iPhone firmware 2.0 Chinese Input Enable

If you are like me, who uses English as primary language but occasionally would like to be able to send a Chinese SMS or email; you should keep your iPhone international settting in English but provide the ability to switch keyboard to a foreign language on the fly.

To do this, all you have to do is go to Settings->General->Keyboard->International Keyboards and choose the language(s) of your choice, you can have as many as you'd like. Enjoy!

iPhone Firmware 2.0: Finally true Chinese Text Support

Tonight, I've finally decided to upgrade the firmware of my iPhone to the all might 2.0. I've waited a couple of days for the iPhone 3G and 2.0 madness to settle down. Once I saw enough stability from friends' and web folks' testimony, I decided to upgrade and give my audience an update on the new Chinese text support. All together, the upgrade took about 25 minutes from beginning to finish (including updating iTunes to v. 7.7).

In the new 2.0 firmware, aside from the support for Developers and Applications, I personally think the support for Chinese text (Simplified and Traditional) is probably one of the other significant update. The the menu icons and primary functions throughout the phone is now is Chinese; there is an hand recognition input that takes a little practice getting used to when using the tip of your finger to write. I haven't been able to find out if PINYIN is an option (which is a much better option for folks like me forgetting how to write the characters, but I can speak it and using PINYIN can help me pick out the best possible match)

Because of my previous entry garnered so much web traffic, I have taken more photos of true Chinese support in action in a slide show below, gallery link here. Enjoy!

Apple iPhone 2.0 Chinese Input

There are some screenshots circulating the web claiming that Apple iPhone's firmware 2.0 will be supporting not only Chinese input but handwriting recognition as well. As someone who's done his fair share of testing iPhone's Chinese text support capabilities in the past, I am going to attempt to translate the website (wretch.cc) which hosted these iPhone 2.0 Chinese screenshots for your convenience.

[begin translation]
Apple iPhone 2.0 Chinese Input
In the latest iPhone 2.0 5A258f beta testing firmware, Apple has finally added Chinese input feature.
And most importantly... it has got handwriting recognition!!!
Hahaha~ Never do I have to waste time hitting the onscreen keyboard again.

Please have a look at the screenshots.

In this photo, features predictive dictionary...









Simplified Chinese input as well as new Japanese input interface...

iPhone Chinese, Japanese, Korean Language Support

I am giving away some free mobile goodies as part of this blog's 2nd year celebration! Take a look here if interested! Happy Holidays!

[UPDATE: True Chinese Support firmware 2.0 HERE]
[Quick Link: iPhone w/ Japanese Screenshots Here]
[Quick Link: iPhone w/ Korean Screenshots Here]

Ever wonder to what extend is the iPhone capable of handling other languages? I was curious as well. What I have noticed is that within the iPod interface, songs and artists can be displayed in Chinese with no problem. This tells me that the phone's OS is similiar to OSX in that they support the reading of other languages.

First Test: Browser Foreign Language Support: Successful!
So I launched Safari to see if this support extends across the broswer and other languages. Please find three screen shots where I am able to confirm that the browser supports Mandarin-Chinese, Japanese and Korean. I was pretty happy to find that it does fully support foreign text. This is a pretty big breakthrough that people seldomly write about. I proceeded to test this via my Nokia N95's browser, and after inputting Google.com.tw into the browser, Google just defaulted to the regular Google.com/m site where all English texts are displayed.

Second Test: SMS Foreign Language Support: Failed
I asked a friend to send a Chinese SMS text message to my iPhone, and the text came across as "??". To verify this, I even used Gmail to send an SMS in Chinese text to the iphone, the results are still gibberish. It amazes me that Apple could not apply the same Language support to every application.

Third Test: Email Application Foreign Language Support: Successsful!
I sent an email to the iPhone and the text came through just like it does in iPod and Safari. Which is again, pretty cool. Once again, I am baffled by the fact that Apple could not support this across all of its applications.

Foreign Lanuage input is out of the question. I saw a demo on YouTube where you can use a browser-based Chinese input and then copy and paste it to other apps. Knowing that the native OS does support foreign lanuage is a good thing. I hope we are just a few firmware away from being able to fully communicate in another language. Even so, I still think the iPhone is still a few years ahead of competition in terms of its display capabilities which now extends to foregn languge support.

(Update 3/8/2008, I finally was able to put up some pictures for your reference, click to enlarge: iPhone-Chinese Mandarin and Simplified, iPhone Japanese, and iPhone Korean Language)



(Update 5/5/2008, there are some screenshots for iPhone firmware 2.0 which shows Chinese and Japanese input. I took the liberty to translate the original article for you here.)

(Update 5/8/2008, for those searching to find more screenshots of iPhone Safari supporting Korean, click here for more pictures)

(Update 5/13/2008, for those searching to find more screenshots of iPhone Safari supporting Japanese, click here for more pictures)