On Mon, Nov 7, 2011 at 12:07 PM, Mahesh T. Pai <[email protected]> wrote:
... > > To be fair, when I flash one of the EU firmwares on my Android device, > it boots up into Russian. I tried the Asian firmwares, only once - and > it booted up into Chinese/ Korean / Japanese / one of those East Asian > languages!!! ;-D > As Andrew Cunningham noted, the internationalization model --or really what I would call LACK of an intelligent I18N model-- on a lot of so-called "smart" phones just goes to show how immature these industry segments and markets still remain. For a while I used a Chinese-made "smart" phone that was capable of displaying more languages than the phone I received from my American cell phone carrier --and thus I conclude it was designed for sale in many export markets-- BUT it had horribly annoying shortcomings. For example, one could only type an SMS message in Chinese if it was set to a Chinese locale. But even then the Chinese input methods were limited and were inseparably tied to specific Chinese locales (i.e., pinyin was available for the Mainland locale, but pinyin was *not* available for a Traditional Chinese locale). Similar problems for Greek, Arabic, and other locale choices. This model is completely wrong and ignores the realities of most major urban centers in the world today where numerous immigrant communities not only exist but are also in constant contact with friends/families/merchants/suppliers/other service providers from all over the world. I should be able to set my locale and display language to anything I want; and still be able to use and switch-on-the-fly to any input method for any language I want independent of the current locale and display language. - Ed > -- > Mahesh T. Pai || > End Users are just friends who haven't submitted a patch yet. > >
