I couldn't agree more, Steve. So I guess you are living in Japan right now? Whereabouts are you? How long have you been there?
As for your iPhone question, you've got to give this miracle of technology a little more credit. There's a reason why I paid a cool grand for a factory-unlocked iPhone 4 from Hong Kong. Is there anything it
doesn't do? (Oh, and if anyone wants to joke about the antenna problems--that has been fixed ages ago. Even a millimetre-thick Gelaskin fixes the problem.)
To wit: yes, there *is* built-in handwriting recognition for kanji entry, for both simplified and traditional Chinese characters (and the good news is that you don't have to have 100% perfect stroke order, from what it seems).
Moreover, the freely-available Kotoba! (based on the aforementioned databases) has a plethora of kanji entering methods. This is the SKIP-pattern method:
This is the radical-matching method:
