When Apple announced the iPhone last year at MacWorld, it seemed as though their goal was to introduce something new and fresh which they successfully accomplished. The phone itself is an incredible device with revolutionary new features. The fact that the iPhone is touch-screen showed that Apple wanted to get away from buttons or a stylus like what we’ve seen in phones and PDA’s for quite a while now, and offer something different. The whole touch-screen method has gone over well for them which is why we’re a little confused at a job that they recently posted on their site.
The job was posted on March 14th on Apple.com, and the title is “Handwriting Recognition Engineer.” When you read the description, you learn that they’re looking for someone to advance Apple’s handwriting recognition technology for Mac OS X. This makes sense if they’re hoping to launch a tablet computer like what has been rumored for a while now but what doesn’t make sense is the last sentence in the description. It reads, “The recognition technology you create may extend beyond Mac OS X to other applications and the iPhone.” Yes, it says the iPhone. Does this mean that if they were able to perfect the handwriting recognition technology, that they would try to incorporate it into the iPhone? If so, does that mean we might be seeing a stylus with a future generation iPhone?
Of course we have to think outside of the box and think about other ways in which Apple could use handwriting recognition technology on the iPhone. An Engadget commenter (VganTN T) makes this point and says:
Maybe the recognition isn’t for user input…
What about writing on a piece of paper, taking a photo of it, and having any recognized text be put into the notes app?
Ready for editing or emailing.
We really can’t see Apple selling an iPhone with a stylus, so it’ll be interesting to see what comes of this, if anything. Apple could have just thrown that line in the job description about the iPhone to get people talking, who knows! Any thoughts?
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Tags: Gadgets, Hardware, Software, Apple, iPhone
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Could they be aiming to make Tablet style laptops like Microsoft pushed for the last few years but never took off? Just because it’s for OS X does not necessarily mean it’s for the iPhone.
Ashley actually underlined the last part of the job description that says they want to take it “beyond Mac OS X to other applications and the iPhone.” So they are definitely targeting the iPhone, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they were working on a tablet either.
I doubt it would involve taking pictures of hand written notes, as that would be OCR, not handwriting recognition, they’re completely different. As Microsoft has shown, hand writing recognition is far more simple than OCR. And if Apple really is going to start implementing hand writing recognition, they have to play a huge game of catch up, because MS has had it perfected for at least 9 years now.
You’re right, Microsoft has had it perfected for quite a while now. I remember how well the handwriting recognition worked about 7-8 years ago when I bought my first Compaq iPAQ Pocket PC!