Found Footage: iPhone 2.0 Japanese keyboard demoed

oh thank god, i was afraid we'd be stuck with the crappy keyboard like we have on the ipod touch. i don't know if i like the sliding thing because it seems like you have to hold it down for a while to get the menu to pop up. i think real phone keypads are much easier with the multitap and tactile feel. sometimes i'll tap a button 3-4 times on my touch and i swear it doesn't register all the time. i still think that because of the lack of a real keypad that the iphone won't be popular here.

I wonder how well it'll work one-handed: japanese people require this as they need at least one hand free to hold the bicycle handlebars (or cigarette).

seriously, though, this might finally convince me to get the iPhone. I was kind of dreading trying to write japanese on that tiny QWERTY keyboard. this looks quite nice and might even be easier than a regular phone keypad.

oh, and btw, not EVERYONE in japan hangs charms & straps on their phones. a lot, maybe, but there are still a lot of people who keep their phones strap-free.

As someone who speaks japanese, this looks clunky and bad. I hope they still allow for an IME style input.

So you won't be able to draw kana/kanji? Is that only available for Chinese Traditional, etc?

Wow this looks pretty neat. I'm glad that Apple will finally make this available to everyone as hacking it in with every firmware release became pretty tedious.

I really wonder how much I'll use this over the QWERTY version.

Judging by how many shortcuts you need to access just to write a single word I think the Japanese market is gonna pass on the Iphone at least until they get a decent keyboard, I have seen Japanese text like crazy, and this is not going to help them.

Also, completely unrelated, the Iphone has no way to hang charms, that alone might be the Iphone's undoing in Japan

Interesting. I was unsure about the + menu for selecting within rows of kana, until I noticed that you can drag and release on it; so stroking "ka" upwards gives you "ku". I can imagine this becoming very quick and natural.

that really looks like it would take forever. As much as I'm sure it sucks that Japanese writers have to transliterate Japanese into Romaji to type on the iPhone now, it seems to be fairly efficient.