Apple Brings Handwriting Recognition To The iPhone Date Monday, May 05 @ 17:08:24 Topic iPhone General As MacRumors reports, a rather notable feature has been identified in the latest beta of iPhone Firmware 2.0. When Chinese is selected as the input language, the user is presented with an option to use handwriting recognition where character glyphs are stroked on the screen with a finger. After a portion of the character has been drawn, a suggestion menu presenting four possible, fully-formed characters appears to the right of the input pane. The Chinese website Wretch.cc has posted a gallery of screenshots of this feature. MacRumors indicates that they have been able to confirm that this feature does exist in the latest beta of Firmware 2.0, available to registered iPhone developers. At present, there is no support for English handwriting. Many of the Apple faithful may remember that Apple was a pioneer on the Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) field with its Newton family of handheld computers. The Newton relied upon handwriting recognition (stylus-based) and was criticized for shoddy recognition in the early units utilizing a third-party recognizer. Later models, however, use "Rosetta," a handwriting recognition system developed in-house at Apple. [See a demonstration video of Rosetta in action here.] Rosetta lives on in Mac OS X as a feature called "Inkwell." Many consider Rosetta / Inkwell to be the most advanced handwriting recognition technology yet developed. It seems very likely that an Inkwell-based English recognizer will make it into the iPhone - hopefully in time for the June launch of iPhone 2.0. Newton Poetry points out that Apple has recently started looking for a Handwriting Recognition Engineer on its job site. Apple is obviously striving to keep this technology on the leading edge for its future mobile devices. Stay tuned... Related links: Newton Poetry: Message Pad Jabberwocky Photo: a family of Newtons Photo: Newton and iPhone: ARM and ARM This article comes from iPod Hacks http://www.ipodhacks.com The URL for this story is: http://www.ipodhacks.com/article.php?sid=2545