A week ago I finally got rid of my old cellphone (Sony Ericsson K800i) and got a Motorola Milestone, a smartphone based on the Google OS, Android. I took the Milestone for two main reasons: it’s the first coming with version 2.0 of Android, and it’s also a good bargain for its price (I got it at 478 euro), since similar phones equipped with Windows Mobile 6.5 or for example the iPhones have prices way more obscene.

I decided to go for Android mostly because the iPhone is way too closed for my taste, and the same goes for Windows Mobile, which by the way it’s a very heavy OS and thus requires powerful hardware (which translates in higher prices).
Android is the first free and open source mobile platform (shameless quote from its homepage) and this means that many developers will be attracted to it, or have been already; as a matter of fact Android Market is the second biggest mobile application market right now, after the Apple one of course, but you can excuse Android for that, he’s still pretty new right?

Anyway, before buying the phone I also made a few researches to check if it was possible to write in japanese on it, and if there were any dictionaries on the market. Months ago I found this great article on J. Maurice’s blog: Japanese IME (iWnnIME) on Android – T9 / qwerty but it requires root access and this means you’ll have to find a way to get root access on your smartphone and I didn’t wanna do that… so now that I have the phone, I browsed the market to check for other possible ways to type in japanese.
I found two noteworthy: the first option was Kaede IME which is good, but the onscreen keyboard really sucks in my opinion, being too big to allow for correct typing. Basically you have a key for every hiragana sign and that’s definitely not good, since they are 46, making each button very small (not to mention it’s also hard to find the correct symbol between all the others fast, unless you remember where each symbol is supposed to be).

The second option, the one I’m currently using, is OpenWnn plus. What I really love about OpenWnn plus is the onscreen keyboard, which works almost exactly like the keyboard of the SoftBank cellphone I had when I was in Japan last time. Basically you have 10 buttons from which you can type every one of the 46 symbols… for example you’ll have the あ symbol and by pressing it a few times you can select either あ or え, い, お and う. You also have a couple more keys for the ten-ten or maru (濁点 dakuten and 半濁点 handakuten), plus one for the symbols (記号 kigou) which becomes the key for ASCII codes (英数 eisuu) or kana while you type. I’m really loving OpenWnn, but as I mentioned, maybe it’s just because I’m used to typing on a japanese cellphone and it may not come so easy to others, who may prefer the bigger Kaede IME type of keyboard.

Another applet you can’t miss if you’re studying japanese of if you (like me) always like to have a dictionary at hand and you’re fed of dragging your 電子辞書 (denshi jisyou, electronic dictionary) around, is Aedict. Again, there are some more dictionaries, but this one if by far the slimmest and easiest I’ve found, and it also comes with Kanjipad, an applet-in-the-applet which allows you to draw a kanji and search for it in the dictionary (which it’ll prompt you to download at first use). Neat!
There’s also the always handy radical lookup and a hiragana/katakana table which, again, may come in handy to new students of this complicated-enough language.

I must say that looking at kanji on the Milestone screen is extremely pleasant, due to the big (3.7 inches) and high resolution screen. So if you wanna get a phone and use it to type japanese as well, I recommend you get one with a decent size screen (3 inches should do) and, more important, with a good resolution! My first option for a smartphone would have been the HTC Hero, but that had a 320 x 480 screen resolution, and it may not be so good for kanji.

P.S. – Aedict uses the edict (yeah well, the name would be Android EDICT, so…) project’s dictionary created by Jim Breen, so you can bet your money it’s a good one (and you don’t have to, it’s free).

P.S. 2 – Since I’m currently unable to take screenshots from my own Android, many thanks to AndroLib.com, where I could find the screenshot you see in this article.

Tags: android, japanese, milestone

This entry was posted on Monday, December 28th, 2009 at 17:56 and is filed under Language. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.