kalleboo's everyday adventures

sony ericsson japanese

I'm a huge nerd, so of course I had the need to see japanese song titles on my phone, and also write SMS messages in japanese. I also have an imported japanese phone, but it's shit (Toshiba 911T). People keep asking me how it works and how to do it on my flickr comments, so I decided to write a summary page. This is the only guide to using Japanese on a european/western Sony Ericsson phone that I know of.

Getting the fonts on there

First of all you need a proper Japanese font so you can see the characters. Some SE phones come with a chinese font which also includes kana, but we want Kanji, not Hanzi

For older series phones (K800, W850, W580, W880 etc, around that time)

  • Download XS++. se-nse.net
  • Connect your phone to it. Click the "FSX" button. Click Connect.
  • Browse to /tpa/preset/system/fonts
  • Delete fonts.xml
  • Upload the ttf file and the fonts.xml file from this ZIP konatu-font-for-sonyericsson.zip
  • Click the disconnect and close buttons.
  • Restart your phone, done!

Newer series phones (K850, W910 and newer) This was the only option when I did it, there may be a newer, free option by the time you read this.

If anything goes wrong, you can always restore your phone using the sony ericsson update service for free, or in the worst case for 10 euro at www.davinciteam.com.

Japanese text input

Here's a japanese text input Java (J2ME) midlet I wrote, which is kind of a tiny japanese IME. It's only tested on Sony Ericsson phones, but I don't see any reason it wouldn't work on other phones (provided you have the fonts and free memory).

Download:

BeeperInput.jar

Install: Send it to your phone using Bluetooth, or enter the link above into the web browser, or put the jar file in the "other" folder on the internal memory/memory card using the USB cable/a card reader and launch it.

How to use it:The input method is based on the "Beeper" (aka ポケベル入力) input mode on my Softbank phone. I'd love to implement a proper ka-ki-ku-ke-ko-type predictive text input but getting a frequency database etc is beyond the effort I'm willing to expend.

Input modes: Hit * to switch between hiragana, katakana and symbol input

Kana: You enter kana by first pressing the button corresponding to the consonant. 1 is for vowels, 2 is for K_, 3 is for S_, etc. Then you enter the vowel, 1 for A, 2 for I etc. Then the kana you entered shows up on screen. For N, hit zero two times in a row. To add dakuon/handakuon/youon, hit * multiple times after you entered a kana.

Kanji: Once you've entered the kana for a kanji, press the down arrow. Press it multiple times for different kanji. When you've selected a kanji, hit the right arrow, and you can write the next kanji. The database is based on edict, but also contains some basic symbols such as はーと and ほし

Emoji: From the menu you can switch databases to the Kaomoji database. Input for this works the same as for Kanji. The dictionary included is the orange31-kh dictionary.

Output: Select "Copy" to bring up your input in a standard sony ericsson dialog. From here you can use the sony ericsson copy/paste feature to put the text into an SMS, email, a web page form, or whatever you wish. Note that the recipient also needs a japanese font to view it.

Cheat sheet: On phones with 320x240 or larger screens, a cheat sheet for the keypad is shown on screen. For phones with smaller screens, refer to this diagram out of the Softbank manual