Caffeine Lab

I recently installed the SDK for Android, Google’s OS for mobile phone. I’ve been following that since it was released; I’m pretty attracted by the platform but when I bought my last phone, Android was not really there yet.

One of my requirement is to be able to input Japanese. Currently a Google search about Japanese input will give you mostly links to some third party hack who get you there, but with a clunky interface. Well, I was happy to see in the SDK’s emulator that Android has support for Japanese input built in! You can select it by going to Menu->Settings->Locale & Text.

Now, that doesn’t tell me if I will be able to access it on an Android phone. Sometimes makers and phone operators are known to rip off parts of the OS or add crap for no good reason. If you have an Android phone, I’d love to hear what maker/model it is and whether you do have alternate input methods included.

I’ve already written about reading and writing Japanese on a Western Nokia phone. Now that I am in France, I got to test sending SMS in Japanese from my E71 to my dear’s E65. And it works, in both ways! There is nothing to do other than setting both phones to display and input Japanese. I have no idea what encoding is used on the server, if it’s really Unicode or if the server think it’s Latin-1 while the data actually is Unicode, I just know it works.

For information, I’m using a MVNO on the SFR network, so I assume that it would work on SFR itself and any operator using their network.

It works now!

About a week ago I wrote about Japanese input on S60 in general, and on my Nokia E71 in particular. Well, I’ve finally found a solution that satisfies me. That’s in 2 steps, and it involves a little bit more that installing packages. But the only “system modification” is done on the MicroSD card, so I feel like it’s pretty safe. If things go wrong, you can just pull the MicroSD card and boot without it. Anyway, if things go really wrong (it was fine for me but I don’t know what can happen for you) don’t blame me. Everything you do is your own responsibility, so don’t follow my advice if you’re not comfortable in tweaking your phone. Also, please don’t ask me for help to setup your phone. All I know is written here, if it works for you it’s great but if it doesn’t I can’t help more.

Important note: that should work on most Nokia phones, but there is no guarantee that it will work with other brands. A reader reported that it doesn’t work well on a Samsung i550.

In short: you can read Japanese for free, and you can write Japanese for ¥5,000 (roughly $50 depending on the rate).

Reading Japanese

The first step is making sure you can read Japanese on your phone. If it’s like mine, out of the box you see squares if you visit Japanese websites, or view emails in Japanese.

All you have to do, is visit this page and follow instructions:

http://japanesefont.blogspot.com/2008/03/how-to-install-japanese-fonts-on-non.html

In short, that will involve:

• Downloading the Nokia SDK that contains the Japanese font
• Copy the font to your MicroSD, in the right folder with a name that mirrors your existing fonts (so you don’t have to override your fonts; you just add fonts that take priority)
• Reboot, and you’re done

Now, if you do it you will notice that the whole font is changed, i.e. even English text looks different than before. The font is “thiner”. That was my grip with +J, I really didn’t like the font they were recommending. In this case it’s different: the font looks really good. This is the font that Nokia uses in the phone they sell in Japan.

(Alternatively, you could spend €30 on a solution full of DRM that I don’t even feel the need to cite… Who would want that? Additionally, I don’t even know if it’s compatible with +J.)

Here you go, you can visit Japanese websites! If that’s all you want, if you don’t care much about input, you can stop here. But if you want to be able to input Japanese, read on.

Writing Japanese

Now you need an input method. I said in my previous post that +J was a great, complete solution that rivals what you get on Japanese phone and even computers. However, the font they offer didn’t look good to me.

At that point we have a phone capable to read Japanese with a good-looking font so we don’t need to install the ugly one they propose. You do need a fairly good Japanese level to install and use +J because all doc and menus are in Japanese.

Before you install +J, make sure it works for your device. Read the supported devices list. It should work on a S60 3rd edition, 3rd edition FP1 and some FP2 devices. It has only been tested with Nokia devices.

Here are the steps:

• Go to the +J page
• Download “+J for S60本体” (do NOT download the font)
• Follow the instructions to install +J from the PDF documentation (SKIP the “install the font” part)

…And now you have full working Japanese input on your phone! But for 30 days only, that’s the duration of the test version. You will need to spend ¥5,000 for the full version – but believe me, it’s worth it and there’s no DRM.

Or, for more money (€60 – no joke) you can have a solution that doesn’t work very well, is full of DRM and clutters your context menu with input-related entries. That’s the product that I cited in my older post, but I don’t recommend it.

Conclusion

Some comments:

• My only grip (but it’s minor) is that switching from English input to Japanese input on a E71 is done with a three keys combination. Not very convenient.
• French accents still work. I mean for display, because my phone is a qwerty one, English OS, and I couldn’t input accents before anyway. Not sure what would happen on a French phone, maybe you lose the ability to input accents? Maybe you need to input in qwerty even if your keys are labeled azerty?
• By default, +J will be in 9-keys mode (for phones with just a phone pad). You need to switch that to romaji for the E71.
• By default, all applications will start in hiragana input mode (to input Japanese as opposed to English). Unless you live in Japan, you’ll want to change that setting too.

Update: I finally found a solution that satisfies me! It involves +J and an alternative font. See details here.

My new toy is a Nokia E71 (yes, for various reasons I chose it over the new hot Android G1 and the old-but-still-hype Apple iPhone).

One of the first things I tried to do is install Japanese input for it. Nokia doesn’t offer that because they don’t seem to care much about the Japanese market and (as far as I know) don’t release high-end phones there. I understand them in a way, because the Japanese market is so different from Europe or US that they would need different products to appeal to the Japanese public.

So here we go: Japanese input on S60 phones in general, and the E71 in particular. So far I found three possibilities, I tried two, and there is no satisfying solution yet.

1. Psiloc Crystal Japanese

Commercial, €50, download the demo here.

The Good:

• Just one package to install; nothing scary
• The font looks really good

The Bad:

• the input itself is really, really weak. So weak I even wonder if they had anyone who can write Japanese in their team.
• It’s overpriced considering how bad the input is

The Ugly:

• Psiloc uses a nazi DRM that runs you-don’t-know-what on your phone and calls home to make sure you’re respectable family guy. Yeah, yeah, I know: it’s to fight piracy. Except that pirates can download a DRM-free cracked version on the web so only legit customers are exposed to the DRM.

More details about the input: when I say it’s bad, I mean it.

• It doesn’t remember which kanji you choose – so next time you write the same thing you have to go through the list again.
• The punctuation is messed up. Pressing “.” doesn’t output “。” and pressing “,” doesn’t output “、”. You can get around by typing “まる” and “てん ” but it’s a pain in the arse… And remember, it doesn’t save your choice so you have to go through the list each time!
• The “-” puts you back in English so it’s impossible to input basic words like マスター (master), スキー (ski) or パーティ (party). NOT POSSIBLE. They basically sell you a Japanese input software using which you cannot input some very common Japanese words.

2. +J

Commercial, ¥5,000, download the demo here (in Japanese)

The Good:

• An awesome input. Very complete, on-par with what you can find on a computer.

The Bad:

• No English doc, so it may be hard to install for beginners at Japanese. Additionally there are several packages (the font is separate) and you need to pick the right ones for your device.
• My real grip: you have to install a font that makes your whole phone OS look pretty ugly. Even when you’re just using an app in English, not typing Japanese, you will be using the ugly font.

The Ugly:

• Nothing ugly for +J. It’s a great input software, I really wish they would fix the font problem.

So here is where I stand. Psiloc’s software input method is insuffisant and their DRM bothers me. Additionally they don’t seem motivated to improve it, according to them they’re focusing on other products. Maybe they don’t work on Crystal Japanese because it doesn’t sell well… I wonder why?

+J is really nice but I can’t stand having a crappy font on my phone all the time. If more than half the email/text messages I was writting were in Japanese I would probably use it though.

The last one is M-FEP60, it’s as least freeware, and maybe Open Source; the source code is available but I’m not sure what the licence is. I didn’t try it because I’m unsure if it works on the E71 (the last version was released before the E71) and according to screenshots it suffers the same font problem as +J.