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It all sounds horribly complicated, although it may be one of those procedures that's easier to do than to describe.It's extremely annoying to be honest.
I fully believe that logographic scripts are faster to read once properly mastered, but writing or inputting them is another matter altogether and the article doesn't even begin to touch upon some of the frustrations such as the i.m.e.'s intelligence deciding at the last character to change the educated guess, completely changing the sentence from what intended as one presses “enter” or the inability to type without looking at what one types which is quite possible in many other scripts.
The system tries to be as intelligent as it can and learns from patterns so the guesses are usually correct, but it also means that at times it is unprædictable.
It can also be quite disorienting for a sentence to suddenly shrink or expand considerably as one is typing, and it isn't generally easy to see part of a word one has typed; only when the full word be typed is the proper conversion made and before that point the i.m.e. actually converts it to something entirely differently, often completely misinterpreting the structure of the sentence because a sentence that ends on an incomplete verb is not a sentence grammatically speaking so the i.m.e. doesn't know what to do with it.
Then comes the fact that the i.m.e. is generally very bad with colloquial Japanese as it's conversion rules rely on the grammar of standard textbook Japanese.
Having said that, there is an odd sense of satisfaction to typing Japanese when the i.m.e. agree with the intent of the user. There is something satisfying about a garbled sentence that looks like nothing instantly transforming into a coherent sentence as the last character is added to it.
> I wonder if things will change [or have changed] with the advent of touch screens and styluses? [stylii?] which would allow the characters to be written manually, using finger or stylus and then have the software convert this to the appropriate typed character?
Yes, the system is quite a bit different there; as the article says: Japanese characters are primarily arranged in a grid of with a width of 5, so te standard approach there is to drag in one of four directions, or not drag at all to select a character, and a list of possible conversions to Chinese characters is more easily available with a touch screen to select from. In this sense typing Japanese on a mobile phone is actually not any more time consuming than typing English on a mobile phone, but on a keyboard, there are definite problems with it.