The Latest News on Depression
As the release in Japan of Apple's iPhone surely gets closer and closer,
what is the latest news leaking out about what the device may look like?
Piecing together the news I can begin to get a clearer picture of what it will
look like, and how my previous predictions may be realised.
3G. 3G, or high speed data transmission speeds is absolutely essential in Japan for Apple's iPhone. This seems like a fair bet, what with rumours of existing 2G Airpods microphone stocks being sold off at firesale prices and becoming sold out in the UK. However, with many eyes watching the FCC web site and their equivalents in many other countries, no-one has spotted an Apple device seeking approval. The process of approval can take up to three months, so it looks like it will be Autumn before consumers will actually be able to get their paws on the Applie iPhone in Japan or any other country around the world. I speculate that there must be some kind of battery life or other issue delaying the release, as there are no concrete rumours of production orders for the additional third-party hardware required to power a 3G iPhone.
Japanese input. With the upcoming Apple iPhone v2.0
software, perhaps to be announced at the June Apple WWDC, many developers have
got their hands on the beta versions of the software and are only too happy to
leak details of what they are finding. MacRumors, for instance, has announced
that the software has handwriting recognition for Chinese but not Japanese.
Although Japanese kanji and Chinese hanzi are very similar and indeed Japanese
has a much smaller set of commonly-used characters, the lack of Japanese
handwriting can only be down to licensing issues; whether it means they haven't
yet closed a deal, been unable to close one, or are just not bothering is
anyone's guess.
However, the interesting news that confirms one of the requirements for
Apple's iPhone in Japan that I previously specified, namely that the iPhone
has, for compatibility with the numeric keypad standard on almost all phones,
introduced a soft kana keypad. This means that to enter, for example, Apple in
Japanese, spelt APPURU, instead of using a standard QWERTY keyboard to type in
A-P-P-U-R-U then press a conversion key to change to katakana, you press the
kana A key once, the TA key six times to cycle through TA-CHI-TSU-TE-TO-small
TSU (or TA thrice then the make-small key), the HA key thrice to got HI-FU, the
rendaku key (the same as the previously-mentioned make-small key, according to
the screenshot) twice to go BU-PU, then three RAs to go RI-RU. Finally, a
conversion key allows final selection of katakana. Although this kana keyboard
requires 16 keypresses instead of 7 in this example, with a much larger landing
area for each key even the fattest thumbs will have no problems typing, and
there will be almost no learning curve required.
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