Panasonic Corporation

Panasonic Intellectual Property Management Co., Ltd.

Teruo Koukai

Toshiyuki Tanaka

Tomohiro Koganei

Kouichi Kanemura

Yasushi Kojima

Hiroyoshi Ohmiya

A character input device includes: a terminal control unit that accepts information on a character candidate being a candidate of an input confirmed character, and performs a displaying process of the character candidate, and generates a guide image whose image varies in accordance with a remaining time until an input confirmation of the character candidate; and a display unit that displays the character candidate and the guide image. By displaying the guide image that varies in accordance with the remaining time before the input character is confirmed, how long it takes until the character is confirmed, or whether the character has already been confirmed is reported to the user, so as to avoid an unintended manipulation of the user.

Character input device and character input method

In a client/server system that authenticates according to a terminal ID, a terminal authentication apparatus is provided that is capable of authenticating a terminal device correctly even if the method of generating a terminal ID has been changed from the old version to a new one, and thus useful as an authentication apparatus for a net TV, mobile phone, on-line network for ATMs, and the like. The apparatus transmits two terminal IDs generated with the generation methods in both old and new versions. With this method, the server authenticates from these two terminal IDs according to the ID fields of the old and new versions, and additionally updates the ID in the old version to a new one.

Terminal authentication apparatus and method

Growing community of inventors

Nara, Japan

Teruo Koukai