Renfield Kuroda wrote:
> Good point -- the most popular PDA in Japan, Sharp's Zaurus, has excellent
> handwriting recognition. And as I'm sure you know handwriting recog is fairly
> advanced in Japan b/c of the rigorous rules for writing (there is only one
> correct way to write Japanese).
The flip side of the coin is that Japanese OCR has to deal with
2000+ characters as opposed to 52, and rapid Japanese handwriting
tends to degenerate into a scrawl that even the natives have problems
dealing with. And then you have the problem of the kanji themselves,
as most Japanese can recognize or phonetically spell out more kanji
than they can write -- good for 10-key/QWERTY systems, not so good
for kanji recognition.
Interfaces are always a question of tradeoffs. Obviously a small
form factor has been more important than speed for PDAs and
mobiles so far, which explains the popularity of 10-key and
handwriting recognition, but the reverse is true for PCs --
and that's why the QWERTY keyboard is popular. i-mode-type
devices really call for something inbetween, so it will be
interesting to see what designers come up with, and what will
succeed.
Cheers,
--
Jani PATOKALLIO / jpatokal@iki.fi / +81 90 7722 3557
Sanpo Laboratory, Mechano-Informatics Dept., University of Tokyo
ヤニ・パトカリオ / jani@sanpo.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp / 090 7722 3557
東京大学、工学系研究科、機械情報工学科、算法設計研究室
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Received on Thu Jan 25 07:05:51 2001