I just returned from the Symbian Smartphone Show in London. Nestled among the exhibitors showing off their coolest software on the coolest phone hardware were a couple of N770's on a hands-on display. I was naturally sucked in.

The vendor was Tegic -- the maker of T9 software that enables typing words quickly on mobile phones through the numeric keypad. I'm sure many of you have seen/used it. The display was showing off a new product -- XT9 -- on phones and several N770's. It looked great, was very fast, and recognized all the crappy handwriting I threw at it. I was intentionally bad, and it still figured out what I wanted, while giving me very educated guesses as I wrote my words. Just like T9 on a mobile phone.

So I pestered several sales droids at the booth about getting the software so I could run it. Finally, one said: "You can't get the software. It should be a part of the OS in..." and she turned to a Nokia rep next to her "...2007. Right?" At which point, the Nokia guy just smiled and said "I can't say."

Is new handwriting recognition on the way for OS2007? If it is XT9 like the demo I used, it would be BIG stuff! What an improvement!

You can find out more about XT9 at Tegic's Web site: http://www.tegic.com/products/xt9.asp. Nothing I can read mentions the 770, but we can always hope.

Anyone else hear anything?

-F

Cool, If they already have it running on the N770 then its almost a given that it will be in a future OS version!
I mean, why go to all the effort of porting to the 770 otherwise?

This is great news if it's true. Makes one wonder what other goodies are coming in the next OS upgrade.

Reading their info says it also handles speech recognition. I'm guessing you didn't see that, or it wasn't enabled/available on the 770, eh?

Personally, I'd like to also have the ability to scrawl directly on the screen (perhaps hitting a toggle key), without having to popup/down the input area, and have it propogate to the proper entry field on the screen. That alone would increase speed and functionality.. imo.

Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!

Now, darnit!

It was very, very fast? You sure those 770s had the same guts as ours?!!?

Before we go into a war of words on this subject: What exactly do you know about HWR algorithms?

It's also worth noting that a 250MHz ARM is a *fast* processor; maybe not compared with a 3GHz Core Duo, but it's easy to forget how much such a thing *can* do.

No kidding. I am amazed by how fast everything works on my newly acquired 770. Not at all what I expected, the video playback especially being better than I thought.

(then again, I still occasionally use a PIII 500 Mhz with 128ram and Win98... )

<Time for another gratuitous Newton insert>

The Newton MessagePad 2X00 manages to do near-faultless cursive HWR (I use it for English, Duch and French texts) with a 162 MHz ARM, 4 MB of RAM and 8 MB of ROM. Add to that that the Newton's operating system is basically interpreted, not compiled and you can easily see how processing power is not really paramount in HWR.

Writing good code OTOH is, and unfortunately that appears to be a rapidly fading art...