Found Japanese Input on PlayBook Accidentally

Hey Everyone,
So I was just on my PlayBook, innocently messaging a friend on Facebook. When....
I FOUND JAPANESE INPUT ON THE PLAYBOOK.

Attachment 138861

Now I know perhaps not everyone will find this exciting, and yes there have been a niche that has been waiting for BlackBerry to put out more East Asian language support on the PlayBook but this is interesting, I wonder what this means a few OS updates down the road. These words are pretty easy to read, from the left they are "Heeee, Jaa, and Haiteru-san" Studying Japanese in University really made me wish that the Z10 and PlayBook would have Japanese input. I'll eventually upgrade after I got used to my Z10 review unit, although I will miss having dual language input (English and Japanese) on my 9900.

I'm interested in seeing if anyone else can recreate this, I'll try with different apps to see if this happens. I also tried tapping the word, and what do you know? It inserts the word in the proper Japanese Kana. Interesting. The one other thing I found particularly odd is that my PlayBook is set to English, even odder is if you guys take a look at the screenshot, the three Japanese words have absolutely nothing to do with the context either, well neither do Year and 2007 but those aren't cool enough to be mentioned :p anyways lets see if this can be recreated in different apps as well.

Definitely a neat little find. I'm running OS 2.1.0.1526 in case anyone was wondering too.

How did you get this to work? The keyboard input choice doesn't show any East Asian non-Latin script. I'm hoping BB10 supports Traditional and Simplified Chinese input when it comes to the Playbook.

Originally Posted by blueberrymerry

How did you get this to work? The keyboard input choice doesn't show any East Asian non-Latin script. I'm hoping BB10 supports Traditional and Simplified Chinese input when it comes to the Playbook.

I believe BlackBerry 10 has both the simplified and traditional Chinese input. I had a Z10 for review and I took a quick look at the input languages. Quite a few more than the PlayBook but not as many as on the BlackBerry Java OS smartphones.

All I did was try to do the : D without the space and bam Japanese word prediction. See if you can recreate this scenario.

I saw an article the other day that said BBRY is not going to introduce their new phones in Japan due to the language modules being to hard to produce - I read between the lines as they probably don't have the financial resources to do it!

Originally Posted by F2

I saw an article the other day that said BBRY is not going to introduce their new phones in Japan due to the language modules being to hard to produce - I read between the lines as they probably don't have the financial resources to do it!

Yes, BlackBerry 10 won't be introduced into Japan, at least not yet. Although I don't see the costs being too high. Japanese input has been around on computing devices for years, they could honestly implement it quite easily in my opinion. I think what it was is that Japan was not a huge market for BlackBerry. They could put Japanese input on BlackBerry 10, although that probably would have further delayed the release.

My hypothesis on this one is that Japanese input will eventually make it's way on the PlayBook and BlackBerry 10, Japan isn't the only country that Japanese is used. There's a lot of people who use Japanese input, myself included, who currently do not live in Japan but they communicate in the language. Makes it kind of hard to do when the device has the ability to read it, yet when you have to use Japanese input, it's not possible just yet. The Japanese IME app is great but it's not a totally perfect solution. Makes it more bearable though.

Random addition, take a look at the third Japanese word from the left, second last character. The "Sa" is written correctly as well, typically when computers input the "Ki,Sa,Gi,Za" characters, they don't have a break, while in handwriting we add in the break. Having the break there makes it look a lot more "authentic" and hey if Japanese input is coming to the PlayBook and BlackBerry 10, I like the styling they used :)

Do you have another app on your PB that supports Japanese, like and English to Japanese converter or something? I have thought that the predictive text seems to be getting more 'intelligent' as the OS updates have come in. There seems to be more recognition of my word usage / associations, similar to the BB10 OS.
If I type your same message "What's your new number : " in the docs app, I only type 4 letters (wh, n, n) on the keyboard for the predictive text to pick the words, including colon.
After accepting the colon sign, I don't have any Japanese characters in the next predictive choices; I get my first name, quote symbol ( " ), 'November', '780' (an area code), and 'Give' .
Cool feature on the PB however you look at it !

Originally Posted by oilgeo10

Do you have another app on your PB that supports Japanese, like and English to Japanese converter or something? I have thought that the predictive text seems to be getting more 'intelligent' as the OS updates have come in. There seems to be more recognition of my word usage / associations, similar to the BB10 OS.
If I type your same message "What's your new number : " in the docs app, I only type 4 letters (wh, n, n) on the keyboard for the predictive text to pick the words, including colon.
After accepting the colon sign, I don't have any Japanese characters in the next predictive choices; I get my first name, quote symbol ( " ), 'November', '780' (an area code), and 'Give' .
Cool feature on the PB however you look at it !

Interesting, as far as I know, no apps on the PlayBook allow for direct Japanese input, other than Japanese IME, although I've been typing emoticons for a long while so I know it can't be pulling from that app, the app requires users to input english characters and it converts them to the Japanese Kana, basically its the same as phonetic typing on Google Translate. Oddly enough I've only seen this happen on this OS, 2.1.0.1526.

I believe both the Z10 and PlayBook have the same SwiftKey word prediction technology built in, the more its used the more it learns from the user which is why if you type extensively on the PlayBook you'll notice it picks up a lot of your words.

The playbook doesn't have a direct way to input a lot of languages or characters but it still can display and predict many of them. Without an app what they then basically need are good character references to get things going. Things the Playbook can key in and allow the introduction.

As far as I can tell, any Unicode characters that you can see on the Playbook can be reproduced on the Playbook: symbols, letters, emoticons, Chinese writing, etc. A single character, several in a row, one word/group after the other, and paragraphs. If the Playbook can display the Unicode it can duplicate it. It's predictive text is based on what it has pre-loaded or from your actions.

The only limit is how to get them to initially appear. There are a couple of ways to do this. Each requires the Playbook to have it saved in some way for its predictive text to appear.

If you send something to yourself through an email it should then become part of the Playbook's predictive memory. Saving something directly on the Playbook as with a word document also works.

If the character(s) is not appearing it is because the more common associations are being suggested. So, if you began the association with the word 'the', then the likelihood of seeing the characters or words you want in the predictive text area extremely low. (I am not sure but the predictive text does appear to also take in account the whole sentence and maybe more when offering up possibilities.)

Anyway, here is a way to test it out. Open Word in Docs to Go. Start by typing any unusual word to associate with the unkeyable part. e.g. newkey. Again, do this so more common suggestions don't show as the five suggestions.

Now add whatever other language word, sentence, paragraph, or Unicode emoticon either right after the end of the newkey or with a space. Save the document. Then start another line and begin keying in the word newkey. It's doing the introduction to the other characters because it was saved with them. Select the word on the Predictive line.

If that suggestion doesn't pull up press the back arrow to get back to the end of newkey and then the space bar again. Or partially delete and re-type newkey.

It works for a lot of characters or languages, emoticons, symbols, etc but not all. It doesn't work for images. If there is a box with an X inside then the character is there but can't appear on the predictive line but will in the document.

If there are no spaces then all will show together, up to a few dozen characters in length. If there are spaces then, after each word, segment, or sentence suggested, the next in line will appear. You click on that and the next word or segment will show until all has been offered. You may notice more choices than just what you pasted because the Playbook predictive looks at the last part(s) so if there a few saved suggestions with the same ending, character, or word, then the Playbook will offer them, too.


Predictive can be helpful for limited uses such as a few character emoticons, names, or short sign-offs but it is usually too unwieldy. Still, it does offer a way to quickly pull up a few unique letters if that's all that the keyboard isn't supporting from a particular language. Say, Ħ for use with find and replace in the Word document. e.g. When typing you key a substitute that you never otherwise use, say, double hh, in place of the untypeable character. After completing the document tap on the search icon and in Find type hh and in Replace paste Ħ. Then select Replace All.

You can delete any predictive text from memory at any time by pressing and holding on the word but you might mistakenly remove some associated predictions, too. I deleted my coffee cup ☕ path and needed to create another one for it to re-appear ಠ_ಠ


If you go to a Unicode site you can find all sorts of emoticons, symbols, and language letters. I did notice when copying and pasting a line of Unicode into an email that nothing appeared to paste but the cursor moved. The email also appeared to show different characters than the ones I copied but I sent it anyway and the intended characters did appear once I tried Word. Better to bring in one character at a time.