On Fri, 20 Jun 2003, Julien Quint wrote:
> > 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.
This all varies from phone to phone, of course. Most of the phones that
I've seen have had the ability to insert a space, though on some phones
it can require quite a few keypresses (e.g., it would be 13 presses on
the "0" key in romaji input mode).
So far I've liked the F503i the best for English input, since the "*"
key worked to make things lower case. This provides two bonuses, really:
first you don't have to scroll through all the upper case characters
before getting to lower case, saving you two or three keystrokes for
almost every character, and second, making something lower-case means
that when you hit the same letter button again, it moves forward and
generates a new character rather than rotating the one you just made
lower-case. English has enough combinations where you'd use the same
letter key twice that this speeds things up, too.
I played around a bit with an SH505i on Friday evening, and it uses yet
another method: it's got what's basically a caps lock key, and you can
be in either upper-case or lower-case mode. This seems only slightly
less convenient than the Fujitsu method, to me, and is definitely better
than having to rotate though all the upper case letters before you get
to lower case.
The SH505i has predactive input as well, though I only tried it for
Japanese, not English, and didn't play with it much. Basically, when
you've put in as much of a word as you care to, you can push the "down"
button, and use the standard dictionary, or the "up" button and use a
predactive dictionary instead.
I think someone else on this list just bought an SH505i, so he may have
more comments on it.
cjs
--
Curt Sampson <cjs_at_cynic.net> +81 90 7737 2974 http://www.netbsd.org
Don't you know, in this new Dark Age, we're all light. --XTC
Received on Mon Jun 23 07:13:57 2003