Motorola Corporation

Figen Ulgen

Kannan Parthasarathy

Jin Guo

Carlos Isak McEvilly

An apparatus for inputting ideographic characters such as Chinese and Japanese characters, comprising an input pad having at least three rows and three columns of keys, forming a square with four corners and one corner key at each corner. At least two of the corner keys ( ) have corner-shaped stroke representions shaped approximately in correspondence with the corresponding corners. This gives a user a useful visual aid. Keys of a left-hand row ( ) represent strokes that predominate in left-hand portions of characters and radicals, and keys of a right-hand row ( ) represent strokes that predominate in right-hand portions of characters and radicals. A lower-left key ( ) represents a stroke having a right hook and a lower-right key ( ) represents a stroke having a left hook. These features lend themselves to ergonomic efficiency in character entry.

Keypad with strokes assigned to key for ideographic text input

The present invention provides a user interface having a plurality of user entry regions (,and,) Each user entry region is preferably separated into a first user entry sub-region (,) and a second user entry sub-region (,) by a visual cue (,). A first character is received in the first user entry sub-region (,) and a second character is received in the second user entry sub-region (,) to provide a unitary collection of strokes. The unitary collection of strokes is then matched as a whole against at least one character template in order to identify a desired character of a user.

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Palo Alto, CA, United States of America

Figen Ulgen