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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."
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.
As of Tuesday, it has a mic jack and a speaker. Apple has already said there will be Wi-Fi VoIP applications.
If you're always in a Wi-Fi environment and have a 2G touch, you may rarely need a phone anymore.
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.
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 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.
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.
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
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.