What would Chinese input look like on an iPhone? Now you know

by Chris Ziegler posted Jul 15th 2007 at 7:32PM

Yep, it's a mockup, but it's a darn good one. Or we think it is, at least -- we don't speak enough (any) Chinese to really know for sure.

[Via Slashphone]

Filed under: Software, Apple, iPhone OS

Tags: apple, china, chinese, chinese input, chinese keyboard, ChineseInput, ChineseKeyboard, input, iphone, keyboard

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Neutral

That's actually really cool and it looks like it would work pretty well.

The way it works is you choose the strokes that are in the character you want and it gives you options accordingly.

I like that.

Neutral

derek @ Jul 15th 2007 8:07PM

its a mock-up? than who cares?????

Highly Ranked

ash_yee @ Jul 15th 2007 10:10PM

It's just a simple text message, the first two is saying "where should we go for dinner tonight? Pizza at home sounds good!"
the second one is saying, actually I would rather go have some chinese dish outside. I can't decide so you pick!"

and the third one is saying "ok why dont we go have Chinese outside then"

From my stand point, the text input looks very hard to just type out regular phrases. Most Chinese mobile phones nowadays have hand writing recognizable function build in somewhere, so using your thumb is a bit of a hassle IMO

Neutral

Jamar @ Jul 15th 2007 10:44PM

I'm pretty sure that in the second reply "some Chinese dish" actually says "Sichuan food" while the third says "Cantonese food".

Oh, and that red button on the bottom left says "pen entry", I think.

After further reading, it seems that it *is* a mockup. A really good one, but still just a mockup. They're not even sure if it'll hit mainland China (let's be honest; some people in the mainland go through prepaid SIMs like candy- will the activation scheme really fly? Think not- the Meizu version will be more popular for this reason).

Neutral

leg9 @ Jul 16th 2007 5:05PM

Pressing strokes to input characters? If you've been to Hong Kong, China or Taiwan you'll notice that hand-written input devices are still everywhere. Learning to type on the keyboard is still too hard or too slow depending on the kind of keyboard input method you use. If you have a touch screen. Why not full handwriting recognition? I think the hardware is powerful enough to do that. Besides the screen is too cluttered to look like an Apple product. No vote from me.

Neutral

Jamar @ Jul 17th 2007 12:51AM

OK, you try writing Chinese with your finger- especially those characters that get to be 20+ strokes... on an area smaller than a business card. Doesn't work.

The knockoffs appeal to me precisely because they have far better Chinese input than an iPhone could (Apple wouldn't mar their iPhone with a stylus slot, would they?)

Neutral

Andrew Shuttleworth @ Jul 16th 2007 8:41AM

How does Chinese input look on an ordinary telephone?

Neutral

Jamar @ Jul 16th 2007 12:25PM

It looks exactly like it does on this mockup except mapped to the 1-9 keys- for HK at least. Taiwan and the mainland are not quite the same. The mainland uses a romanization system called pinyin and Taiwan uses something incomprehensible to most others.

Neutral

johnny hates waiting @ Jul 16th 2007 3:14PM

just use pinyin for input. thats what I do.

Neutral

Jenna Walker @ Jul 16th 2007 3:42PM

you don't even need Mandarin or Cantonese characters--they also have pinyin, the alphabetized version of their words. All they would need would be our alphabet and / - \ U symbols to put over certain letters to show pronounciation--it would be much easier than searching through hundreds of thousands of characters. There are so many characters that the majority of people, even upper class, well educated people, don't know most of the characters, only a small percentage, maybe like 10-15% of them. Pinyin would be MUCH easier to do in this case. They all know it anyway, they start our learning pinyin before the characters.

Neutral

Ram-UK @ Jul 19th 2007 11:22AM

Only problem is that natives don't actually learn romanization (at least in HK, why would they need to?), so any romanized input is going to be less popular than handwriting or something desktop-estabilished, say ChangJie.

Neutral

leg9 @ Jul 17th 2007 10:58AM

We are talking about simplified Chinese here, so almost all words will be less than 20 strokes. Besides, a business-card sized space is plenty for writing one word with your index finger, even for traditional Chinese. I have a writing tablet not a lot bigger than the size of the iPod screen, and I can at least write on it using my nails. With some heuristic I suppose you can write pretty nicely on the multitouch screen with your fingertips. Hand writing recognition has come a long way.

Even if hand-writing is still challenging, why would you limit the input method to just the 9 strokes you find in regular mobile phones? Why not the full keyboard of Wubi http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wubi_method or Changjie http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Changjie ? Or just present a full QUERTY keyboard for hanyu pinyin ?

But then all these input methods are not mutually exclusive -- one can implement all of these -- hand-writing, Wubi, Changjie, those in the mock up and let the user choose what to use.

All told, Chinese input is a hard UI problem. It'll be interesting to see what Apple actually comes up with.

Neutral

Leroy Vargas @ Jul 23rd 2007 12:06AM

At least Japanese phones are way much easier to operate. Their numeric keys duplicate as kana input (hiragana or katakana, you choose) in a way similar to alphabetic (upper/lowercase) input in our phones: one of the keys doubles as a/i/u/e/o, another as ka/ga/ki/gi/etc, another as sa/za/shi/ji/etc, and so on. Kana syllables, once input, can then be turned into one or more of several possible kanji strings by hitting some key, same way as in Windows IMEs. Romaji input is also possible.

I also believe Korean phones to be easier, but never seen them yet: numeric keys possibly duplicating as choseong/jongseong (initial/final consonants, respectively) and jungseong (vocals).