Here’s another reason to be excited about using Android devices.

Students at the Shanghai Jiao Tong University are currently developing and testing a new Chinese input system on Android devices. This new input, named Aeviou, is similar to Swype, with the difference being that Aeviou is only for Chinese input.

There are already quite a lot of different Chinese input methods on the market which is natural, considering the keyboard was primarily designed for English language input. However, this is only when traditional keyboard input is used. For the increasing number of mobile devices released, the main method of input for Chinese is still the PinYin method. PinYin input entails having to phonetically spell out each character and then selecting the correct character among the choices. The entire Chinese language is represented by 412 phonetic combinations so it is a long and tedious list. There is also the choice of handwriting Chinese on touchscreen devices but, although it is the most natural Chinese input method, it is also the slowest. There are so many strokes in Chinese characters that it takes a long time to input a character and thereby also increasing the chance for errors.

Aeviou intends to replace traditional PinYin input methods to become the fastest and most convenient input method for mobile devices. It removes all the vowels and the letter “v” (that’s where the name Aeviou comes from), reducing the combinations for Chinese PinYin input. This lets you literally swipe through the letters with ease, just like you would with Swype. Researchers claims that their speed tests show an increase of more than 3x against other input methods.

Now that is real fast. Check out the video below for Aeviou in action and comparison with other input methods:
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Did you find the 262mph record that China scooped up only two months ago impressive?

Well, add another 40mph to that number as China has claimed the new speed record for unmodified commercial trains. The new line presently being tested between Beijing and Shanghai has delivered a mind-warping 302mph (486kph) top speed, which is projected to help cut down travel times between the two cities in half, down to a mere five hours. As with the Shanghai-Hangzhou connection that held the record previously, speeds with actual passengers on board will probably be limited to more moderate levels when this connections opens up in 2012, but the Chinese government’s goal is still that magical 312mph (500kph) mark.

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Oh yeah! China’s right on track for World domination.

First, the absurd economic growth and now usurping the West in technological advancements.

Here’s some technical jargon from Engadget:

“The fully operational Tianhe-1A, located at the National Supercomputer Center in Tianjin, scored 2.507 petaflops as measured by the LINPACK benchmark. That moves it past Cray’s 2.3 petaflops Jaguar located at Oak Ridge National Lab in Tennessee. Tianhe-1A achieved the record using 7,168 NVIDIA Tesla M2050 GPUs and 14,336 Intel Xeon CPUs consuming 4.04 megawatts.”

Just to note: I’m actually being sarcastic. I don’t think China is ahead of anybody technologically.

via Engadget

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