Sony Ericsson Z558i does pen input

by Chris Ziegler, posted Oct 2nd 2006 at 10:43AM

At first glance, the new Sony Ericsson Z558 looks like nothing more than a rehash of the Z550 geared toward the Chinese market. By and large, that's an accurate assessment, save for one critical detail: the new model packs a touch screen and stylus for handwriting recognition -- a feature that seems like overkill for Latin characters, but thinking about Chinese puts things in an entirely different perspective. Much like the Nokia 6108 before it, the Z558 sports handwriting recognition for the sole purpose of making life a little easier on folks whose languages are composed of thousands of characters (though as you can see from the press photo, you can write in English too, if you're into that sort of thing). Other features include a 1.3-megapixel cam, 18MB of internal memory expandable to 1GB via Memory Stick Micro cards, and a 900 / 1800 / 1900MHz GSM radio with EDGE; look for it in Z558c and Z558i variants for mainland China and the rest of the world, respectively.

[Via Slashphone]

Filed under: Handsets, Sony Ericsson, GSM, GPRS, EDGE

Tags: character recognition, CharacterRecognition, ericsson, handwriting, handwriting recognition, HandwritingRecognition, pen, recognition, sony, sony ericsson, SonyEricsson, stylus, touch, touchscreen, z550, z558, z558c, z558i

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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Neutral

Chris @ Oct 2nd 2006 10:47AM

First!

Neutral

albert sun @ Oct 2nd 2006 6:21PM

@Chris
You're first, but your comment is also idiotic.

That thing looks like a pain in the ass to write with, especially on such a small screen. For some more complicated characters I doubt that this method would be any easier than the current Chinese character input methods. The current methods can actually be quite fast, and with practice its possible to text in Chinese as fast if not faster than in English.

Neutral

exst @ Oct 3rd 2006 9:55AM

If this phone had a swivel design similar to w600i, I think that this feature would be a bit more comfortable than on a clamshell like this.

Neutral

shane @ Jan 27th 2007 4:57PM

i think this looks like a very good phone but it isnt available anywhere and nowhere has prices for it

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