Okay, puzzle time: topic--cell phones

[hyphenate]

Got a puzzle for everyone regarding cell phones.

The English language has 52 alphabetic symbols (uppercase and lowercase), 10 numerical ones, and about twenty commonly used sybolic characters. On a cell phone designed for texting, all of these are available, either through direct typing, or through pressing a special key. All well and good.

What happens, though, when you have a language that has many, many more? An example might be Chinese, which has, I believe about 500-600 characters--how might they have access to that many characters without carrying around something that might be over a couple of pounds?

This would indeed produce some kind of problem for people in their respective countries. I realize that people elsewhere might speak English, but I'm also sure there are others who do not.

Answers, anyone?

[gmoney]

1. I guess the way they use computers and the interwebs?

I don't think Logitech makes any 600 key keyboards, even in China, do they?

On edit: More info, yet still pretty vague. http://www.slate.com/id/2136726/

[madinmaryland]

2. My cell phone has only eight buttons...

Don't know what Chinese characters would be on it.

[ElboRuum]

3. You ask this question in the age of Google and Wikipedia??!?!

Here...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_keyboard

Note how they use the QWERTY keyboard as the base.

[hyphenate]

4. That's all well and good,

but a keypad on a cell phone would be even more constrained considering the size of a cell phone. I guess a cell phone with a touch pad would end up being used, as a person could directly enter in the characters themselves.

[Godhumor]

5. I used to own a cellphone in Japan

You type using the English alphabet and it would then convert it to hiragana, katakana or kanji depending on what mode you had selected. If you picked kanji, you could choose the correct symbol from a drop down of choices of all the kanji that used the same spelling.