Nokia unveils intuitive handset for China

Finnish phone giant Nokia is betting that a tiny stylus will give it an edge in China, the world's largest market for handsets and one of the few it has yet to dominate.

The company has unveiled the Nokia 6108, created in the firm's product design centre in Beijing, and aimed at certain Asian markets only. The phone's keypad flips open to reveal a small area on which Chinese words can be handwritten with a stylus.

A character recognition engine will convert the scrawls into text, which can then be sent as a message.

On other phones, users have to key in phonetic Chinese using Western letters, which can be tedious. Nokia says its new feature is a more intuitive and natural way to write Chinese SMS messages.

"Younger users in urban cities are accustomed to using the keypad but rural users could find the writing method more convenient," said Tomi Paatsila, director of Nokia Asia-Pacific's mobile phone business unit.

Chinese messaging is fast taking off in the mainland and this feature could serve to enhance the appeal of Nokia phones in a market crowded with international and domestic rivals.

"In March alone, 15.9 billion SMS messages were sent by China's some 220 million mobile subscribers," said Paatsila.

The Nokia 6108 sports a built-in Chinese-English dictionary with a library of more than 100,000 words and supports both simplified (used in China and Singapore) and traditional Chinese characters (used in Hong Kong and Taiwan).

Besides the predictive text input feature, the dictionary also allows for translation of words from Chinese to English and vice versa, added Paatsila.

Nokia's bid to create a more natural Chinese input system is not new. In China and Taiwan, domestic makers of handhelds and electronic dictionaries have for years included stylus input and handwriting recognition in their products. Computer users can also buy stylus pads with handwriting recognition, or even Chinese speech recognition systems.

However, all these products have only found a niche market - poor ease-of-use and less-then-perfect recognition accuracy remain their greatest weaknesses. The majority of Chinese computer text is still input using a phonetic system with a standard keyboard.

The Nokia 6108 also features a lunar calendar pinpointing dates of Chinese festivals and even comes complete with five themed wallpapers depicting the five traditional Chinese elements of metal, wood, water, fire and earth.

Beyond the Asian customisation, the 98-gram tri-band handset comes with standard frills seen in Nokia's recent products. These include a colour screen which supports up to 4,096 colours, GPRS connectivity, polyphonic ring tones and Java games.

Outside Singapore, the new gadget was also showcased in seven other Asian countries - China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Malaysia, Vietnam, Indonesia and Thailand - yesterday.

The Nokia 6108 will be commercially available in Asia-Pacific in the third quarter but pricing is not confirmed.

This latest Nokia effort mirrors product customisation strategies adopted by other handset makers in bid to boost market share.

In China, Motorola continues to sell more phones than anyone else but fierce competition has since prompted the firm to step up research and development investments in the country and speed up the introduction of 14 Chinese handsets.