Why is N900 without the Chinese language?

How do you know?

Short answer: No worries.


Long answer: the Maemo (Linux) platform has cutting-edge support for internationalization (aka handling all possible languages/scripts).

1. Viewing any script only requires a font (usually Unicode) supporting that character set.

2. Translating menus, guides help files only takes a few proverbial minutes. (although building new "native language" support infrastructures will require further effort)

3. More effort must go to ensuring that the User Interface will handle the various scripts, like the romanized English or Spanish, Arabic, Persian, Hebrew, Korean, the Sanskrit-based Hindi and Tibetan, or the ideogram-based Chinese, ancient Egyptian or the sometimes mixed Japanese etc. etc. correctly.

All the supported languages and scripts must flow and fit in the UI as a glove.

4. Input methods: There are often multiple different methods for inputting text via keyboard or handwriting-recognition. Here Nokia/Maemo must pick the best suited method(s) for default installation and optimize the UI and the algorithms to the hilt.

Maemo will naturally also allow the installation of any commercial or open-source third party solutions, like SCIM or Maemo CJK for example. Got a better input method? Grab the Maemo 5 developer kit and port it over!

5. The Maemo app store will provide easy one-click installation of applications and updates via 3G or WIFI.

Considering that the Maemo platform is fast heading towards the mainstream markets, with Maemo 5 soon getting shipped by the world's largest mobile handset manufacturer, I'd be surprised if 3rd party developers weren't already looking into porting their apps (input methods, dictionaries, text-to-speech, voice recognition etc.) to the platform.

So really no worries.

I tried Chinese and Japanese support on my N810 but decided to uninstall both. If you install only one of the two, it would be OK. Installing both, then it leaves not much memory for anything else. Currently I am using online input for both languages.

at least writing and reading in japanses would be an advantage...at least for me

Hi, this thread belongs to the Maemo 5 forum since it's not hardware related. Can an admin move it please?

Chinese and Japanese fonts are displayed out of the box in Maemo 5. The official support is not there because of lack of input methods and dictionaries. The N900 is not targetting the Chinese and Japanese markets, so it makes sense.

Hopefully the basic display plus the community enhancements are enough for you! For what is worth the Maemo team has a good representation of Chinese members, and also Japanese. Actually the CJK project is pushed by one of them.

Cool, the question is, does it read e-mails and text messages in Chinese OK too?

Slightly off topic, but would you share the url's for the Chinese and Japanese online input tools you are using. TIA

I know that the browser can display Korean websites.
But can it display Korean fonts for music / video files?
Does it just require a font to be placed in the phone?

because there is a lot work to be done elsewhere and as said chinese markets aren't targeted?