Nintendo has licensed a handwriting recognition technology, Decuma, which gives Nintendo DS game developers the chance to use it in new DS games. The deal with Zi Corporation expands the possibilities for the DS's touchscreen technology with a feature that is most commonly seen on PDAs.

This will enable developers of DS games to integrate handwriting recognition into their games - and not just in English, either, since the Decuma system supports not only the Roman alphabet but also traditional and simplified Chinese, and the Japanese hiragana, katakana and kanji alphabets.
Nintendo plans to sell 12.4m DS devices in the 12 months ending March 2006.