ROANOKE TIMES 
                      Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times

DATE: Thursday, March 14, 1996               TAG: 9603140049
SECTION: BUSINESS                 PAGE: B-8  EDITION: METRO 
COLUMN: Computer Bits

YOU THINK YOU HAVE KEYBOARD WOES? PITY THE CHINESE

HERE WE HAVE some snippets of advice and opinion we hope will be of interest to the computer users among us.

Keyboard nightmare

China should be a dream market for personal computers. It's trying to make great leaps forward in technology, education and commerce, and few of its 1.2 billion people have PCs. But the Chinese language is a nightmare for keyboard designers.

The Chinese in Taiwan use more than 13,000 traditional Chinese characters. The mainland has simplified its written language to 5,000 characters, but that would still require a keyboard as big as a kitchen table. Chinese-character keyboards do exist, but a typical one comes with a four-volume manual and requires six strokes to produce one character.

As a result, some top computer makers are rethinking their machines. Such companies as Apple Computer Inc. and Motorola Inc. - which has said it plans to build Apple clones in China - are trying to devise new ways to command computers in Chinese, mainly through voice and handwriting recognition systems.

Fortunately, it turns out that Chinese is far better suited to voice and handwriting recognition than English. Developers of the new systems say the tone-based language is easier for a computer to ``learn,'' because there are relatively few sounds to choose from.

Apple plans to bundle a speech-recognition kit with the Macintosh computers it sells in China and Taiwan, hoping the system will increase its 2 percent market share in China. Motorola's keyboardless computer is based on a handwriting-input system.

- The Wall Street Journal

Mousepad review

Is it possible to build a better mousepad? The venerable 3M, inventor of Scotch Tape and Post-it Notes, has tried to do so with Precise Mousing Surface.

The rounded pad is a major departure from rectangular foam types. The mousing surface is thin. If it weren't for its garish purple-and-black design, it would go practically unnoticed on the desktop.

It has a bumpy ``microstructured'' texture intended to keep dust and dirt away from the mouse's internal trackball and reduce cursor slipping.

The pad's right-handed design seems awkward on the left side of a keyboard, but if you are a right-handed PC mouser who can live with the color scheme (no others are planned), go for it. It costs $15; to order, call 1-800-697-5423.

- Knight-Ridder/Tribune

Faster modem?

If a 14.4 will connect to the outside world on your phone lines, the 28.8 will, too, although you may never see it hook up at its top speed. Just about anything, from the humidity to an overweight pigeon sitting on the line outside your house, can cause enough interference on the line to make your modem try to perform at a slower speed.

Remember, a 28.8 is pushing those copper wires to their physical limits: There's only so much stuff that can be shoved through a phone line at once. But take any additional speed you can get.

- Fort Worth Star-Telegram

LENGTH: Medium:   70 lines
ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO:  AP. This giant Windows screen was installed Wednesday in
          Hanover, Germany, for the world's biggest computer and 
          telecommunications fair, the CeBit, which opens today. color. 
          Graphic: Logo. color.