Fujitsu’s quatrasexual 4-way slider phone
Fujitsu touts four-way slider phone
Reg Hardware:
Fancy a phone with a large enough screen to surf the web as well as you would on a desktop? Fujitsu may have the answer… the Japanese giant has a couple of futuristic mobile phone designs up its sleeve. The first is a landscape-orientation unit designed more for browsing than making calls. Dubbed the “slider”, it sports a full keyboard….
SWEET!
To bad Fujitsu will never sell this this 4-way slider phone in Japan—phone with Blackberry-style keyboards are nearly impossible to buy in Japan. All people here can “thumb” the keypad of cellphone to type Japanese at the same speed as typing on a normal keyboard.
Why?
Because Japanese is so sloooooow to type their having a keyboard doesn’t make any difference in typing speed. Typing Japanese is always a crappy two stage process of first phonetically inputing words and then converting to kanji picture characters. Since Japanese is highly phonetic at the first input stage, Japanese inputs rather well on a cellphone keypad, especially with predictive input functionality. The oyayubi-zoku(親指 æ— ) —the “thumb tribe”— is “lucky” aren’t they?
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