“A Chinese third-party developer claims that Apple has bought his software for recognizing handwritten input on the iPhone. Screenshots of an iPhone OS 2.0 build incorporating handwriting technolgy as a method for entering Chinese characters surfaced a few weeks ago, but it now appears that Apple may have acquired this function rather than developed it in-house,” iPhone Atlas reports.
“Dubbed ‘HWPen,’ the third-party handwriting recognition application was developed by Hanwang.com.cn to allow Chinese character input on the iPhone, but the program works equally well with English input. Apple has reportedly stripped English character input from the tool, sieving for only Chinese character recognition for iPhone OS 2.0,” iPhone Atlas reports.
Full article here.
Oh yeah, Bogus knows nothing about chinese characters. All you need is a finger to write. You don’t need a pen, Bogus!
Thanks, rondonski.
The only problem with Newton handwriting recognition is that it required you to “train” the device over time. The handwriting recognition got better and better the more you used it and corrected it’s mistakes.
The problem was that it would take a few weeks to work everything out. Thus, when you first sat down with it, you felt like you were dealing with a dunderhead. “I wrote ‘it’–how’d you come up with ‘cat’?!?!” That’s part of what inspired the stories about how bad Newton handwriting recognition was. People would use it a few times and get annoyed.
(As an aside, I remember the little kiosks that Apple put in stores with a Newton superglued to the kiosk. I always pictured this poor Newton going crazy as it tried to deal with 20 people a day with different handwriting…)
I haven’t used Ink in Mac OS X, so I don’t know how good it is…
“I haven’t used Ink in Mac OS X, so I don’t know how good it is…”
You should. It works well.
@@Scott
It is Japanese.
“hontoni”
It basically means, “Really?”
Почему не на русском языке?
or Arabic or Hebrew or (fill in the blank on any other non-roman character based language).
Why?
Because the Chinese market is bigger than all the others combined – kinda sorta maybe… (I waffle because I am not sure kinda sorta maybe)
I thought steve j said that he didn’t like stylii? Handwriting recognition would denote the use of a stylus. Are we going backwards?
rickw,
Steve probably had the normal input for smartphones in mind.
I’ve used it in HK. They’re on almost every iphone there. Works great, for English too.
iPhone in China is starting to look happening to me. It’s the largest volume market and should be top priority next to Japan. Chinese symbols are not an easy thing to fingerpaint…maybe Windows 7 can do it…eh Bill??
How do you write, “Eat up Martha,” in Chinese?
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“How do you write, “Eat up Martha,” in Chinese?”
I think you just poke her with a chopstick repeatedly.
(j/k)
“Bogus. That would imply the inclusion of a stylus for the iPhone.”
Using it with a stylus designed for the phone would be optional. Apple might not even need to include it, leave it up to third parties, or include just a very rudimentary (cheap) stylus. Idea being you can still operate the iPhone with your finger, but now you can draw or write with it as well.
I’d assume the Newton handwriting recognition or ‘Inkwell’ is out of date by now and would require rewriting to port it to the iPhone. That would be why they bought the software, along of course with the Chinese capabilities.
Interesting that they took the English recognition out of the thing. Obviously this is for Chinese phones only, but for all we know they’re a test market. Apple will remember the Newton-bashing that took place re handwriting recognition. Maybe they want to be sure this software REALLY works before bringing it to the States. After all, the iPhone is not a sideline for Apple, as Newton was, it’s a Big Deal.
@MizuInOz:
Russian, Arabic and Hebrew are not “character based languages” like Chinese. They use alphabets like English does, just different ones (Russian: 33 letters, Arabic: 29 primary letters, Hebrew: 22 letters). No reason they can’t be typed using an onscreen keyboard.
Handwriting recognition might be cool, but would be significantly slower for selecting individual letters from an alphabet than simply hitting a key.