Hi Peter,

I don't have a smartphone myself at the moment, so I went to check up my friend's Android smartphone last night to see if the thing you asked of is possible. My friend's smartphone is a HTC Sensation, currently running Android 2.3 Gingerbread. His is a Telstra 2-year plan.

Does this phone has QWERTY keyboard and support Chinese Pinyin? Yes. (But only virtual QWERTY keyboard).

To enable it is pretty straight forward - I did it just now. Apparently the Chinese language packs (both Simplified & Traditional) are already built in. You basically go to Settings > Language, and the "Input Methods" section. There, you can find a list of languages with different input methods to choose from. You simply enable the languages and associated input methods you want.

After I had enabled Pinyin input method on my friend's Android, next was to find out how to use it. It turned out to be straight forward too: To input Chinese text, just click on a key on the virtual keyboard with the symbol 'EN', and it would toggle to 'Pinyin' (and vice versa). After that, whatever you type would be in Chinese. For those who don't know - to input a Chinese character we simply enter the roman characters representing the appropriate Mandarin pronunciation, then a list of Chinese characters with similar sounding would appear. We then choose the Chinese character that we actually want. Nowadays, just like the auto-complete in English inputting, built in 'word prediction' feature that attempts to guess the next series of characters that the user is attempting to enter has made Chinese input a little more efficient these days.

For Chinese language, there are several popular input methods. The only one I know how to use is the Romanised Pinyin. I myself is not a frequent user of Chinese input for email & SMS, so Pinyin is sufficient for me. From my understanding, Pinyin is not the fastest in terms of input. That's why some of my friends who use it on a daily basis use some other more efficient input methods. But I feel Pinyin is the easiest to learn and use.

H.T.H.

Cheers,
Wen

On Fri, Nov 11, 2011 at 4:10 PM, 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?

Thanks for recommendations
Peter

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