WritePad for iPad by PhatWare has been upgraded to 6.0 and is now equipped with a new Multilingual handwriting recognition engine that supports English, German, French, Dutch, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese.

WritePad lets you take notes in your own handwriting with an iPad stylus pen or even your finger. The state-of-the-art handwriting recognition software will adapt and learn your style of writing. You can use simple gestures to select text, cut, copy, paste, and insert special characters.

• Create and edit text documents using the advanced handwriting recognition engine or iPad keyboard for text entry in landscape or portrait mode.
• Improve productivity by utilizing inline gestures, spell checker, context analyzer, and shorthand features.
• Statistical analyzer, which improves overall handwriting recognition quality by addressing common recognition errors. If this feature is enabled, WritePad will learn the user’s own handwriting style.
• Email, Tweet, Print, or post Facebook updates directly from WritePad.
• Synchronize WritePad documents with Dropbox, Evernote, and iTunes or upload documents to Google Docs.
• Translate documents to 13 supported languages using Bing Translator.
• Change WritePad’s appearance by manipulating text, page, and ink colors using the customizable Styles feature.

WritePad for iPad is available for $9.99.

• App Store link

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Thanks to iPhone developer, forum regular, and troll-slayer extraordinaire cmaier for passing along this gem from McRumors:

Apple has quietly included handwriting recognition for Chinese (Traditional and Simplified) into the latest iPhone Firmware 2.0 beta. When you select Chinese input, you are given the option to use handwriting recognition allowing you to draw characters on the screen with your finger. As you write the character, four possibilities appear on the right side of the screen.

Simplified characters, the official version in Mainland China, is the key to one massive market. Traditional characters, used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, regaining popularity in the South of China, and adapted to form parts of the Japanese and some South East Asian regional/cultural groups, is key to a second.

(Not to mention what implications, if any, this has for on-again/off-again China Mobile discussions…)

Having studied Chinese for a few years, and not having found any handset character recognition I’ve been particularly fond of yet, I’m likewise eager to see what Apple can bring to the table.

What do you think?