On Friday, Jun 20, 2003, at 09:21 Asia/Tokyo, k j wrote:
> What do you guys think of the predictive text input (japanese language)
> currently available on keitais now? (docomo, au, jphone, tuka)
On mine (Docomo N504is), the default method (I haven't tried any other,
actually) is that there is a memory of previously input words, and when
you are inputting new words, the ones that have this prefix are
proposed on the bottom on the screen, with the latest one you inputted
coming up first. You use the "dictionary/directory" key to switch to
the list of proposed words, then the arrow keys and enter to select the
word you want. Once you have selected a word, another list of words
that can follow appears, and so on.
This is a very paradoxical aspect of the keitai. People complain that
they forget how to write kanji, because they are so used of typing them
on a computer or a keitai or some such device; for me (I don't know
many kanji and my japanese is very poor), it is a great learning tool
as it helps me remembering them and gives me confidence in using them,
as I can type a kanji which I haven't studied but have seen before.
Also, since my vocabulary is so small :( I can type very fast because
the predictive system works very well with such a limited lexicon. I
can type whole sentences with just a few keystrokes because they are
already in the dictionary.
There are a few issues, though. One is that once you select a word from
the dictionary, you have to press cance/delete to go back to normal
input. For instance, since I put my address (Ichigaya tamachi) in the
address book, any time I input "Ichigaya" (eg to check the time of the
last train home), I always have to backtrack because the dictionary
always automatically proposes me to write "tamachi". Another issue is
that even though the typing is quite efficient, it takes me a lot of
time to compose the message I want to type... but I can't really blame
that on usability issues.
> And are any of the phone friendly for English input?
Not very. For instance, it is a little impractical to insert whitespace
between two words, and there is no such thing as the predictive input.
Also you have to switch back and forth between letters and numbers,
cycling through kanji and half-width katakana, not to mention mixing
upper and lower case letters.
Julien
--
Julien Quint, Visiting Researcher, National Institute of Informatics
Hitotsubashi 2-1-2-1312, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo 101-8430, Japan
Tel +81 (0)3-4212-2596 Fax +81 (0)3-3556-1916 E-mail quint@nii.ac.jp
Received on Fri Jun 20 04:07:30 2003