A comparison of bike-computer iPhone apps

/ cycling

Although most serious cyclists use dedicated head units, I’ve used iphone apps for about as long as I’ve had an iphone. I haven’t used all the apps that are out there, but I have used a few.

My own cycling interests lean towards long-distance rides and bikepacking. Nearly all my rides are solo. This informs what I do and don’t prioritize in an app. I currently do not have a power meter, although that will change at some point. I do use a heart-rate monitor.

The way I use all of these apps during a ride is mostly to rely on periodic spoken updates (via a bone-conduction headset) for my stats rather than looking at the screen. This lets me keep the screen dark, which makes a huge difference in battery life. Although I can keep my phone charged on the road as long as it’s not raining, I have ridden through rain that prevented me from charging my phone for 12 hours, and finished the ride with about 25% battery reserves. So these spoken updates are important to me. I set up each of these apps to recite my average speed and average heart rate for the entire ride, and for the past 15-minute split. I use this to judge my pacing. What I have found is that Ride with GPS doesn’t get these stats correct. Most (but not all) of the updates give the same values for the whole ride as for the last split, which is mathematically impossible unless I have perfect consistency (I don’t). Cadence and Cyclemeter seem to get these right. Navigr8 doesn’t give the option of reporting split average heart rate, though it will report split average speed.

The Ride with GPS app requires that you have an account with the service to use it, although they do offer free accounts as well as two tiers of paid memberships. Navigr8 requires you create an account on sign-in. Cyclemeter, Cadence, and Navigr8 all offer paid subscriptions to unlock additional features; I’ve paid for subscriptions to all of them and am evaluating them on that basis without paying attention to what is available at the free tier.

Cyclemeter, RwGPS, and Cadence all offer live tracking so that the folks back home can monitor your progress: the apps generate a link to a check-in page that you can send out. Cyclemeter can also e-mail notifications at regular intervals. Obviously these all depend on having internet connectivity during your ride. If you and the people who tracking you have Apple products, you can just use Find My, so this is mostly useful when sharing your progress with someone who does not.

Cadence and Navigr8 can keep the screen active but dimmed—I think of this as pseudo-locking. This is nice because it means you don’t need to unlock the screen in order to view the dashboard, just tap on it, but it also means that the screen is susceptible to unintended taps, and on Navigr8’s busy screen, that’s potentially a problem.

Battery life

The usual knock against using a smartphone as a bike computer is that the battery life isn’t good enough. I just described how I’ve adapted to using periodic spoken updates instead of keeping the screen on. But what if you want to keep the screen on, and don’t have a dynamo hub to keep the phone charged? What kind of battery life could you get?

I have an iPhone 16 Pro. This model is known to have great battery life in general. It’s about a year old and the battery health is rated at 100%. I set up Cyclemeter to keep the screen on for the duration of my ride, turned on energy savings, turned off wifi, and left the screen brightness at whatever level I normally keep it at (good enough for most conditions, but not direct sunlight). I had two Bluetooth devices connected: a heart-rate monitor, and a bone-conduction headset (playing music for most of the ride). After a ride lasting 2:50, the battery was at 82%. Assuming the burn rate is linear, this works out to about 6.35% per hour, or about 15.75 hours of use. Call it 12 hours to leave something in reserve in case of emergency. That is not as good as a top-tier bike computer, but it is good enough for a lot of situations.

Cyclemeter

Cyclemeter is one of the oldest apps on the App Store, and it shows. It is decidedly old-school in some ways: it relies on e-mail for outbound communication. It has a monolithic database rather than individual route/ride files. It organizes rides based on routes, which makes a certain amount of sense when performance over a known route is the only way you have of judging your fitness progress, but makes less sense in light of newer training metrics. Setting up the dashboard (Cyclemeter calls this the “stopwatch”) pages is really tedious.

It’s not all bad though. The dashboard display is the best of the lot, and is the only one that looks like a native app (it was developed for the iPhone but eventually was released for Android also). There’s good “fit and finish” on everything. Someone using the app for the first time should be able to launch it, tap the Start button, and go for a ride without any further instruction: the basic features are intuitive.

One quirk of this app is that although it can show a map view as a dashboard cell, you can’t pan or zoom that map. Instead, there’s a separate map tab for that. The dashboard can show a course elevation profile, but this is barely readable.

A Cyclemeter dashboard panel

Ride with GPS

RwGPS is better known as a service for designing and sharing routes, but they do offer their own bike-computer app that is closely integrated with the service. RwGPS has staked out a different territory than Strava, and is not so much oriented toward performance cycling as toward touring, long-distance riding, and route-sharing. It does have segments and some of the same social features as Strava, but these don’t seem to be widely used. The app reflects this different focus. It lacks some pretty basic features, like a lap button. The dashboard screens give limited customization: you get 2 pages with 5 fields each, and you can customize what goes in each of those. And those fields are displayed in small type—the focus is on the map. But the app gives very fine-grained control over navigational alerts.

This is the only one of these apps that does not offer a dark mode. This is not just an aesthetic matter: all newish iphones have OLED displays, which means that only the lit-up pixels use electricity. A display that is mostly black will use less power. RwGPS partially makes up for this by being the only one of these to use live updates on the lock screen, a relatively new iOS feature, which lets you check your basic stats without unlocking the screen at all.

As far as I can tell, RwGPS is the only one of these apps that will display a cue sheet.

Like Cyclemeter, it’s intuitive. A first-time user shouldn’t be confused by it. A very high degree of “it just works.”

A RwGPS dashboard panel

Cadence

Cadence is a newer app that’s trying to do it all: it acts as a regular bike computer, it lets you design routes, and lets you design structured workouts. This is ambitious for a one-man shop.

The way you edit the dashboard pages in Cadence is to go into the settings, where you can view a simplified schematic of your grid, and tap on cells to set their contents. Cadence gives you a lot of flexibility in how you populate the grid; it’s the only app that will show three cells in a row, and it maintains a completely separate set of dashboard layouts for landscape orientation. It’s the only one of these apps designed to work in landscape as near as I can tell. It can also show graphs in cells (of heart rate, for example), although this is just a novelty if you’re cramming the graph into a small cell.

One quirk of this app is the companion Apple Watch app: When you go for a ride, the Apple Watch will normally detect that you’re going for a ride, tap you on the wrist, and ask if you want to record the ride using Apple’s own Workout app. If you’re using one of these apps, you probably don’t want to do that. Cadence’s watch app will override the “do you want to record this?” notification, but not the wrist tap, which quickly gets annoying. I haven’t found a way to prevent that, short of turning off reminders from the Workout app entirely. I mentioned this to the developer and he shrugged it off. This is too bad because I like Cadence’s watch app better than any of the others on its own merits.

In theory, Cadence can import externally created routes, but in practice, this feature is not useful: it can only import GPX files, and it seems that a GPX file can either contain a path, or waypoints, but not both (or at least, RwGPS will only export one or the other but not both). It seems that the author is more focused on fleshing out the app’s internal route-design features than working with external services like RwGPS.

This is the only one of these apps that can run structured workouts. As of this writing, it cannot control a smart trainer, but the company’s website says that is planned for a future release. That would add a lot of value to this app.

A Cadence dashboard panel

Navigr8

Everything about Navigr8 is just nerdy and cartoony, starting with the name. The dashboard display is unpolished, with colorful icons, gridlines that are inconsistent and get chopped off by the screen’s rounded corners (not obvious in the screencaps), bad typography (is that…Arial?). The off-track and on-track trumpets sound like they’re from a circus. The map tiles try to cram way too many controls in, and in direct sunlight, they’re barely visible. The overall fit and finish feels poor. Although all these apps let you swipe left and right through dashboard pages (even RwGPS), this is the only one that doesn’t show swipe animations, which is frankly jarring.

Another jarring aspect of this app is that navigation and ride recording are separate operations. Normally one would load a route, tap the start button, ride the route, tap the stop button, and you’re done. With this, you load the route, tap the “navigate” button to navigate it, tap the “record” button to record the ride, then tap the “stop” button to finish the ride, and tape the “on track” (or “off track”) button to stop navigating.

The way you edit the dashboard on this app is by defining the grid in the settings, and then on the dashboard itself selecting each cell to decide what goes into it.

Navigr8 gamely attempts to estimate power based on what data you can give it if you don’t have a power meter, but I don’t believe the numbers it produces are remotely accurate.

It supposedly has something like Garmin’s ClimbPro that pops up an elevation profile when you’re on a big climb, but I did not see this. The elevation-profile cell shows a fixed-distance look-ahead, and can step through a few distance options.

One great feature is the ability to add a waypoint while riding, with a spoken note. The documentation goes into considerable detail on its waypoint features, and how they can be used to trigger certain events, which sounds interesting, but isn’t something I’ve tried.

I eventually got imported routes to work correctly, but it took some experimentation. There are a number of file formats that can be used in conjunction with bike-computer apps. GPX, FIT, TCX, KML. GPX is probably the best known, but least useful for sending turn-by-turn directions. It seems that a GPX file can contain either the route as lines on the map, or directions, but not both. FIT can contain both, and is a binary file format. TCX can contain both, and is an XML format. Navigr8 could import a FIT file, but treated it as the route only, without directions. A TCX file worked correctly, with both the route and directions and a custom POI that I added working correctly.

Getting a TCX file from RwGPS into it is a bit of a trick. The RwGPS app will not export TCX files or share them using the standard share sheet. In order to get the TCX file:

  • Open the RwGPS website in your iphone’s browser.
  • Navigate to the route you want, and under the MORE menu select “Export as File.”
  • Choose the “TCX Course” file type and download it.
  • Open the Files app. The Files app separates your files between “on my phone” and “iCloud Drive.” Make sure you’re in iCloud Drive.
  • Open the Downloads folder.
  • The downloaded TCX file should be at the top of the list. Press and hold on it to bring up a menu of options, and tap Share.
  • From the resulting list of share targets, select Navigr8. You might need to scroll to the side of the sideways list of target apps and tap “More” to find it.

This is kind of a pain. RwGPS could make it easier if they wanted to.

Navigr8 has a lot of promise, but it needs a lot of work.

A Navigr8 dashboard panel

Feature comparison

Feature Cyclemeter RwGPS Cadence Navigr8
Dashboard
Custom dashboard pages 🟢 🔴 🟢 🟢
Music control 🟢 Locally stored music only 🔴 🔴 🔴
Weather data 🟢 🔴 🟢 🟢
Elevation profile 🟢 🟢 🟢 🟢
Offline map tiles 🔴 🟢 🟢 🟢 Possible but awkward
Map providers Apple, Google Numerous Apple, Google, Mapbox Apple, Google
Lap button 🟢 🔴 🟢 🟢
Custom screen lock 🟢 🟢 🟢 🟢
Screen dim 🔴 🔴 🟢 🟢
Integrations
Ride with GPS 🔴 🟢 🔴 🔴
Training Peaks 🔴 🔴 🔴 🔴
Intervals.icu 🔴 🔴 🟢 🟢
Strava 🟢 🟢 🟢 🟢
Apple Health 🟢 🟢 🟢 🟢
Navigation
Turn-by-turn directions 🔴 🟢 Works with RwGPS maps only 🟢 Internally designed routes only 🟢 With some trouble
Live tracking 🟢 🟢 🟢 🔴
Notifications
Live activities on lock screen 🔴 🟢 🔴 🔴
Periodic spoken notifications 🟢 🟢 🟢 🟢
Other
Apple Watch companion app 🟢 🟢 🟢 🟢
Alternative display device 🟢 House-brand dashboard panel 🔴 🟢 ActiveLook AR glasses 🟢 ActiveLook AR glasses
Training Plan manager 🟢 🔴 🟢 🔴
Ghost competitor 🟢 🔴 🔴 🟢

Other thoughts

Most bike-computer apps offer a lot of flexibility in dashboard layout, but not a lot of discipline. It would make more sense to have rows of related items. Like all heart-rate data on one row, all weather day on one row, etc. Grouping like data together should make it possible to show more data more clearly in less space.

They also don’t show a lot of creativity in how data is displayed—for the most part, they’re taking the same “spreadsheet” approach that head units do, when so much more is possible. I’d love to see a histogram of my heart rate with the current zone highlighted, for example. But to take the spreadsheet concept in a different direction, a bike-computer app could give users the option to fill each cell with the result of a formula, given certain data primitives as terms in the formula. To go a step further, I imagine an app where the dashboard is a WebKit view that takes advantage of HTML, CSS, Javascript, and a library like D3 for data visualization. Custom fields could be shared as small chunks of code.

Years ago, when Saab was a company that made cars, they had a feature they called “night panel,” which would black out all the instruments except for the speedometer and anything that required your attention. I imagine something like this for a bike-computer app, where the screen “pseudo-locks” the way Cadence does, and you can specify certain fields that will stay lit up in this state.

If you use Training Peaks or other external services that aren’t well-supported, you probably want to download either HealthFit or RunGap. These both act as “switchyards” for your workout files, and can sync them to and from external services. I’ve tried both and am currently using HealthFit.

Phone report

/ technology

Gwen and I decided to update to the new iPhone 5, and along with that, I decided to switch carriers to Verizon. We’d previously been with AT&T, and Verizon was the one service that neither one of us had ever tried.

AT&T has notoriously bad service in San Francisco and New York from what I understand, but I had never had any trouble with them in Austin—except when there’s a big event in town that brings an influx of tens of thousands of visitors (and they’ve actually gotten pretty good about dealing with that). They do have lousy service out in the sticks—when I was riding the Southern Tier, I went a couple of days at a time without a signal. Verizon has better coverage in remote areas, including the site where Flipside is held, and now that I’m on the LLC, it will be more important for people to be able to reach me easily out there.

But so far, Verizon in Austin is not so great. I had no signal at all when I was inside Breed & Co on 29th St the other day. And Gwen had no data signal at Central Market on 38th St. And sound quality on voice calls seems to be worse than AT&T’s (this could be the phone itself, but I suspect it’s a voice codec issue). Usually, when I am getting a signal, it’s with LTE data, which is very fast. So there’s that.

And while I always felt that AT&T regarded me as an adversary, Verizon seems to regard me as a mark, which is even more galling than the poorer coverage. Immediately after signing up, I started getting promotional text-message spam from them. Apparently this can be disabled if you do the electronic equivalent of going into a sub-basement and shoving aside a filing cabinet marked “beware of the panther.” We also have those ARPU-enhancing “to leave a callback number…” messages tacked onto our outgoing voicemail greetings; some research showed that there are ways to disable this that vary depending on what state you live in (!), but none of them have worked for me so far. I’ve put in a help request. And every time I log into their website (mostly to put in help requests to deal with other annoying aspects of their service), they pop up some damn promotion that’s irrelevant to me. Like “get another line!”. Out of all the mobile carriers, the only one that I liked dealing with was T-mobile—but they’ve got the poorest coverage in Austin (I had to walk 2 blocks away from Gwen’s old place to get a signal), or anywhere else for that matter. As a friend who worked in the mobile-phone industry for years put it “They all suck.”

No complaints about the phones. I haven’t really tried out some of the new hardware features, like Bluetooth 4.0. The processor is much faster. The screen is noticeably better than on the iPhone 4, in addition to being bigger. People bitch about Apple’s Maps app. In Austin, I haven’t had any trouble with it, and in any case, Maps+ is available to give you that Google Maps feeling (in Iceland, I found that neither Apple Maps nor Google Maps had a level of granularity down to the street address—the best they could do was find the street).

Thoughts on an iPhone app for bike touring

/ cycling

I’ve played around with a number of iPhone apps for cyclists. None of the ones I’ve looked at are really optimized for bike touring—instead, they’re mostly oriented towards fitness cycling, which has somewhat different goals.

An iPhone app for bike touring would need to overcome the problem of battery life and fulfill three main tasks. Battery life isn’t as big a problem as it is generally made out to be, but even in a best-case scenario, it would be difficult to get a solid 24 hours of use out on a single charge when using the iPhone as a bike computer for a big part of the day.

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iPhone, Google apps for your domain, and Google “my maps”

/ technology

I’m documenting this publicly just in case anyone ever runs across the same problem I’ve been having.

I occasionally plot out routes on Google Maps and save them under My Maps. Curiously, there is no convenient way to get My Maps onto my iPhone. This leads to the slightly ridiculous situation where I would need to print out maps to bring with me.

Google Earth for the iPhone purportedly will access My Maps, but I couldn’t get that to work, because I sign into Google through Google Apps for Your Domain; there’s a web-based sign-in inside Google Earth, and when I attempted to sign in through the GAfYD (launched through the Google Search app, which otherwise works great), it would throw an error.

I have discovered if I log into Google Earth through the non-GAfYD interface, using my full e-mail address and the usual password, it works.

From what I understand, there’s only a limited ability to show personal maps in in the Maps app on the iPhone, and this can only be done via some hackery. Google Earth seems like the best option for accessing personal maps.

Survey of iPhone bike-computer apps

/ cycling, technology

I’ve written before about the iPhone’s potential and drawbacks as a bike computer. And there are a lot of bike-computer apps available for it right now. Let’s take a look at them.

I’ve gone on a bit of a kick lately and tried out four different ones. There are one or two others that I haven’t gotten around to yet. I hope to eventually, and will report on them in this space when I do.

Executive summary: Rubitrack for iPhone and Cyclemeter are clearly oriented towards performance cyclists; right now I’d give the nod to Cyclemeter. GPSies seems almost like a toy, but might be of use to hikers. Motion-X is for GPS otaku.

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Survey of iPhone bike-computer appsRead More »

Pulldock

/ technology

The “unofficial Apple weblog” had a post calling on readers to submit their wishlist for future iPhone OS features, which got me to thinking.

Multitasking is an obvious shortcoming on the iPhone right now. Multitasking is possible: some of Apple’s own apps run in the background, and there are jailbreak apps that allow apps to run in the background and for the user to switch between running apps. But Apple does not allow app-store apps to run in the background at all, presumably because of performance and battery-life problems.

I believe that multitasking on the iPhone can be broken down into two functional categories: apps that you want to run persistently in the background, and what I’m calling “interruptors”: brief tasks that only take a few seconds to complete, and where you don’t want to break out of your current app. I’m concerning myself with the latter case here.

A jailbreak Twitter app, qTweeter, has the kernel of an approach to presenting these interruptors: it pulls down from the top of the screen like a windowshade, and is accessible any time.

This approach could be generalized to present multiple apps in what I’m calling a pulldock. There could be one pulldock that pulls down from the top, another that pulls up from the bottom, to present up to eight interruptors.

I envision these interruptors being stripped-down interfaces to existing apps or services, such as twittering or text messaging, that would appear in some kind of HUD-like view superimposed over the running app. Interruptors should be lightweight enough that they wouldn’t overburden the phone. I can also imagine new ways of passing information between a regular app and an interruptor—such as launching a camera interruptor while in the mail app as a way to take a photo and insert it into a mail message, which would save a few steps.

Here’s a screencast:

Yeah, there’s a lot of “umms” and sniffing in there. It’s the first screencast I’ve ever done. The visuals were done in Keynote using the template from Mockapp.

Mobile Hub

/ technology

Years ago, Apple promoted the Mac as a “digital hub” for media. Today we take for granted that computers can be used as hubs for media.

Two of the numerous points covered in Apple’s recent demo of version 3.0 of the iPhone OS was that Apple was finally giving developers access to the port, as well as unblocking bluetooth. These points have largely gone unremarked, but in the long run, I suspect they’ll be especially significant. I think Apple is positioning the iPhone to be a mobile hub.

Right now, the iPhone/iPod Touch has a sharper display, more processing power, and better input affordances than many of the gadgets that we deal with on a day-to-day basis. I predict that some manufacturers will take note of this and start producing headless products that will only work with an iPhone snapped onto the front to take care of these functions and/or provide new functions. This could be a nice moneyspinner for Apple, because of their “iPod tax” on products marked as compatible, and because it would make the iPhone that much more appealing, thus increasing demand for it. It could also be a profitable niche for manufacturers to exploit, since they could sell a product that is more functional than conventional equivalents but cheaper to build.

For example:

  • Car stereos: A car stereo with no faceplate, but simply a bracket and plug for an iPhone strikes me as the most obvious category. Many aftermarket car stereos already have detachable faceplates anyhow, and this would be a logical extension of that idea. Giving direct access to music on the phone would be the obvious benefit, but it would allow tidier integration of phone functions into the car, and add navigation as a lagniappe. A custom app might give simplified access to phone, nav, and music, and perhaps would have a radio controller that communicated with an actual radio in the car stereo over the port.
  • Bike computers: There are already a number of interesting apps that can use the GPS chip on the iPhone to track performance and routes over a bike ride, but these are hampered by some of the phone’s limitations. One is that there’s no way to continue logging GPS data when the app is not running, for example, when answering a call. I’m not sure if 3.0 will change that. (A friend who works at Apple suggests it will, but I’m skeptical. All that would really be needed would be a simple background daemon that logged GPS data at regular intervals, allowing the actual app to pick up where it left off.) Apart from that, a bike-mounted cradle for the phone would permit wheel and heart-rate monitor data to be fed into the phone through the jack and could provide extra battery power to the phone—so far, the only way to get heart-rate monitor data into the phone has been through a specialized product that uses wifi. This is a clever hack, but bluetooth or some kind of low-power radio communicating with the cradle would be more appropriate.
  • Cameras: I’m not the first person to observe that serious cameras could use an interface more like an iPhone’s. Snapping an iPhone directly onto a camera back would be ungainly, but tethering it over a wire could make a lot of sense, making it a tool for managing captured photos, backing them up, appending metadata (including GPS), and transmitting them.
  • Trackpads: Again, there is already an app for the iPhone that allow it to function as a trackpad (or as a tenkey input, etc), but again, these work over wifi. Apple has done a lot to make the trackpad on laptops not only a tolerable alternative to the mouse but in many ways a superior one. I can imagine a keyboard with a snap-in slot for the iPhone that turns it into a trackpad, giving those advantages to people using desktops.

What is not clear so far is whether a new port connection can trigger an app on the iPhone. This would be helpful—if not necessary—to create a seamless experience. Ideally one would simply snap one’s phone onto one’s car stereo in order to put it into car-stereo mode—the phone would recognize what it was connected to, and an application would have been registered to automatically launch when that connection is made.

Later: Looks like I’m not the only person to think about this. See iPhone 3.0 As the Accessory to …? and PC 1.0, iPhone 3.0 and the Woz: Everything Old is New Again

iTunes overload

/ technology

Media types in the iTunes library iTunes is overloaded.

iTunes first came out in 2001. At the time, you could use it to rip CDs, burn CDs, play ripped files, and organize those files. You could also use it to copy files to an MP3 player (the iPod didn’t exist at that time).

The personal computing landscape has changed a lot since then, and so has iTunes. It’s being called on to do a lot more.

I’ve said before that the Mac works best when you “drink Apple’s kool-aid,” that is, organize your contacts in Apple’s address book, your appointments in iCal, etc, because these apps act as a front-end to databases that other apps can easily tap into. The same goes for iTunes: Apple nudges you into using it to organize not only your music, but also your video files, and the iTunes database becomes almost like a parallel file system for media files. iPhoto is the manager for, well, photos.

When I first got an iPod a couple years ago, it seemed a bit odd that I could sync my contacts and calendars to it—through iTunes. While it makes sense to manage one’s iPod through iTunes, there was already a subliminal itch of cognitive dissonance.

With the iPhone, that cognitive dissonance is breaking out into a visible rash. The media types that it manages now includes applications for the iPhone. iPhoto is the mechanism for selecting photos to copy to the iPhone, and either it or Image Capture is used to download photos taken with the iPhone’s camera. Curiously, there’s no way to get photos off the iPhone within iTunes; this feels like an oversight, or perhaps someone in Apple was feeling a bit of that itch as well, and felt unwilling to load up iTunes with another function even further from its central purpose.

While I’m not aware of any yet, at some point there will be apps from independent developers that need to exchange files between the desktop and the iPhone other than those handled by iTunes—it’s easy to imagine word-processing files, PDFs, presentation decks, etc, being copied back and forth. It’s not clear how that will happen. It could all happen via the Internet, although that would be indirect both physically and in terms of the user’s experience. For large files, it would be annoying, and for people without unlimited-data plans, potentially expensive. Apple does offer programmers a bundle of functions called “sync services,” but this requires the desktop application be written to support syncing in the first place. For a lot of the file transfers I envision, syncing wouldn’t be the appropriate mechanism. There’s not even a way to get plain text files from Apple’s own Notes app off the iPhone. It’s widely speculated that cut and paste are absent from the iPhone because Apple hasn’t figured out a good interface for it. I suspect it’s the same thing here: they haven’t figured out a good, general mechanism for moving files between iPhone and desktop.

At some point, Apple is going to have to re-think the division of labor in its marquee apps, to separate organizing files from manipulating or playing them.

Japanese input on the iPhone

/ technology

I don’t expect to do a lot of Japanese text entry on my iPhone, but I’m glad that I have the option, and I’ve been enjoying playing around with that feature.

Any Japanese text-entry function is necessarily more complex than an English one. In English, we pretty much have a one-to-one mapping between the key struck and the letter produced. Occasionally we need to insert åçcéñted characters, but the additional work is minimal. In Japanese, the most common method of input on computers is to type phonetically on a QWERTY keyboard, which produces syllabic characters (hiragana) on-screen—type k-u to get the kana く, which is pronounced ku; after you’ve typed in a phrase or sentence, you hit the “convert” key (normally the space bar), and software guesses what kanji you might want to use, based on straight dictionary equivalents, your historical input, and some grammar parsing. So for the Japanese for “International,” you would type k-o-k-u-s-a-i; initially this would appear on-screen as こくさい, and then after hitting the convert key, you would see 国際 as an option. Now, that’s not the only word in Japanese with that pronunciation—the word for “government bond” sounds exactly the same and would be typed the same on a keyboard. To access that, you’d go through the same process, and after 国際 appeared on-screen, you’d hit the convert key again to get its next guess, which would be 国債, the correct pair of kanji. Sometimes there will be more candidates, in which case a floating menu will appear on-screen.

The first exposure most English speakers have had to the problem of producing more characters than your input device has keys has come with cellphones. T9 input on keypad is a good analogue to Japanese input on QWERTY: you type keys that each represent three letters, and when you hit the space key, T9 looks up the words you might have meant, showing a floating menu.

The iPhone, of course, uses a virtual QWERTY keyboard for English input, which is pretty good, especially considering the lack of tactile feedback and tiny keys. It guesses what word you might be trying to type based on adjacent keys. It does not (as far as I can tell) give multiple options, and isn’t very aggressive about suggesting finished words based on incomplete words. For English, at least, I’m guessing Apple decided that multiple candidates for a given input are too confusing. In general, the trend for heavy English text input on mobile devices seems to be towards small QWERTY keyboards, despite the facility some people have with T9. I’m wondering how many people are put off by the multiple-candidate aspect of T9, and if that’s why Apple omitted that aspect, or if it’s simply that not enough English-speakers are accustomed to dealing with multiple candidates.

Japanese input on the iPhone is different. It is aggressive about suggesting complete words and phrases. It does show multiple options (which is necessary in Japanese, and which Japanese users are accustomed to). In fact, it suggests kanji-converted phrases based on incomplete, incorrect kana input. Here’s an example based on the above:

iphone Japanese input sample - 1

Here, I typed k-o-k-u-a-a-i (note the intentional typo), which appears as こくああい. It shows a bunch of candidates, including the corrected and converted 国際, a logical alternative 国内, and some much longer ones, like 国際通貨基金—the International Monetary Fund. Since it has more candidates than it has room to display, it shows a little → which takes you to an expanded candidates screen. Just for grins, I will accept 国際通貨基金 as my preferred candidate. Here’s another neat predictive trick: immediately after I select that candidate, it shows sentence-particle candidates like に が, etc.

iphone Japanese input sample - 2

Let’s follow that arrow and see what other options it shows:

iphone Japanese input sample - 3

I’m going to select ã‚’ as my candidate. It immediately shows some verbs as candidates:

iphone Japanese input sample - 4

Here, 参ります is a verb I used previously, but 見 and 食べ are just common verbs—I’m guessing they’ve been weighted by the input function as likely for use in text messages (the phrase 国際通貨基金を食べ is somewhat unlikely in real life, unless you are Godzilla).

The iPhone also has an interesting kana-input mode, which uses an あかさたな grid with pie menus under each letter for the rest of the vowel-row. It looks like this:

iPhone Japanese input sample - 5

To enter an -a character, just tap it:

iPhone Japanese input sample

To enter a character from a different vowel-line, slide your finger in the appropriate direction on the pie-menu that appears and release:

iPhone Japanese input sample - 7

You can also get at characters from a different vowel-line using that hooked arrow, which iterates through them. I haven’t figured out what that forward arrow is for. It’s usually disabled, and only enabled momentarily after tapping in a new character. Tapping it doesn’t seem to have any effect.

This method offers the same error-forgiveness and predictive power as Japanese via QWERTY. I don’t find it to be faster than QWERTY though, but perhaps that’s just because I’m not used to it.

One thing I haven’t found is a way to edit the text-expansion dictionary directly. This would be very handy. I’m sure there are a few more tricks in store.

Also, a fun trick you can use on your Mac well as on an iPhone to get at special symbols: enter ゆーろ to get €. Same with ぽんど、やじるし、ゆうびん, etc.

Update Apparently the mysterious forward-arrow breaks you out of iterating through the options under one key, as explained here. Normally if you press あ　あ, this would iterate through that vowel-line, and produce い. But if you actually want to produce ああ, you would type あ→あ (Thanks, Manako).

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