Cui – On My Way

You know what the title means? I don’t, until I google it and find out it’s the name of a song by Mogwai.

You know why I put it here? ‘Coz it’s shown in my iphone somehow this morning!

Although i haven’t figure out what’s exactly the repro steps are, I do know it’s related to the sync between iphone and iTunes, esp. when something goes wrong, like iphone is disconnected before iTunes has completed the sync or something like that.

I’m sorry i didn’t take the picture. But if you have seen it, you may understand what i’m talking about. Guess what? I think Mogwai is, perhaps, one of some Apple iPhone engineer or product manager’s favorite bands. And that’s why he or she put this easter egg into iPhone.

If you enter google.com in iphone’s safari browser, by default you will redirect to google.cn sometime, which may not be what you want. If so, try yidong.google.com.

I know it’s a Chinese PinYin for the word ‘mobile’(移动), but it does be able to take you to google’s default global-search, other than the Chinese-only one.

Besides,there you can also see the google’s new move on web apps esp. for iphone as below.

Rumor source here 

D.Phone(迪信通) is one of the largest phone retailers here in beijing, even whole mainland. Actually my first mobile phone moto P7689 was bought there in Jan, 2001.

I think to make iphone available to china, at least the deal should cover several issues:

1.Official unlocked iphone.
Perhaps the same as the Germany/France version. Good news, anyway, isn’t it?

2.UI Localization
This may not be a big issue.
Actually even without the official one, an Chinese lang pack are already there by achan11.
 
3.App Localization
Like Chinese Input(I know you’ve already got iCosta or NativeCn working, but kinda hand-writing IME is still necessary), Phone Enhancement(CallID correctly recognition etc).

4.Hardware Localization
Perhaps, Wifi module has to been removed as required by Chinese goverment(sorry,it’s in Chinese).
But I wonder how many people still wanna buy such an iphone.

We all know iPhone’s multi-touch technology based user interface, but can you imagine what a ‘bigger version’ will look like?

Well, check out this video.

Awesome, isn’t it?

It does remind me of something similar: Microsoft Surface. Tons of videos could be found in YouTube. and here’s one of them.

So, A whole new chapter in user experience is coming. And I’m ready to say ‘Cheers!’.

Apple, China Mobile discuss China iPhone

Considering the market of the CMCC’s more than 523 million subscribers with about 7million/mon growth rate, guess Steve would make a compromise. As a result, the Chinese mobile users will benefit from that.

iPhone, as invention Of the Year by NYT, even though Apple has made the restriction on the amount and the way that people buy iphone, still drops to 3999RMB(535USD) in Guangzhou, China(in Chinese) today.

Of course, it’s Chinese-localized, activated and unlocked by the resellers. All in all, it works perfect in both China Mobile and China Unicom.

And i think that price of iphone is still very competitive to the following competitors, although it’s 235USD more than in US:

N95(8GB) : 5999RMB(803USD)

N93i : 3990RMB(534USD)

Moto RAZR : 2600RMB(348USD)

Sony-Ericsson P1i : 3080RMB(412USD)

Confirmed.

Now that the function of chinese input support is much more important than a pretty handsome apperance, then I uninstalled SummerBoard.

Of course, iCosta is back.

P.S. I’m in 1.0.2.

Update: iCosta CAN work under SummerBoard as holly  pointed at the comment.

1.You must install weDict first by either iBrickr or Installer.

2.Then download the dictionary in your language from startdict.

For me, I downloaded the oxford-gb dictionary(en – zh_CN) 牛津现代英汉双解词典(click to download). And the file I got is stardict-oxford-gb-2.4.2.tar.bz2.

3.Now unzip the .bz2 file by winrar, which is the one I take, or any other uncompress software you prefer.

Three files extracted: oxford-gb.idx, oxford-gb.ifo,oxford-gb.dict.dz.

4.Re-unzip the .dz file by the freeware 7zip to a .dict one. WinRar can’t do this for you.

5.Copy the .idx and .dict files to iPhone’s /var/root/Library/weDict/ by WinSCP or Putty.

6.Launch weDict and enjoy!

Update: for the most recent weDict version 0.5, in order to make the newly added dictionary work, you have to manually choose the dictionary first(which is not necessary in the previous version).You can get it by checking the following picture out.

One more thing,if you use WinScp to copy the dict files to iPhone, make sure you copy them to the right place, because WinScp’s default folder for iphone is very similar to the right folder. Again, see the picture, please.

Update(Feb 12,2008): If you are in firmware 1.1.3 and weDict can’t work any more, you may check out George’s fix as quoted below. There’s lots of other fixes here.

weDict stores the dictionary index cache in /var/root/Library/weDict, if for some reason this folder was not created (which is my case), apply the following fix:

mkdir /var/mobile/Library/weDict

chown mobile /var/mobile/Library/weDict

ln -s /var/mobile/Library/weDict /var/root/Library/.

Update(Jul.10,2008): I’ve uploaded the oxford ready-for-iphone dict files here(click to download). Download and unzip it to your local disk, then copy the two dict files to the right folder on the phone. Launch wedict and enjoy.

Update(Sep.26,2008): Currently the dictionary files you copied to the wedict folder are NOT always avaiable. Check out the details on the comments of this post here.

NativeCn is another chinese input method for iphone. It works only under fw 1.1.1 as said. Most latest build is 1.0.1 beta.

Compared with iCosta which i use in my iphone(1.0.2), NativeCn has more input methods  like Traditional Chinese(繁体), Guangdong(粤语) even Japanese.

Installation steps:
1. Download NativeCn_1.01.zip;
2. Extract then copy the folder to iphone’s folder: Applications/
3. Set the execute permission by running:
cd /Applications/NativeCn.app

chmod +x ncn

The installer.app installation is under developing.

Since my ff is 1.0.2 then i haven’t got the chance to take a try on NativeCn yet. And i’m sure i will later, after an upgrade to 1.1.1.

Yeah! All chinese iphone owners can now enter chinese characters in any iphone applications now! Yes, you get it: a platform IME! COOL,right? :-):-)

Oh, I forgot its name: iCosta. And now version is 0.9.

If you use Installer (AppTApp), please launch Safari in iphone to visit here. Then follow the instructions and reboot your iphone;
If you use iBrickr, then download iCosta.pxl and install from your local disk. Don’t forget to reboot your iphone, either.

And the switch between en keyboard and ch is “.124” key. Try it out now! Time to say goodbye to my installed SMS chin apps now with much appreciation

Update(Sep.25,2008): for now, iCosta has updated to 1.2.3(Chinese) for the new iPhone OS 2.0.x and 2.1. You can get it through Cydia. Currently iCosta is still my preferred IME for Chinese.

Update(Sep.16,2009): 1.2.8 for 3.0&3.0.1 released.