Fujitsu Corporation

Ntt Docomo, Inc.

Osamu Ota

Keiichi Iwamura

Shunsuke Tanaka

Kazuhiro Yoshihara

Junya Yamaguchi

A character input device not completely occupying a screen, good in visibility, and enabling input of characters while reducing to a minimum the movement of the fingers and line of sight, which, in the case of input of for example the hiragana 50-character phonetic syllabary of the Japanese language, displays an initial block of the major group lead characters a (), ka (), sa (), ta (), na () on a first row of a character input region on a display screen and the block of the remaining major group lead characters ha (), ma (), ya (), ra (), wa () on the second row, allows movement of a focus position or character position by 'left' and 'right' keys (a ()&#x2192;ka ()&#x2192;sa ()&#x2192; . . . ), switches the character focused to the block of ha (), ma (), ya (), ra (), wa () after the focus position reaches na (), allows switching between displayed characters by for example using the &#x201c;down&#x201d; key to move to the next character (for example, a ()&#x2192;i ()&#x2192;u ()&#x2192; . . . ) and using the &#x201c;up&#x201d; key to move to the furthest character in the group (for example, a ()&#x2192;o ()&#x2192; . . . ), and allowing input of the character by using a &#x201c;decision&#x201d; key when the character to be input is focused on.

Growing community of inventors

Tokamachi, Japan

Osamu Ota