Peter Ross <Peter.Ross@bogen.in-berlin.de> wrote:
Hi all,
do you know about a phone with QWERTY keyboard and Chinese Pinyin support available in Australia?
No, but I would be very surprised if the support wasn't a standard component of modern mobile operating systems. I can imagine that you might have to download language-specific files if they aren't included by default for reasons of storage capacity. Actually, I don't know how thousands of Chinese characters are mapped to a qwerty keyboard. Presumably, it involves multiple keystrokes per character, and perhaps visual feedback during the entry process. Phonetic input mapped to a character dictionary would, I imagine, be another solution in principle, though that might appeal more to people who are learning Chinese as a second language than to native speakers. Finding a phone with Chinese printed on it and with original documentation might be a little more difficult, but if the user is prepared to work with a device that has English labels printed on the controls then I would expect it to be entirely a matter of software.