There might, you know, be a few living in the US and every where else, along with Japanese, Koreans, Thai's, etc. Some of them might even have iPhones if you can believe it!

"the numbers 520 in Chinese ("wu er ling") sound like the words for "I love you" ("wo ai ni")."

Is there a real use for it? I can see the use for chinese, but I can't see the use for english - you'll be using a finger so you'll probably draw each letter quite big for it to be recognised, and from previous use of tablet PCs they're usually quite slow. Once you get used to typing with the iPhone you can usually be quite fast - three finger typing is about as fast as normal typing on a full keyboard. Surely it'll be awful for passwords as well - if you can see what you're typing so can everyone else, but if you can't then how do you know it's doing it right?

Well done to the guys that developed it - I just can't see much of a use for it.

Wow, for a phone that gets so much hype, it sure it missing a lot of standard features found on several other phones (basically any Windows Mobile phone for starters) for years!

such an important feature that no one mentioned it was missing until this guy made it, i can't say I lost any sleep over it, then again I don't whinge like a little bitch about it being too expensive not 3g and lacking a 100 megapixel camera I'd never use

Once you have handwriting recognition capability for hanzi, then spotting japanese, korean, thai, even arabic characters is a simple change. Start with the most complicated first, yes?

If you don't use that, then sending 520 is to your girlfriend is good, sending 5201314 is better. But sending 748 to anyone is very very bad.

LOL

Been so long since I played with a Newton I'd forgotten how 'good' the recognition was :)

Please put me out of my misery.

"If you don't use that, then sending 520 is to your girlfriend is good, sending 5201314 is better. But sending 748 to anyone is very very bad."

5201314

748

I need to know.

They avoid any instances for the number 4 as it sounds like "death". Ironically, one of the "best luck" numbers is 666 ;)

There are some articles on the 'net and/or Wikipedia that talk about this particular custom.

As a former Palm and HP Jornada PocketPC user, I don't think of using a "finger-based" handwrite recognition system in the near future ... stylus-based was bad enough!