Remember that cool handwriting recognition software that I mentioned some time ago? Well, it seems that the HWPen application that was developed by Hanwang.com.cn has been acquired by Apple for use in the next major firmware release for the iPhone – the iPhone OS 2.0 firmware.
Hanwang claims that Apple has acquired their handwriting recognition software. It seems that Apple has chosen to acquire the recognition code rather than develop the software in-house – as previous iPhone OS 2.0 screenshots led us to believe.
Unfortunately, it seems that Apple may have crippled the handwriting recognition software to only work with Chinese character input – effectively keeping English text input restricted to the on-screen keyboard. We’ll have to wait for iPhone OS 2.0 to go live before we can confirm whether or not Apple has integrated HWPen into the iPhone, or if they decided to go with their own code to recognize handwritten text.
You can still grab HWPen for free for your jailbroken iPhone (this is how). If Apple really did take HWPen under its wing, expect free versions of the application to disappear right quick.
[Via: iPhone Atlas]