Microsoft is not planning to offer an Arabic handwriting recogniser for its Tablet PC operating system for at least another year and a half, Middle East developers heard this week. Speaking at the Microsoft Middle East Developers Conference in Cairo this week, Shiraz Somji, development lead for the Tablet Platform Group, said developing an Arabic recogniser did not make sense commercially. “The Tablet PC market that we are shooting at is the laptop market,” he told delegates. “If you look at the laptop market then about nine languages will cover about 89% of that market. Developing a recogniser is a huge effort. To do it properly for Arabic, we would need at least 10 to 12 million handwriting samples, and we’d need to set up offices in at least two or three different areas just to collect those samples.