Phone with QWERTY keyboard and Pinyin support
Hi all, do you know about a phone with QWERTY keyboard and Chinese Pinyin support available in Australia? Thanks for recommendations Peter
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.
Jason White wrote:
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.
Last time I looked the iPad's onscreen keyboard didn't even do dvorak...
Actually, I don't know how thousands of Chinese characters are mapped to a qwerty keyboard.
[Concerning computer keyboards, not handsets...] AIUI hanzí input methods (inc. pinyin) basically have you spell it out more-or-less phonetically on qwerty, then allow you to select amongst homophones. Hangul and (I think) kana have few enough graphemes that you basically have one key per grapheme, plus a few dead keys (a la diacritics in western europe). Incidentally, Hangul keyboard layout has *always* been vowels on one side, consonants on the other. Take that, qwerty!
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.
I don't think that's an issue for Mandarin; you just use qwerty. For kana and hangul, of course, have alternate graphemes on the keys. If you can touch-type, it's not TOO hard to simply remember the mappings without looking at the keys -- at least if you can see the graphemes appear on screen. I struggle a bit to type Korean words accurately when I only get diamonds on the screen ;-)
Trent W. Buck <trentbuck@gmail.com> wrote:
Last time I looked the iPad's onscreen keyboard didn't even do dvorak...
But there are overwhelmingly more Chinese language users than dborak users, hence an enormous economic incentive for phone and tablet vendors to support the former.
[Concerning computer keyboards, not handsets...]
AIUI hanzí input methods (inc. pinyin) basically have you spell it out more-or-less phonetically on qwerty, then allow you to select amongst homophones.
Is there sufficient detail in the Romanized transcription to give you the tone as well as the speech sounds? Just my curiosity taking over...
Hangul and (I think) kana have few enough graphemes that you basically have one key per grapheme, plus a few dead keys (a la diacritics in western europe).
Incidentally, Hangul keyboard layout has *always* been vowels on one side, consonants on the other. Take that, qwerty!
It's a good idea. Qwerty was, after all, designed to slow down typists to prevent mechanical difficulties in early typewriters. It has also been hypothesized as not accidental that "typewriter" involves only keys along the row above the home row, i.e., it's easy to type quickly for demonstration purposes.
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.
I don't think that's an issue for Mandarin; you just use qwerty. For kana and hangul, of course, have alternate graphemes on the keys. If you can touch-type, it's not TOO hard to simply remember the mappings without looking at the keys -- at least if you can see the graphemes appear on screen. I struggle a bit to type Korean words accurately when I only get diamonds on the screen ;-)
That's entirely understandable. Typing Korean on machines without the right fonts installed is impressive, but I wouldn't recommend it. for security, one would have to be able to type passwords/passphrases without seeing the graphemes, however. For my part, I can select a Chinese table in my braille display software, type LANG=zh_CN date at the shell prompt, and get output that may or may not be intelligible to someone who reads Chinese braille. In fact, my recollection is that at the console, languages requiring large fonts aren't supported anyway, due to the kernel's limited font table. There aren't any Japanese or Korean tables at the moment.
Jason White wrote:
That's entirely understandable. Typing Korean on machines without the right fonts installed is impressive, but I wouldn't recommend it.
Well, I do it because...
In fact, my recollection is that at the console, languages requiring large fonts aren't supported anyway, due to the kernel's limited font table.
...fbcon doesn't do CJK (though it can do Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew, and limited Arabic, although not all at once). When dropping the occasional word, ICBF switching into jfbterm (with GNU Unifont), so I just type blind.
On 11/11/11 6:37 PM, Trent W. Buck wrote:
Peter Ross wrote:
do you know about a phone with QWERTY keyboard and Chinese Pinyin support available in Australia?
An OpenMoko FreeRunner running Emacs in Debian? >duck<
Well, since the Nokia N9 (which I'm seriously considering getting) is running MeeGo, which is Debian with extra bits that's not entirely impossible. Regards, Ben
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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participants (5)
-
Ben McGinnes -
Jason White -
Peter Ross -
Trent W. Buck -
Wen Lin