to accept commands to answer important incoming phone calls.
Several trips to Verizon, including software updates and replacements, have failed to resolve the issues.
Perhaps Moto is a threat to Apple, but claiming that Samsung's touch screens are a threat is an absurd claim at best.
Anybody can build a touch screen that lets you poke at big static buttons, or lets you try to fatfinger a virtual keyboard. Only Apple has the FingerWorks patents to do high-quality, high-usability multitouch gestures.
Disclaimer: I've been using a FingerWorks TouchStream keyboard for more than five years, so I'm a big fan of the technology. I've also been a Mac user since 1985 or so. But when Apple bought FingerWorks, they completely shut down all sales and support, leaving the existing user base swinging in the breeze, so I'm a bit... conflicted.
The iPhone does have Chinese input.
Moreover, the article isn't really news at all. The iPhone was just released in most of these markets and isn't officially in China yet anyway. However, being here in Hong Kong (or even in the mainland) you see the iphone everywhere. So just give it time.
Plus, who ever heard of a "touchscreen war"?
I don't know about other languages, but in Japanese, you enter the latin transliteration and get a list of possible representations in japanese / chinese characters, instead of drawing the character like you can do on other devices.
That said, since firmware 2.0, the iphone has handwriting recognition.
"Between strong and weak, between rich and poor [...], it is freedom which oppresses and the law which sets free"
That would ROCK. They could just slap a touchscreen on top of the bottom clamshell of a Macbook air.
It would be perfect for college students taking notes and reading e-textbooks and a myriad of other applications.
Somewhat offtopic, and forgive me for being ignorant, by why havent tablets caught on? I'd buy one in a heartbeat if it Just Worked(tm). Most of the "tablets" out there are just laptops with flippable screens == too much complexity and too many fragile moving parts.
I usually can't stand Macs but if Apple were the first to do a simple, elegant, full-screened "iClipboard", I'd be all over it.
Forget the iPhone, it's UI is way too goddamned slow for a mobile device.
That's OK, because when all their computers start coming with touch interfaces (imagine that not only will you have the keyboard and mouse, but you'll be able to reach out and move/resize things right on the screen) then they're gonna be bad-ass again.
McCain/Palin '08. Now THAT's hope and change!
TFA says a big reason why it is lagging overall is because Moto and Samsung holds 80% of the touchscreen market in Asia. Considering that Apple has not even RELEASED the iPhone in CHINA, Korea and Vietnam to name a few countries it seems obvious why. Also, it was just released (like a month or two ago?) in places like INDIA, Singapre, etc.
On the contrary, seeing the crazy lengths people will go to here to GET an iPhone (I'm in Vietnam) I'm sure that that percentage will change. It is amazing to see, in a country where the per capita income is about $1K (CIA world factbook), lots of people carrying iPhones (a hacked iPhone is about $700 here). I was just in a cab and surprised to see the driver who probably makes less than $10/day using one (but maybe he "found" it from some unlucky person leaving it in the cab). The demand is so high that many telephone shops will have "iPhone" as the most prominent sign on their shops even though no-one in the entire country is an authorized reseller. Sorry but it is still a big big status symbol here.
"Losing the war?" Only if somehow Samsung and Motorola's larger market share confers a strategic advantage in supplying devices with multi-touch screens. Balda supplies Apple -- do they supply the other guys as well, and are quantity discounts significant enough to marginalize all but Samsung and Motorola?
Oh, yeah, it's not easy to pad these out to 120 characters.
Apple really had nothing to do with the new touch screen technologies. The just happened to be in the right place at the right time as third party companies came about perfecting them. The only reason multi touch has become so prevalent now is because patents on them have expired so they are effectively free game. Apple can't hold onto it, and everyone else is free to exploit it.
I beg to differ.
More Apple FingerWorks Patents Surface
...as of August 2008, [Elias and Westerman] still file patents for Apple, Inc.
Apple wants you to control a touch panel or computer with almost anything
Multi-Touch Technology And Where It's Going Next...Oh And Apple Didn't Invent It Either!
Somewhat offtopic, and forgive me for being ignorant, by why havent tablets caught on? I'd buy one in a heartbeat if it Just Worked(tm).
Looks like you just answered your own question there...
ZuluPad, the wiki notepad on crack
I was under the impression that it did, and that it even used its predictive-text system with the pictogram-style input ?
Yeah as of iPhone OS 2.0 it has a rather robust input system. Apple wasn't targeting the international market before the 2.0 OS.
The AC that submitted this obviously doesn't know that the iPhone isn't limited to only QWERTY input and the referenced article makes no statement on that is why Samsung and Moto are currently more popular. Looks like a little bit of trolling going on...
http://www.apple.com/iphone/features/keyboard.html
So far the HTC Touch (Diamond | Pro) and the Samsung Omnia (8Gb|16Gb) are looking promising contenders. They each seem to be doing different things with it, but doing at least a useful selection of them 'better than the competitors'.
Which is good, as I'm still not sold on the iPhone.
I got the impression that they were referring to the other phone manufacturers having captured the market well before apple even entered it. Just my $.02
I'm in the market for a new phone and, although I prefer simplicity, it would be nice to have an easier way to write text messages. My coworker recently showed me a video demonstrating this new technology that was developed by a guy who helped invent T9. It's unique because it doesn't require you to lift your stylus or finger to type.
I'm not a fan of the on-screen keyboard, especially if it covers the entire screen, but I could definitely deal with this slick input method.
"Don't hate the media, become the media." -Jello Biafra
The obvious question is "So what?" Apple right now could happily lose the touchscreen market entirely, and still be doing just fine with its laptops, iPods, iPhones, and iHippies.
I am officially gone from
There are "slates", which are only the screen and a stylus, but text input is very annoying. Think of the amount of text you might enter in a single day, or just even in a single slashdot post. Would you rather write it with a stylus or type it?
Jean-Francois Im's blog
Can the editors please make sure nothing from "idle" ever shows up on the front page again. Browsing work related tech sites is fine, browsing sites full of low-brow inane bullshit is not!
I know, I must be new here...
I'm surprised that you bought an iPhone based on requirements. Not that they aren't important or that the iPhone doesn't satisfy them but most people (like me) think the user interface is the most compelling reason to use an Apple product and are willing to let a few technical spec's fall through.
Still I'm happy you made the right choice! :)
A while ago I decided it was time to replace my trusty old Harmony remote, as some of the buttons don't work very well, etc.
I decided to get the then-brand-new Harmony One, which features a touch-screen where the older Harmony remotes have six or eight buttons around an LCD.
I returned it a week later. I just couldn't handle not having a tactile response. I don't want to have to LOOK at the remote in order to use it, and there's just no way to feel your way around with a touch screen.
I do have an iPod Touch, and that's a major problem I have with it. Try using an iPod Touch while it's in your pocket while listening to music. Yeah, you can find the On button, but it takes a lot of practice to actually sue the slider without looking, and then just try skipping a track. Heck, it's easy to mis-press the thing when you're looking right at it.
I love the form-factor of an iPod Touch/iPhone as an information-display device, and the eye-candy is beautiful, but I'd prefer tactile over touch-screen anytime.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is kinky.
I think his question is "Why hasn't it caught on on the manufacturing side to make a tablet that Just Worked(tm)?"
Thank God for evolution.
Is GSM even prevalent in Asia? I thought in Japan and Korea most users are on CDMA. Could be wrong though.
Pure tablets haven't caught on because text input from them is a chore at best, and most of what most people do with a computer is text input.
I suppose it's possible that better virtual keyboards and haptic feedback may improve the situation, but not enough for me... without a breakthrough, I'd rather have a powerful MacBook Air-like machine than a tablet.
I don't even know why this article will make it to slashdot! I have an 3g iphone and the asian language input rocks! The handwriting asian language characters recognition on the iphone touchscreen is so much better than anything I have used before on any PC! For the stat, motorola and samsung phones are around for so much longer and it won't be surprised they have a bigger stake now, but eventually apple will catch up!
Call me distorted from SJ's reality distortion field, but I find it rather silly that everyone seems to have their panties in a knot over the "touchscreen" aspect of the iPhone, and either rush out to build a touchscreen phone of their own, or try to dismiss the iPhone as being a niche fanboi gimmick (while trying to create their own gimmicks).
From what I've experienced as an iPhone user, the touchscreen is only part of what makes the iPhone an iPhone. There is a whole lot of underlying design theory there, and touchscreen just happened to be what makes that part work.
Point in case, Kyocera used to sell a touchscreen cell phone about 10 years ago in Japan. Nothing at all like an iPhone, it was a touch sensitive monochrome LCD panel that was not scratch resistant etc., but it would essentially "shape shift" to get your address book etc. It was an utter failure, not because it was a touchscreen, but because there was essentially no reason to do it. The drawbacks of trouchscreens (there are plenty, even on the iPhone) outweighed the benefits of having it, and that's key. I expect bad ideas from 1998 to come back en-masse and plague the market with phones that look and operate like a Zune.
While Apple's iPhone may be the first device most people call to mind
This alone is scary, and the fact that it may be true is even more scary.
I have a digital voice recorder from 1997 that has a rather advanced touch screen, let alone all the PDAs and PocketPC Phones that existed YEARS before the iPhone.
Sometimes you just have to go, "Ok, the public in general is uninformed and borderline scary stupid."
(And before the fanbois go 'multi-touch', they should go look up multi-touch technology, as Apple didn't even invent the multi-touch interface on the iPhone, as it is a DIRECT clone of the TED presentation technology from several years ago, that was building on independant and MS multi-sensory/touch technology.)
Let me get this straight: Apple is losing the touchscreen wars in a market they probably have little impact in and a market that has devices that the Euro and American markets will rarely get to see? Someone please, stop the engineers at Apple from leaping from their office windows!
In other news: "American and French woodsmen are falling behind in the burgeoning chopstick market!"
You don't need the "fiddly QUERTY nonsense" anymore to enter Chinese/Japanese/Korean. Not since iPhone 2.0.
The first touch screen phones came from Handspring/Palm, and they were excellent at the time. In fact, they are still a decent choice for a low cost touch screen phone. Although they were designed for use with a stylus, there were many third party add-ons that allowed finger typing, many of them better than what the iPhone has.
The next touch screen phones came from Microsoft. Although the user interface is the usual Microsoft-ugly, they crash a lot, and the whole thing is trying to enslave you to Microsoft software, those were and still are powerful phones with a lot of third party software for them.
The iPhone? Yes, it's prettier than Palm and easier to use than Microsoft. It's slimmer and sleeker than both. It crashes a lot, but it does it with oh-so-much-style that you barely notice. Its games are hot, although its productivity software is limited due to Apple's attempts to protect its own business. No Flash and no Java limit it significantly. And the iPhone is more locked down and locked in than either Palm or Windows Mobile phones.
The iPhone will gather a significant percentage of market share in many markets, but it will not be the majority smartphone platform of the future. Between Nokia/Symbian, Google, Microsoft, and Samsung, Apple has some tough competitors.
Can't we just go back to basics? I just need a phone that I can use to dial out and accept calls on. I'm always in front of a computer, so why would I mess with a micro sized screen. I guess if everyone thought like me, Apple would go out of business.
Work smarter, not harder, with gps tracking
Not even remotely comparable figures. iPhones aren't even being sold in places like CHINA, Korea, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Taiwan, Vietnam, etc. They've only been selling in some other countries for a month or two (Singapore, India).
So if the iPhone has 20% of the OVERALL Asian market, it must be COMPLETELY DOMINATING the few (1?) market it's been in for any length of time: Japan.
Time to buy more Apple Stock.
If you're trying to avoid the perception that you purchase devices based on their 'cool factor' then HTC is the way to go. HTC stands for High Tech Computer. That is so uncool. That sounds like the name of a company that produces beeping keychain toys for the dollar stores.
Add Windows Mobile, and no one will ever accuse you of using style as a deciding factor.
I think this post sums up the term "fanboi" nicely.
Thank God for evolution.
I know the iPhone works in the following countries (because I've used it there): Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand, Hong Kong and I've heard it works in China. Also they offer it for sale in Japan, Singapore and India. So I assume that all these places (at the very least) are GSM.
Somewhat offtopic, and forgive me for being ignorant, by why havent tablets caught on?
Personally, I haven't given them even a second glance because they seem to be priced at some high-premium above regular laptops. I know the touch hardware costs more to add in, but the price differential looks like double the otherwise equivalent laptop. As an additional side issue, I'd have to deal with Windows or reduced Linux support.
Which brings up an interesting question. Up until now Western languages have had a huge advantage for computers since keyboards can have one button per letter because of the small alphabet and context-free characters. It is really easy and fast to input characters to form words using dedicated buttons.
Now with accurate, sensitive touch screens, will word-based writing systems like Chinese actually be better suited now for writing?
If I'm submitting a story I'd rather cut and paste it from a previous slashdot article.
Ceci n'est pas un sig.
Well, you can actually draw asian language characters as well, although that's less efficient than that fiddly qwerty nonsense.
Most people who speak Chinese (and I believe Japanese as well) actually tend to use roman characters to enter characters (for example, in China Hanyu Pinyin is used).
The one notable exception is Taiwan, which uses Zhuyin instead, which is the same concept as using roman characters, but has a different character set.
A few others are used as well, but the most common ones to use qwerty anyway (I'm not sure about Korean).
I only have experience with Japanese, but even on the iPhone you get a Japanese keyboard, not QWERTY.
Most Japanese phones use a standard numeric keypad to enter Japanese text, first in Hiragana and then into Kanji in the same way as computers do. The article poster clearly has no idea what they are talking about.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
"I think this post sums up the term "fanboi" nicely."
No, it really didn't... I don't know what "specs" we're talking about being missed here, but a good interface is crucial for many people...
like Myron Krueger said: "If people were going to use computers all day, everyday, the design of such machines was not solely a technical problem-- it was also an aesthetic one. A lousy interface would mean a lousy life."
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
They have caught on in niche markets. Last two times I went for surgery at a relatively brand new place all the nurses had tablets. Those 100 forms you had to fill out authorizing surgery were all digital. You could read through them and sign at the bottom.
All the XRay machines at their office are digital. Everything gets dumped into a central server. When I went into the consult rooms the doctors walked in with tablets and reviewed the xrays right there, no more having to hand off the big negatives.
Doctors wrote prescriptions on the pad and they printed off out front.
But as others have pointed out, I wouldn't have wanted to post this note on slashdot using a stylus.
The Nokia internet tablets are promising, but not beefy enough on memory. Give me a model with 512 megs of memory instead of 128, and then I'll take it seriously.
I am keeping my eyes on them regardless, since Nokia bought out Trolltech/QT and KDE 4 packages are now available for them.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
The iCal integration is pretty great.
And with jailbreak, the iPhone's software capabilities go far and away beyond other manufacturers' offerings. Too bad Apple refuses to support the devices in a jailbroken capacity.
+++ATH0
Stop sensationalizing this kind of crap. It's bad enough on Digg, were half-clever adsense whores with a talent for top-ten lists can get the mob to vote up whatever random wikipedia-sourced slop he's crapping out that day, but can we try to have something a little more akin to journalistic standards here on Slashdot where at least the editors are paid and therefore by the least common denominator of the word's meaning, they are "professionals."
it ran Android. Or was available with 3G in the US.
+++ATH0
More worthless blather from some self-important anal-yst. Where are the figures backing this crap up?
Apple didn't get to where they are today by listening to anyone, much less these stupid analysts.
16 billion bucks in the bank. Give my regards to that asshole Daniel Lyons.
"You're getting brutal, Sark. Brutal and needlessly sadistic."
"Thank you, Master Control"
-Sark and the MCP
"I think this post sums up the term "fanboi" nicely."
No, it really didn't... I don't know what "specs" we're talking about being missed here, but a good interface is crucial for many people...
like Myron Krueger said: "If people were going to use computers all day, everyday, the design of such machines was not solely a technical problem-- it was also an aesthetic one. A lousy interface would mean a lousy life."
Dude, this is Slashdot. Here, "advanced user interface" means you're using xterm-color.
#DeleteChrome
You still have the market cornered in UFO ship computer operating systems. No one can take that away from you.
Yes... if perfected well enough.
ie: in Japanese, the word "Japanese" is "Ni-hon-go" 3 'characters' (but I believe there's rules when joining these characters together) vs the English "J-a-p-a-n-e-s-e". I'm not sure how many Japanese characters there are though, since they get joined together to define a word (1 character can be 2 syllables).
Why we haven't already developed input (we may have, but a Japanese co-worker used an English keyboard and through key tricks typed in her native language that way) that uses the syllables from eastern languages is beyond me. The speed and efficiency would be nice, although we sort of already do type in words "WTF" "LOL" "BRB".
But the real question is... which eastern language is the best suited for word input?
Disclaimer: I am not god.
We may not be created equal
But we can be treated equal.
"it's getting a sound thrashing from Moto and Samsung, who've cornered the Asian market where touchscreens are popular for their ability to let users input Asian languages without all that fiddly Qwerty nonsense."
The iPhone does have non-QWERTY touch-based Asian input. It looks gesture based, and it's been available since firmware version 2.0.
http://www.engadget.com/2008/05/05/iphone-firmware-2-0-adds-chinese-handwriting-recognition-newton
It looks like the submitter didn't do this homework before posting.
I am sorry, but yet again, this is Apple thrashing and usual FUD from naysayers.
Strangely, I use my iPhone daily to enter Japanese characters without a stylus, and without resorting to QWERTY input. I have a nice little interface where I can enter all the kanas without thinking, and then I am presented with a dictionary interpretation for the kanas.
I cannot say for other Asian languages, but this part of Asian language is certainly covered... and guess what? the iPhone is sold in Japan officially... not in many other Asian languages... so OF COURSE it might not have the full language support.
Not that I think I'll change anyone's mind but really think about what makes a product, ANY product useful nowadays. Is it the raw specs? Do you buy your car based solely (or even primarily) on how many horsepower it has or its MPG? No, things like comfort and handling and responsiveness matter greatly. Possibly even safety could be considered a part of the "user interface", we could all literally tie ourselves in to the seat using rope but a seat belt is much more convenient (and likely to be used).
This doesn't even go into such things like styling or "image" (which is why you might buy a BMW over say a Chevy) and which, I'll happily admit, is a reason why I like Apple products. (Even services are very dependent on "the user interface" how is Disneyland different from Coney Island? Note: I used to design theme parks). So, if you want the maximum price to performance and are willing to suffer (great?) inconvenience, build your computer from scratch and install your own OS on it. That's what Bill had in mind, he thought we could all be nerds. I value my time more highly so I'll let Apple do the work.
Personally I think the iPhone looks very nice in functionality but there is no way in hell I'd "legally" buy one with subscription for the insane prices they are charging. Half a thousand dollars or so sure, but no subscription.
You might want to look into buying an iPod Touch then.
Meanwhile apple still doesn't support write to left scripts such as hebrew and arabic.
After just using a Windows Mobile phone during a two week international (outside US) trip, I can assure you that the iPhone is far and away the best phone out there. The Windows Mobile phone was simply atrocious. It was worse than having no phone at all. It was a nightmare.
I also note that not all touchscreens are the same. Apple's is simply more sensitive and accurate. Others, like on the Windows Mobile devices, seem to be plastic-y and non-sensitive. Is there a technical difference? Is it simply glass v. plastic? Or is there a difference on how the touch sensitivity works?
I modded you funny, because I think I was the only one who caught your sarcasm...
Errr... you WERE being sarcastic weren't you? heh heh, yes, of course you were...
Pssst... could you use the "~ at the end of the sentence to denote sarcasm" convention so we don't BOTH embarrass ourselves.
I think this post sums up the term "just doesn't get it" nicely. To some people user interfaces are important, we all do actually have to use our devices after all.
I've had my Ipaq for many years... since long before the iphone, it does everything the iphone does, plus adds GPS, MS Office, etc., and stereo bluetooth. No, the screen doesn't shift when you turn it.
I think the troll scoring on the op is out of line, since this is a relative comment that should remind people that the iphone didn't start it...
Anything you say will be held against you.
So that wouldn't be anything to do with losing the market then. Instead the headline would read "Apple only just released product for market".
An undocumented post by an anonymous poster. Why is the junk a headline on the Google news tool?
My biggest issue with writing on touch screens is the lack of friction/traction. Since a stylus on touch screen is real smooth, I have a harder time controlling my writing as opposed to when I use a pen or pencil on a piece of paper.
"Our opponent is an alien starship packed with atomic bombs. We have a protractor."
Can't speak to other Asian languages, but its Mandarin support is really helpful to me. It's particularly good for practicing character recognition with the various flashcard apps available for the thing. I like it.
I doubt you could ever write Japanese faster than you could type English. Nihongo might be 3 characters, but look at how fancy they are: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Nihongo.svg
The kanji is a little faster, but ni-ho-n-go is still 13 strokes.
by why havent tablets caught on
Because the keyboard is ten times faster than a pen? Even a really small keyboard is still faster than a pen. When it comes to editing there is no contest at all.
Asian markets? Are there really other markets outside the US?
Get the nifty felt-type like nib from Wacom and put that in your stylus for a more paper-like experience (if you have a glass screen on your tablet).
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
Actually, there's a nifty add-on for Word which allows one to use proofreading marks as editing gestures which makes corrections very fast and natural in feeling.
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
I don't see a war I just see normal competition. Company A makes X with touch screen, it becomes popular Company B makes Y that is a bit different however it does some things better and some things worse then X.
Unlike the Browser War of the 1990s there isn't a price for dominance or non-dominance. Even If I had an iPhone and only 2 of them were ever sold. I can still use my iPhone for what it was intended to do. It is not like my screen will stop working or it won't make a call. Unlike in the browser war for the looser of the war they were suck with not being able to properly view many web pages.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Two letters: T9
Wow what a useless rant. How can you lose a market you just got into. How can you lose in a market that you are not competing in. It's like saying American football is losing to Soccer. When all of these phones are in the same market on the same network then whe can have this discussion. As it stands now no Motorola touch screen is in the US market and AT&T does not have a samsung touch screen. What this person did was create an article whos numbers are based on Asia were 80% of those phones hold the market and Iphones are not sold.
why havent tablets caught on?
Perhaps because screens do not have the tactile response of a true keyboard. While a keyboard has the ability to provide an actual response via fingertouch, a touchscreen feels the same wherever you touch it. People prefer an actual keyboard because they(if they have any typing experience at all) can quickly find where a key is simply by where their fingers are in relation to home row(the little bumps on the f and j keys are there for a reason).
I don't like Linux. This doesn't make me a troll.
It was HP, not Apple that started the touch screen. So Apple has nothing to lose really. And Moto and Samsung rock! Apple is just hype.
Dude, nobody's claiming Apple invented the touchscreen.
But the article is misleading because once you've used an iPhone, all other touchscreen interfaces seem downright primitive.
Time to plug in my iCan'tHereYouYou'reNotTalkingLALALA
I dunno, sarcasm is a pretty sophisticated emotion (is it an emotion?). I'm a nerd you insensitive clod!
Big fricken deal.
Jobs has added to the lineup another family of devices with which to bolster its bottom line. At launch Jobs said just a small percentage of the market was worth a substantial bit of money per year... the intention was NOT to corner %90 of the market.
Once again, Apple puts aout a product that has many other manufacturers revamping their designs to meet or exceed Apple design. Sure the Blackberry is very good at what it does, but even RIM has put out a touch screen based model to satisfy its customers who would like to experience this "new" approach.
Nothing new here..... move along
in Japanese, the word "Japanese" is "Ni-hon-go" 3 'characters' (but I believe there's rules when joining these characters together) vs the English "J-a-p-a-n-e-s-e". I'm not sure how many Japanese characters there are though, since they get joined together to define a word (1 character can be 2 syllables).
There are 1945 jouyou kanji, which are required to be known to achieve a normal level of litteracy.
Why we haven't already developed input (we may have, but a Japanese co-worker used an English keyboard and through key tricks typed in her native language that way) that uses the syllables from eastern languages is beyond me. The speed and efficiency would be nice, although we sort of already do type in words "WTF" "LOL" "BRB".
The way it works is that you type each of the sounds that represent the word(ni, ho, n and go in your example), then you convert these sounds to kanji. Sometimes the conversion requires no choice from the user, and sometimes it does(such as ki, which could mean tree, spirit, etc.)
I believe a similar system is used for Chinese.
Remember though that predictive analysis can be used, in the same way that predictive text analysis can be used to enter words on cellphones. For example, when using handwritten input, potential characters can be filtered based on the type of strokes that have been written so far, as there is a certain stroke order for characters. There is also a potential for predictive analysis, as multiple-character words are fixed combinations. For example, if I write hana(flower), perhaps the next character will be ya(shop, thus turning the word into florist) or bi(fire, thus turning the word into fireworks).
But the real question is... which eastern language is the best suited for word input?
Good question. :P
Jean-Francois Im's blog
Motorola may have a large market share, but in the last fiscal year they had a loss of US$ 50M on revenues of US$ 36B, while Apple had a profit of US$ 3.5B on US$ 24B revenues.
If you run a business (or are a shareholder), market share doesn't mean much unless you're making money.
Posting anonymously due to potential NDA problems :) Calling the tube as Nokia's response to iPhone doesn't do justice. There's something extremely better coming up the pipeline!
Well, duh. What good is a touchscreen with only one button?
While Apple's iPhone may be the first device most people call to mind when they think of a touch interface mobile
that hasn't stopped them from thinking they aren't dumbasses.
Terrorists can attack freedom, but only Congress can destroy it.
Is that true in Japanese? I know in Chinese every character is exactly one syllable.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
Slashdot, tired of being one-upped by Digg, resorts to crappier and crappier headlines about "hardware wars", "Apple Products Killers" and "Apple is dying" even though they have 5 billion dollars in the bank.
Film at 11.
I would say that the P800 from Sony Ericcson was out before M$ arived on the scene.
But apart from that I agree with your post.
The characters you linked to are kanji, did you use the right word there?
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
Call me crazy, but I think that the Palm Trio beat the iPhone to market by 5 years. That's the first touch screen phone I recall and think of.
Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon what's the difference? All steal money from devs and control with walled gardens.
You ever see the comic strip with Dilbert competing with Zazu the monkey? Dilbert thinks he's got him licked as they sit side by side at their computers furiously working away (to impress the PHB). Then Dilbert notices that Zazu is going faster than he is! He realizes he's got an unfair advantage; Zazu can use his TAIL to operate the mouse and keep both "hands" (do monkeys have hands?) on the keyboard.
"I felt the jaws of evolution close around me" - Dilbert
Maybe so, but the story was the same from Nokia, Ericsson, Motorola, Samsung, and so on. This was committee work and they all had ugly things to say about the reliability of the connections going through hinges, and sliders are worse than hinges.
It's the nature of flexible connections stuffed into a small space with a limited budget, subjected to far too many deformations.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
One Kanji is generally one word, same as Chinese. But Japanese words are like, 10 syllables each. I can't think of any other language where "no" is a three syllable word.
There is also the N810 which has everything except for the phone and runs linux.
Oh yeah, it doesn't have a accelerometer either, but it has a really nice screen with a high resolution.
It's not really for everyone, and personally I'd like it to have a bit more horsepower, but otherwise it's a damn fine gadget.
Big frickin deal.
Jobs has added to the lineup another family of devices with which to bolster its bottom line. At launch Jobs said just a small percentage of the market was worth a substantial bit of money per year... the intention was NOT to corner %90 of the market.
Once again, Apple puts about a product that has many other manufacturers revamping their designs to meet or exceed Apple design. Sure the Blackberry is very good at what it does, but even RIM has put out a touch screen based model to satisfy its customers who would like to experience this "new" approach.
Nothing new here..... move along
The bigger question is which shift is likely to be more important. Is the big shift going to be to generic touchscreens which are slight modifications of the current mouse programming interface or to multitouch which is an attempt at a basic reorganization of the human computer interface?
In the article they say: "Such devices are popular in the region for their ability to allow users to input Asian language characters with a stylus". A stylus driven touchscreen is inherently NOT multitouch. Multitouch is a niche market compared to touchscreens in general but it is also distinct from it. The article is about Newton era technology which is not the technology which drives the iPhone and iPod touch.
Touchscreen phones are a niche market for the very good reason that touchscreens have traditionally been a very poor interface for phones. Most of the phones that support touch input still have a keyboard of some sort, with the touchscreen as a secondary interface for PDA functions, and my experience with a T-Mobile windows-powered phone is typical. None of the rest of my family was even willing to use it after one trial, because you simply can't use a touch screen as easily as a regular phone for the principle purpose of a phone... placing phone calls.
My daughter is amazing... she not only dials, she texts on her phone (standard 12-key pad with T9 prediction) one-handed without even looking at the screen except to check the message before hitting send.
If the iPhone is not in the Asian markets, why does it need the ability to communicate in Asian?
Apple just barely started to compete in Asia in the last month or so. Duh. Of course they have almost no marketshare there.
Apple just went from offering the iPhone in 5 or 6 markets back in May to now offering the iPhone in over 70 markets by the end of the year.
This article is an analysis of nothing. Kind of like saying the iPhone has minimal market penetration in Antartica
Secondly, the iPhone hasn't even been released in China, but is still a huge status symbol, and the upper-end electronics areas will prominently show iPhones for sale. When it does get released in China, it's sure to have Chinese-language writing support.
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
Really, what is it with everyone, Palm Treo's had all this stuff before the iPhone.
That actually isn't a very good example. You can write that about as fast as somebody can write "Japanese". It's just a matter of what you're used to.
Japanese for "no" is iie (pronounced e-a).
1 whole extra syllable? They have shorter words for our longer words too (no examples off top of my head). "A-na-ta-wa" is "you", BUT the you is normally implied in speaking, and never said, so technically they dropped a syllable from the sentence.
All languages have shorter words for our longer words, and vice versa. Like questioned above, which has the best trade off, especially when writing full words.
Disclaimer: I am not god.
We may not be created equal
But we can be treated equal.
Hmmm, I hate to break it to you, but such a thing already exists. Tablets have been around in the mainstream for half a decade now. Granted, Apple hasn't done one, but I used to use a tablet PC in university, and Microsoft did an excellent job integrating tablet controls into XP. I'm sure Mac could do it a bit better and more thought out (Multitouch on steroids), but the XP/Vista tablet experience isn't bad itself. Very functional, easy to use. Personally, I think they're a great thing for students - I really enjoyed mine.
Frankly, who gives a flip which was the first!
What I'm interested in, is which device does it best, and I think it's pretty damn obvious which the winner is.
Well, in the meanwhile, one can get an Axiotron Modbook (but it doesn't support rotation, and there've been some technical glitches w/ some units).
Microsoft's Tablet PCs are pretty decent though --- if only there were a pen-centric utility for accessing and managing files --- but if one of the note-taking programs (OneNote, EverNote, GoBinder &c.) suits one's needs it's almost as good as Go Corporation's PenPoint, plus one gets to use any Windows app.
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
You forgot RIM, and eventually openmoko.
I'd just be happy if my blackberry curve had the things available to it that my old palm pilot did. Saving data files on it, along with quality open source software is apparently an alien concept in the blackberry world. It exists, but it's scarce and of low quality. Much of the pay stuff isn't much better.
Moving parts yes, but fragile? What's fragile is a tablet screen without a flippable laptop keyboard protecting it during transport/storage/etc. Don't think of it as a laptop with a flippable touchscreen; think of it as a tablet PC with a built-in protective cover that doubles as a keyboard.
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
I'd rather use my voice. Like with Dragon naturally speaking
Because the manufacturers aren't stupid, and therefore aren't going to build a computer that has no useful software.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
And if your digitizer is an electromagnetic resonance type (i.e., Wacom-type) rather than a pressure-sensitive one (i.e., like most PDA touchscreens).
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
When I was a senior our math department got a grant from HP and I had the pleasure of using an HP tablet for a year and a half and since I was doubling as a CS/Math major I got to play with them all the time. I loved it. I didn't even have a notebook or paper my last 3 semesters.
The problem though is price. To even get one of the ones I was working on would still cost over $1200 today. If I was a freshman just entering school I would probably spend the money, but right now it doesn't make sense for me to buy one, not when I can get a regular laptop that will allow me to do dev work for much less than that. They are still a bit of a novelty.
What I'm interested in, is which device does it best, and I think it's pretty damn obvious which the winner is.
Good point, the Kaiser rocks.
I dont read
I hate to burn karma for this, but i'd like to point out that although the parent comment certainly contains flamebait, it is not at all offtopic.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
I went back and looked at the article closely and noticed some things.
1) They seem to be measuring OVERALL sales of touchscreens in the entire world. (It appears they asked the manufacturers how many touchscreens they were selling).
2) However they are basing Apple's "thrashing" on the fact that 80% of the leaders' (Moto and Samsung) touchscreen sales come from Asia.
3) Apple has only been selling in ONE country in Asia (Japan) for any length of time. India and Singapore have recently (one or two months ago?) been added.
4) So they're comparing ALL of Motorola's and Samsung's sales across Asia against Apple's sales in at ONE country for more than a few months. That leaves out CHINA, Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, Hong Kong (SAR), Philippines, etc.
It seems like this is the sort of "article" that was thrown together by looking at one statistic (worldwide sales of a product) and distribution of the sales of the product without understanding the companies involved (the writer obviously didn't know that Apple hasn't entered Asia except for Japan until recently. So how can you compare sales and then draw conclusions?).
Other questions like "What is a touchscreen device? Does it include devices that use stylii?" remain unanswered. Also, this whole category of touchscreen devices may be quite recent as the other cell-phone manufacturers are reacting to the iPhone. (Prior to the iPhone I do not recall touchscreens being used except for Palm devices). So it is quite possible that Apple has a large share of the market WHERE IT IS COMPETING.
And the Touch Pro is even more awesome, and so is SE Xperia X1 (also made by HTC). Then there's the upcoming Touch HD, 800x480 touchscreen phone.
All your base are belong to Wii.
I believe we call that a chicken-and-egg scenario
Thank God for evolution.
Dunno, I just started college and I got a tablet, along with 5 other friends, and here I regularly see a ton of tablets. They are catching on, it's just that until recently there haven't been many affordable tablets. But now HP's got the awesome tx2000/2500 series for under a grand USD, which is really nice. Also, the slate style tablets w/o flippable screens would suck for stuff like writing this comment. I don't see what's so complex about spinning the screen around. Everyone who sees it is pretty impressed, even a die-hard Mac user I know. Swiveling screens are actually useful beyond just converting to a tablet too, eg. if you're working on something and you want to show someone in front of you.
All your base are belong to Wii.
Oh thanks, that kind of annoys me with my tablet but I adjusted to it after a while. I'll look in to that.
All your base are belong to Wii.
The iPhone already has, built in, alternate entry methods for complex characters by drawing with a finger (either Chinese or Japanese or both, saw it demonstrated at WWDC).
As pointed out elsewhere, the main issue is the iPhone is not being sold in China, and really only just started in Japan.
Lack of great asian character input methods is not an issue.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Yes, that's pretty much it.
I thought I would hate the iPhone, I only got one to be able to better support my customers, who were buying them like crazy.
I love it. Of course, I jailbroke it within half an hour of getting it, and it tethers and runs Netatalk - but it really is as good as the hype.
Now with accurate, sensitive touch screens, will word-based writing systems like Chinese actually be better suited now for writing?
No. Because you have to have a way to Index the literally thousands of characters. Most words in Chinese are made of multiple characters so it isn't just a keyboard of words. Japanese is the best of both worlds IMHO. It has a phonetic system that can be typed with a Western keyboard, hit the spacebar and the computer gives you a list of conversions.
The real advantage of Japanese and Chinese writings are when it comes to the reader. Reading in these language is so much faster and efficient than western languages.
Japanese for "no" is iie (pronounced e-a).
iie is three mora (basically the Japanese equivalent to what syllable would be in English).
Yeah, I enjoy mine too and Vista's tablet support is even better, especially since it's built in. The handwriting recognition is surprisingly good, and OneNote is awesome for taking notes. I've been really impressed with my tablet, since MS isn't exactly known for being polished, but the experience so far has been really good.
All your base are belong to Wii.
the winner which won the hype and sheeple blessing? Gimme a fucking break here. There are way better touchscreen devices in the market if you were point to the losers standing in queues for nights.
You forgot RIM
Does RIM have a touch screen phone now?
Big problem with tablets is the display. when a laptop closes the hard outter shell protects the screen, a tablet doesn't have that extra protection. I have to be careful with my cellphone that has a nice display to avoid it coming up against things that would scratch it.
A touchscreen also has to deal with smudges, oils and dirts that a laptop doesn't and these can also affect how you can view the screen so the issues they have is a bit more complicated (My phone has a stylus so I'm not prone to smearing it up)
It would be perfect for college students taking notes
What the hell is wrong with paper??? Really, it's a millennia old paradigm. Technology has its place, but not everywhere.
The iPhone 2.0 firmware introduced both Pinyin (QWERTY)-based and handwritten input methods for Chinese in both the traditional and simplified character sets. The handwriting recognition isn't perfect, but it's reasonably comparable at least to Motorola's - can't speak to Samsung's.
Another argument for Motorola and Samsung's dominance here is that iPhones are still available only through grey market imports, and are still prohibitively expensive for most buyers. And, as kamapuaa notes above, the overwhelming majority of cell phone users in China use input methods based either on the Pinyin romanization system or the 'K9' keypad stroking system, not based on handwriting.
Tablets have caught on, they certainly have their place too but they are not laptop slayers for a few good reasons. Firstly, they are widely used in education by both students and teachers, especially in engineering. I have a convertible, and there is no way I would sacrifice my keyboard simply to avoid a seemingly delicate hinge, it is far too important to me to be able to type my assignments. They are actually quite robust, the hinges, you'd be suprised, and to that I'll add that normal laptop hinges are really quite weak to begin with. As an engineering/maths student, a normal laptop was going to be a burden, a tablet is perfect for what I do. Absolutely all of my notes are now organised perfectly and in one place at all times, I can pdf my work and send it to students with a few clicks, at any point I can flip between working on some maths to actually writing up some code to implement that maths. I couldn't have hoped for better, it is the perfect device for me and it just works, all the time.
Tablets are exclusively used by couriers these days for signatures, touchscreens widely used at checkouts in all manner of stores. I hear tablets are also a hit in the medical industry - slate tablets too so there you go. They are really really fantastic devices, its just that most people these days have no use for handwriting capabilities. Nobody writes anymore, thats what I put it down to. Hell when I decided to go back to university it took me a few weeks to get my handwriting back on form.
Just trust me - tablets have taken off, its just that it is a niche device to begin with. You may see more and more students using them in future as the prices come down, but while they hover around $2-3k those who need them most cannot afford them. Oh and tablet pc features are implemented incredibly well in vista, its about one of the only things that works and works well. I see nothing on the apple platform that is even remotely close to the capabilities of windows for handwriting. Honestly I feel this is why they don't release a tablet device - they won't be able to compete with MS on quality for once. I'm not an MS fanboy by the way, no chance, I just recognise when something does just work.
Oops, s/kanji/katakana/g
I said you can't write Japanese faster than you can type English/romanji. Point being, don't throw out your keyboard just yet.
Actually, cellphones work like that already. In a recent trip to Japan (less than 4 months ago) everyone I knew used predictive input exactly like that.
And it wasn't the fancy phones. I bought the cheapest one at 100USD from au by KDDI and had that feature. Also, mine doesn't have predictive input for romajii (roman characters), and I have no idea if the fancier ones do.
The point is, it was very easy for my friends (as they told me) to input text very quickly.
Slashdot. Unreadable news to annoy nerds. - wonkey_monkey
Two letters: T9
In what alphabet is 9 a letter?
A good user interface is nothing without functionality. A light switch is a good user interface, but it's not much good for washing your car. If the phone can't (or in the iPhone's case won't) do something you need it to do, the user interface is a secondary concern.
I use a western-shaped Hanja keyboard for Korean, and for Japanese, kind of a txting like grid keyboard that I tap multiple times to cycle through the "AIUEO" of each sound and a couple multifunction keys like dakuten/handakuten/small, "wa/wo/nn/-", and maru/Japanese comma/?/!. Ya/yu/yo switches to small versions after cycling through full sized... it's quite usable and intuitive.
But the kanji lookup is SLOOOOOOOW. So slow it slows my typing down. "*tap tap... taptaptaptap...* HEEEEY! YO!!!! WAKE UPPPPP!!! *massive backlog of random kana floods out with a page of suggestions for kanji/sentence particles*" Then, a lot of the interface is laggy like OSX - it does nothing, but you have no way of telling if it knows you wanted something done... then all the backlogged commands are processed in an instant. Still, I do love the thing. Finest PDA yet for me. I was a long time PalmOS guy and WinCE/Mobile was NOT looking attractive even nowadays.
Next time try saying "I just i-shit my i-pants" and you'll avoid all this troll business. I love the i-phone, mod me up.
Can I bum a sig?
I have to agree with all the users pointing out that the iPhone isn't even available in most of Asia, so there's no basis on which to state rival phone makers are "ahead" of them.
Having just come back from Korea and being an iPhone owner, I can say Apple is years ahead of Samsung in build quality, interface, and features. The new Samsung touchscreen offering, the Haptic, comes with only 256MB of internal memory, and retails for around $500 USD. Compare that to the $200 iPhone with 8GB memory, plus the App Store, plus iTunes, plus a full brower, plus GPS, plus Google Maps, plus Youtube. Korea is going to eat up the iPhone once it's finally released. And I'll be happy then. They're really getting screwed by their carriers right now.
The only problem I've seen so far is when I send an SMS to my girlfriend in Korea with my iPhone, the Korean writing gets messed up and seems to shift each character to one on another key nearby. So that will definitely need to be fixed before release or it'll be useless.
The iPhone already allows you to enter Asian languages with a finger:
http://www.apple.com/iphone/tips/
Basics -> International Keyboards -> scroll down to the bottom.
Not to mention, I like many others....have had our handwriting legibility degrade over the years to the point that even "I" can't read it...I can't imagine the software could either.
I print in all cap. letters, and I still can't read what I hand write half the time. No, a keyboard is much better.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Okay, here's how hit works:
Yes, you could type in hiragana/katakana, but I know exactly no one who does. I don't know why. I thought I was being a lazy gaijin by typing in Roman characters, but then I found out that only a few serious secretaries or whatnot actually use the kana keyboard, which is unfortunate, I think, because it about doubles the number of keystrokes required, but whatever. I don't have to learn a new keyboard to type in Japanese.
So let's type "Nihongo" in a Japanese word processor, on a computer:
1) Type "n" -- "n" shows up on the screen /ni/. This is the sound, not the kanji.
/ho/
/n/, and "g" shows up
/go/.
2) Type "i" -- The "n" disappears and is changed to the hiragana character for the sound
3) Type "h" -- "h" shows up.
4) Type "o" -- changes to the character for
5) Type "n" -- "n" shows up
6) Type "g" -- The previous "n" changes to the character for
7) Type "o" -- The "g" disappears and turns into the character for
Now, all of this is underlined. That means it's not really set yet. So we hit space bar.
The characters for the sounds /ni-ho-n-go/ change to the kanji for the word that means Japanese language, as that is the most likely candidate for that string of sounds. If there were some other word with the same reading (I can't think of any) that I used frequently, that would be the computer's first guess.
If we need a different kanji, we hit the space bar again. If it's still not right, we hit it again and a little menu comes up that we can select from.
This is how it has worked for at least 10 years; before that, I don't know.
You actually don't have to convert to kanji after every word. If you just keep typing, it'll start converting behind you, to the most likely kanji. I find this dangerous, however, because you don't pay as much attention and you end up with gibberish sometimes. I tend to do a whole phrase at a time before hitting spacebar.
For cellphones, Japanese is already a lot easier to input than English. --So much so that my gaijin friends and I usually text in Japanese. Because the syllabary is organized by leading consonant and then following vowel (i.e. "ka" "ki" "ku" "ke" "ko"), you just tap that key until you get the sound you want (the "2" key for the /k/ sounds) and it starts predicting right away. Not just words, but entire phrases.
If, for example, I tap "1" twice for /i/, it comes up with the sentence "Ima doko," which means "where are you now?" --A very common thing to text to someone you're meeting.
I don't know how it works for Chinese, but I suspect it is similar. I am very suspicious about the claims of the summary that Asians, presumably with their wacky writing systems, need many keys for their impenetrable Oriental scribblings. But all I really know well is Japanese, and we do fine over here with QWERTY, and even handle the number pad as an input device better than alphabetic languages.
No, I believe we call that "Microsoft's Tablet PC initiative failing." Microsoft went about it the right way, by creating software while simultaneously partnering with manufacturers to build devices to use it, but it failed to find the killer app for it.
The best shot the Tablet PC had was with OneNote, but it wasn't good enough. Specifically, if the notes people were taking were primarily text, then typing them would be faster than writing them. And if they weren't text, then they were equations or diagrams and OneNote wasn't good enough at recognizing and "cleaning up" equations and diagrams. For example, if Microsoft Equation Writer had been integrated into it (and without the need to explicitly mark the object to be recognized as an equation), and if it had been able to turn squiggly hand-drawn geometric objects into perfect geometric objects, and if it could anchor objects together (so that they stretch instead of separate when one part is moved, like in Visio or Omnigraffle), then it would have been good.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
I'm not quite sure what everyone did 10 years ago when very few people owned cell phones.
Back then, people used pay phones for emergencies. But nowadays, pay phones have become undesirable for two reasons. First, people use them to trade in controlled substances. But perhaps more importantly, they just don't bring in the revenue that they used to now that cell phones have replaced many uses.
I dont have an iPhone, nor have I ever used one... but I do think they were the first ones (that I know of at least ), that used an interface that was sensitive to motion/tilt. At least in a phone.. Or am I missing something? Actually, Nintendo is who I think of when I think motion activated anything.. but now I'm rambling.
I didn't know there WAS a touchscreen war. Sounds like propaganda to me.
Homonyms are fun!
You're driving your car, but they're riding their bikes there.
Dude. Android. Maybe you've heard of it?
Of course I've heard of it. And I get it... where? Oh, it's not available generally yet.
I'm a big tall mofo.
It all depends on the specifics.
There are, in all, few "needs" for a highend consumer gizmo, just levels of "want".
I NEEDED a Todo program. I made due with an iPhone memo, because so many other things were so great (and overall it was a better solution than switching to notecards or lugging a Palm.)
Yes, there might be things that will legitimately veto the choice of an iPhone (fewer now w/ the app store) but the original accusation of fanboi-ism was not that well-founded.
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
Whoever wrote this article obviously has not used the iPhone OS 2.0 software. It allows you to input Chinese writing in traditional Chinese, simplified Chinese and Hanyu Pinyin (romanized). And the Chinese handwriting recognition system is the best I've used, and is extremely accurate.
Which brings up an interesting question. Up until now Western languages have had a huge advantage for computers since keyboards can have one button per letter because of the small alphabet and context-free characters. It is really easy and fast to input characters to form words using dedicated buttons.
Now with accurate, sensitive touch screens, will word-based writing systems like Chinese actually be better suited now for writing?
It might be faster to hand write a few simple kanji (or hanzi), but for complex characters* it is definitely faster to write the Romanized pronunciation (as described by numerous other replies in this thread).
Especially these days, with everyone inputting Japanese with romaji or cell phone-style inputs, people are forgetting how to hand write kanji. While easy, reliable computer handwriting input might help reverse that trend, I think that very few people can recall every character they might need to write in a given day quickly enough to make handwriting worthwhile.
*For the purposes of this discussion, I'd say the vast majority of kanji are "complex."
There are no such thing as a war on touch screen. Frankly, iPhone is not about touch screen. It is about software and about how the things works. Symbian? Windows Mobile? Hahahahahahaha!...
Maybe this will change things for the Indian market:
http://tinyurl.com/4cqn2u
What I'm interested in, is which device does it best, and I think it's pretty damn obvious which the winner is.
I'm trying to find reliable info about that, but I'm still not sure. Considering Apple's reputation for easy userinterfaces and the iPhone's multi-touch, I suspect the iPhone has the superior user interface. But does it really? Aren't there any others with slick multi-touch UIs?
Somewhat offtopic, and forgive me for being ignorant, by why havent tablets caught on? I'd buy one in a heartbeat if it Just Worked(tm). Most of the "tablets" out there are just laptops with flippable screens == too much complexity and too many fragile moving parts.
I'm not all that familiar with tablets and don't own an iPhone yet, but from what I've seen, I get the impression that the iPhone is pretty much a tiny general purpose computer. So what exactly do tablets do that the iPhone doesn't?
I've also figured out the killer accessory for the iPhone: a wireless keyboard of the same size as the iPhone that folds up against it.
Forget the iPhone, it's UI is way too goddamned slow for a mobile device.
Really? That's very good to know. I'm still looking for a good smartphone/mobile computer, and the iPhone is a top candidate, but I do want a snappy UI.
For Chinese, there are multiple input methods in common use: pinyin (Romanization similar to what the Japanese use) for qwerty-loving people like me / mainland Chinese, Bopomofo for Taiwan (similar to kana, but with only 37 letters + 5 tones it actually fits on a qwerty keyboard as individual keys), and Changjie (which is shape-based). There's also a lot more non-standard methods with less use.
Try an anti-glare screen protector, they give the same feel as paper and are great to write on.
the iphone has awesome keyboard options! you can "write" Chinese characters with your finger and use it in the free Chinese or Japanese-English dictionary, there is the classic Japanese 9 key hiragana input and English... this post is apple bait
It works exactly like that for Chinese.
Chinese operates on the Pin yin system to be imputed into a computer. You key in the pronunciation, and then continue typing until the end of the sentence.The computer can generally predict what you're about to write. If it's the wrong word, then you sort of change it by pressing some number keys.
Sometimes it's actually easier to do it on a keyboard, than writing it out, because the input program functions like a dictionary.
Uhh why is parent modded to Score: 0?
He's correct, and he's explaining how Chinese input works.
Chinese characters are written using strokes, but they are romanized. I do input Chinese and find it very convenient. It's just like what grandparent posted.
For example. in the pre-installed IME Editor, if I want to type "ni hao ma?" ("nee how mah" -- how are you), I just type "ni", and a whole list of characters which are pronounced "ni" comes up. I just pick, and usually the character I want is one of the first few.
Same goes for "hao" and "ma". In fact, it gets faster after getting used to it. Handphone input methods work the same way.
Handwritten Chinese input have been around, but I don't use them. They work pretty well (from demos I see), and if included in a tablet, Chinese won't have to figure out the pinyin (romanization) and can write very fast. Of course, the problem lies in recognition, which would be more PITA than English.
You're at roadside emergencies more often than you're near a Wi-Fi network? You might consider a refresher in driver's ed. :)
When I'm near a Wi-Fi network whose WEP key I know, I'm also near a land line. I carry a phone on the Virgin Mobile network (service less than $70/yr including tax) to arrange an alternate ride in case my bike has a flat tire and/or the city bus service is either excessively late or not operating at all.
Because "just works" is an incredibly subjective and nebulous concept?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Then there's the upcoming Touch HD, 800x480 touchscreen phone.
Cheers, my Kaiser is getting a bit old now so I might look at this depending on what Android phones are available in December / January.
I dont read
Actually, recognition of Chinese characters is easier 'cause there's a standard stroke order (and number which is how they're looked up in dictionaries) which is expected to be followed.
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
- Paper can't easily be searched, recognized text can
- Applying colour to paper (beyond what's afforded by something like a Rotring Quattro) requires n-devices where n == some number of stick-like objects which have to be carried)
- adding sheets of paper increases bulk / weight linearly, while adding files / pages to computer storage doesn't
- recognized text can be converted into a finished paper w/o laborious re-typing
- it's easy to take a photograph of something and then mark it up, no need for a printout
- one can easily add area to a digital note to increase the amount of space at need
- &c.
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
Things Tablet PCs doe that the iPhone doesn't:
- Provide a large screen
- run apps which aren't widely available (e.g., a font editor)
- provide GBs of storage space (I've got a 30GB HD in my Tablet PC, and a PCMCIA adapter w/ a 4GB CF card in it) which can be easily expanded upon
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
A war!!!!!
is it? really? maybe we need a troop surge
C'mon.. Asia has like very few people. Their different alphabets and symbol based writings are a passing phase.
Big countries like England, France and Belgium are all using regular keyboards. This seems like a non story to me.
a good interface is crucial for many people...
like Myron Krueger said: "If people were going to use computers all day, everyday, the design of such machines was not solely a technical problem-- it was also an aesthetic one. A lousy interface would mean a lousy life."
This is exactly why I'm considering the iPhone. I'm sure there are other smart phones that are technically better, but if I have trouble finding or using the features, it's useless.
A device (computer, phone, whatever) is only worth what the user is able to use. And since nobody ever reads manuals, that means: what the user is able to figure out for himself. So a good, intuitive user interface is vital for getting value out of your phone.
Or maybe it's my age. I used to have no problem at all memorising vi commands, but nowadays I just want stuff to work without having to work for it myself.
Plus, who ever heard of a "touchscreen war"?
Pick a word, feature, item or concept that's in the news a lot, subject to hype or whatever, paste "war" after it, and hope it catches on. If it does, you're suddenly a big name in journalism for having been the first to see it coming.
Apple learned a long time ago that appearance sells.
2 women in the bar- do you think the one with the highest IQ goes home with a guy first.
As long as apple has creative packages it will generate sales.
Buying an I-Phone using the AT&T network makes my case.
Not whining, but I love it when posts at 1 randomly get modded -1: Overrated.
All your base are belong to Wii.