Chinese + Japanese Text messaging has now been released by Smart Communications, Inc. http://technology.inquirer.net/infotech/infotech/view_article.php?article_id=98986

I'm very uninitiated here, but I don't understand how this works. I believe there is a huge number of characters in Chinese (and Japanese Kanji is the same as Chinese..?) - heck I have trouble enough hitting the number keys three times to access 26 letters, so thousands of characters would be nearly impossible on a 10 digit keypad.

So in doing some research (and talking to my Korean roommate), here's what I've kind of discovered. Chinese people sued to text in pinyin, which is the phonetic equivalent of written Chinese, but it uses English characters. So the fact that the article refers to new "chinese and Japanese language texting" implies that this isn't just pinyin - it actually refers to traditional written characters. Now a couple alternatives exist I believe. One is that the components of each character, like little boxes or squiggly lines are what you find and press to eventually form a composite character the same way you write a word in English. The other possible method of implementing this involves sets of characters assigned to each digit, and by the same logic that w-9 texting fills in the rest of a word, only contextually reasonable sentences get completed?

I'm sure there's someone in the class who actually knows how this works, so I'll just ask in a couple minutes. Incidentally, how are the keyboards structured for Chinese and Japanese?