[2] In November 2005, another Japanese company, NEC Corporation, announced the development of a translation system that could be loaded in mobile phones.
[4] Technological advances within the miniaturization of computing and communication devices have made possible the usage of mobile telephones in language learning.
Among the early projects were the Spanish study programs which included vocabulary practice, quizzes, and word and phrase translations.
See also Infoscope, which is a handheld device composed of a digital camera and wireless internet access, developed at IBM's Almaden Research Center.
This is usually done via an Internet connection (WAP, GPRS, EDGE, UMTS, Wi-Fi) but some earlier applications used SMS to communicate with the translation server.
Recently, there has been a notable increase of the number of language pairs offered for automatic translation on mobile devices.
Many new hand-held devices come equipped with a QWERTY keyboard and/or a touch-sensitive screen, as well as handwriting recognition which significantly increases typing speed.
[13] The caveat is that this method is extremely difficult to automate; implementing this structure in a user-friendly fashion remains a major challenge facing translation app developers.
Since the SMS method of communicating with the translation server has proved less efficient that sending packets of data – because of the message length limit (160 characters) and the higher cost of SMS as compared with Internet traffic charges – Internet connectivity on mobile devices is a must, while coverage in some non-urban areas is still unstable.