(keitai-l) Re: predictive text input

From: Julien Quint <quint_at_nii.ac.jp>
Date: 06/20/03
Message-Id: <05F21422-A2BB-11D7-AA6D-000A956ABB8E@nii.ac.jp>
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