Dr. U.B. Pavanaja said on Wed, Sep 01, 2010 at 02:07:22PM +0530,: > Simple solution; Let TRAI issue an order making it compulsory to all handset > manufacturers to implement Indic Unicode in all handsets sold in India. All > platforms do support Unicode. It is the lethargy or the business decision by > the manufacturers not to implement Indic Unicode. > > Someone should wakeup the authorities from their deep sleep. Most brands sell UTF-8 enabled handsets in India.
UTF-8 may not work if you buy a unbranded / cheapo handset. I have used handsets from Nokia and Samsung. Samsung handsets from 4 years back supported Hindi input, and has Malayalam fonts on it. ML rendering was broken. My current Nokia handset has excellent rendering in Malayalam, but no input. It supports Gujarati and Hindi, apart from English input. Default language, upon switching on the handset first time is Hindi, which is a pain, because I read Hindi with much difficulty, and the salesmen at most shops are good at English and Malayalam, but not Hindi (guys from Nokia - are you listening?). The sales girl at the Nokia priority shop when I got my handset handed over the phone to me after fiddling around for sometime, and I finally borrowed another Nokia set and followed the Menu from the other set to switch languages. When I went there 3 weeks later to buy another handset (again from Nokia), the lady nad got the trick, and dit it for us. AFAIK, most handsets manufactured for Indian market do support input in one Indic language (usually Hindi) apart from English. I am speaking this much as a consumer, who cannot resist the temptation to look over another's shoulders to see what handset other person is using. Now, coming to the mandating part of your mail - which should be the default language? Hindi? Ok - how many sales persons in Bangalore, the IT capital of India can read Hindi? May be, 40 %. How many in Mangalore (which IIRC, is your hometown) can read Hindi / Devanagari? May be, 20%. How many, in Chennai? 15 %. That is, if the politicos accept the mandate. About 30% of the politicians I meet use a small 2 inch by 3 inch note book as their pnone addressboook. I am a government servant, and I can say that with some authority. Probably, the notebook will vanish if Malayalam input is available, but I can never be sure. Indic language support has to improve a lot in mobile devices. But the big question would be which should the default language, and you will stir up a hornet's nest if mandates are issued about that. Mandate Unicode for Indian languages - yes; but Mandate use of Indic language in a phone? Please, no. -- Mahesh T. Pai || http://[paivakil|fizzard].blogspot.com DICTIONARY, n. A malevolent literary device for cramping the growth of a language and making it hard and inelastic. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ This SF.net Dev2Dev email is sponsored by: Show off your parallel programming skills. Enter the Intel(R) Threading Challenge 2010. http://p.sf.net/sfu/intel-thread-sfd _______________________________________________ IndLinux-group mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/indlinux-group
