W42SA from Sanyo

Hold on to your handwritten character hats, as the W42SA from Sanyo is equipped with a touch sensitive keypad that allows users to draw their characters instead of tap them out. If you were to take a standard phone keypad and combine it with the touchpad of your laptop, the W42SA's keypad is probably close to what you'd end up with. The "Handwritten Character Input" function recognizes Hiragana, Katakana, the Alphabet, and numerical characters... but no Kanji.

There are some other functions of the touchpad; you can draw a preferred shape using your finger to activate any of these three functions: removing the key lock, move/scroll when viewing EZweb or mail, a shutter button when taking a picture using autofocus.

You'll find a standard slew of options for the W42SA, such as LISMO support, SD-Audio playback, Hello Messenger, Infrared, ATOK+APOT, a QVGA screen, microSD slot, etc.



Inspired by:
http://k-tai.impress.co.jp/cda/article/news_toppage/30741.html

Press Release (KDDI):
http://www.kddi.com/corporate/news_release/2006/0828/