What’s with the funny title, since I haven’t been posting here in two years, you ask ?

Well, I’m referring to Japanese language support on the iPhone.

Back in the days of iPhone OS 1.1.4 (in Japan, available on the iPod Touch), the only way to input Japanese text was through the qwerty keypad interface, which was fine, but the predictive input was painfully slow. The keyboard was ok though : you tapped a letter, it appeared in the input field. It was not the best experience ever, but at least it worked.

Then came the time of iPhone OS 2.0.x : New kana keyboard (same as every single other cell phone sold here), and new predictive system. I thought “alright ! someone managed to convince Steve-o to use a tried and true solution instead of re-inventing the wheel !”.

But then, I actually, you know, tried to USE IT, and that’s when things went ugly : not only is the keyboard lagging like hell (meaning : tap a key, and wait 5 seconds or more to actually have the hiragana displayed in the input field) but the predictive system is getting in the way and makes things even more unresponsive.

the kana keypad looks like this :

Kana keypad on iPhone OS 2.0.2

For those who have never used that kind of input, it works pretty much the same as the old text input of yore, before T9 : you want to input “い” ( ” i ” in Japanese), then you press the “あ” key twice. (Japanese kanas are classified as follows : a, i, u, e, o あいうえお, then same for “か” : ka, ki, ku, ke, ko かきくけこ, etc.)

This system is actually very speedy once you’re used to it, and actually, on the iPhone, it’s much faster than the qwerty input because the keys are bigger and there is no correction applied to the Japanese input through the qwerty keypad.

Anyways, as of this writing it doesn’t matter because it’s a pain in the ass due to the constant lag. I’ve witnessed a 1 minute lag (that is a full 60 seconds) quite a few times, be it under 2.0.0, 2.0.1 or 2.0.2. Actually, things seem even worse under 2.0.2.

You’d think that Japan would be important and strategic enough to Apple not to mess that up… but no.

Then there is the actual Japanese iPhone interface : it’s a translated version of the English interface, not a “Japanese Japanese” interface : some stuff just look plain weird to a native speaker.

And then (insert “dude, where’s my car” flashback here) there is the “small” issue of the non-pushed email address from Softbank, the Japanese carrier for the iPhone. Push *email* (yes, email, not mms or sms) has been standard on Japanese cellphone for at least as long as I’ve been here (that would be 8 years). And because Apple wants to sell more MobileMe subscriptions, Softbank was forced to create a special domain (@i.softbank.jp) to make it non-push, to please Apple.

Push is simply a fancy way to describe the “IDLE” function of an IMAP mail server. MobileMe is simply an IMAP mail server with IDLE support. When you configure your account through the MobileMe button in Mail.app on the iPhone, it’s just a preconfigured template of an IMAP account, which hides the details of the server.

This template advertises support for IDLE to the server, whereas the normal “other / IMAP” Mail.app button does not : there you go, all of a sudden, your IMAP server with IDLE support can’t hold a connection to Mail.app, i.e. no “push”.
(how do I know ? well, I jailbroke my iPod touch with 2.0.0 and peeked at all the config files)

Another way to witness that is to configure your MobileMe through the “other” button of Mail.app : you can send/receive emails, but oh surprise, push doesn’t work anymore…

This is just a very lame way to promote a paying service for something that has been free and standard in Japan for almost a decade.

So here, that’s why I think the Japanese market has been an afterthought on the iPhone OS 2.0.x.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 22nd, 2008 at 04:21 CEST and is filed under Apple talk, Rants & Raves, Software, iPhone. 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.