Sayonara, Moto. May 9, 2008
Posted by stshores24 in Miscellaneous.Tags: character set, difficulty, Japanese, kanji, Khatzumemo, language, moto razr, moto razr v3, motorazr, motorola, Opera Mobile, pictograms, Unicode
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Or at least it will be ‘bye-bye’ once we can upgrade.
I like my Moto Razr V3. I wish it had the memory expansion slot, and a nicer camera would be good too. But all-in-all, it’s a fun phone, and its looks aren’t bad to boot.
The thing that’s really annoying me about the Moto Razr is its lack of support for a full Unicode character set, or at least a Japanese character set.
I spent a good portion of the afternoon looking for a solution for this. Surely someone our there on the Intarwebz has managed to hack their American Razr and put a Japanese character set on it.
Um, erm…guess not. I think the only Motorola phones you can get that have the Japanese character set on them are sold in Japan. And none of the Japanese keitai support GSM (as GSM is not used in Japan), so I can’t use them over here on my AT&T account.
Who cares? Well, this has come into play now that I’m in serious Kanji-learning mode. I was excited when I fired up Opera Mobile and browsed over to Khatzumemo, the SRS that I’m using to help me retain my knowledge. Now I can learn on the go, right?
Wrong. Little boxes appear where the nifty little pictograms should be. Instead of flower children with magic wands and clams walking upright (no, I’m not doing drugs, these are some of the mnemonic devices in the book), I see little squares. Little squares which indicate that the device I’m using does not support a full Unicode set. Little squares that make it impossible for me to study on the go.
I guess when it’s time to upgrade next time, I’ll have to do my research and find a phone here in the U.S. that supports kanji. I’ll probably need something that has dual modes, too, so I can use one phone here and there. (I know we’ll visit Japan eventually.) Any suggestions?
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You should see if you can get a phone from Japan because American phones won’t have Japanese script on them.
It’s nice that cell phones can take pictures and do other things, but my first priority is a phone that doesn’t drop calls or erratically shut off. The picture feature is nice, but the quality is never going to be very nice. A camera that has a lens smaller than a dime is not going to take quality pictures.
I’m not looking for a fully Japanese phone, just a phone that will support a full Unicode set. And Japanese phones won’t work on AT&T because AT&T uses GSM networks, and there are no GSM networks in Japan. I’d have to switch carriers.
As far as reliability, I haven’t had any problems with the Razr. I’ve never had a dropped call, even in the elevator of the stone-and-steel building where I work. The speakerphone feature is nice, too.
[...] Obviously, Khatzumemo is much more granular. The interface is not quite as pretty as RevTK or some of the installable SRS programs out there (Mnemosyne and Anki are a few I’ve seen used), but it’s fully portable, which is a BIG plus. I can load kanji at home and review them at work, or vice versa. If my phone supported Unicode or at least Japanese character sets, I could review them on the go (provided I also had an unlimited data plan), but wishes are fishes or something like that, and I’ve already ranted about that before. [...]