RogerS
2007-11-01, 21:47
Shortly after the first internet tablet was announced but months before it was released, Nokia indicated that language support would not extend (http://www.internettablettalk.com/forums/showthread.php?p=3457&postcount=3) to Asian languges for space reasons. The OS needed to be trimmer.
That decision was perfectly understandable.
I'm sure many users will cheer the arrival of CJK capability (http://maemocjk.garage.maemo.org/). Anyway, the speakers of Chinese, Japanese and Korean.
As it happens, the language I personally am most interested in is Khmer (Cambodian). There aren't a lot of people who speak Khmer and probably the market for internet tablets in Cambodia is too small to be bothered with.
That's probably true of a hundred other languages, however.
While I'd like to be able to use my NIT to do everything any Linux computer can do, again I see the logic that that's not really one of the essential design goals of the internet tablets.
But being able to display most any web page is.
And if there are huge swaths of Unicode that can't be displayed on an internet tablet screen, that's a big asterisk that needs to be placed next to "internet" in the device name, with a footnote specifying "except in countries lacking Western or Chinese-ideograph-based scripts."
Unicode, internationalization, combining and displaying characters in complex scripts like Khmer (in which sometimes letters stack and the order the letters display isn't always the order in which they're keyed) or Indic languages -- this isn't really optional if one is making a device to display pages on the internet. It's required. IMO.
Nokia now sells several phones (http://www.khmeros.info/drupal/?q=en/node/2058) that have a Khmer interface (http://www.khmeros.info/drupal/?q=en/node/1891), including Khmer Unicode input. (And 17 other Asian languages.)
If it can be squeezed into a phone, I think it'll fit into an internet tablet.Read the full article. (http://www.internettablettalk.com/2007/11/01/the-internet-is-worldwide-2/)
That decision was perfectly understandable.
I'm sure many users will cheer the arrival of CJK capability (http://maemocjk.garage.maemo.org/). Anyway, the speakers of Chinese, Japanese and Korean.
As it happens, the language I personally am most interested in is Khmer (Cambodian). There aren't a lot of people who speak Khmer and probably the market for internet tablets in Cambodia is too small to be bothered with.
That's probably true of a hundred other languages, however.
While I'd like to be able to use my NIT to do everything any Linux computer can do, again I see the logic that that's not really one of the essential design goals of the internet tablets.
But being able to display most any web page is.
And if there are huge swaths of Unicode that can't be displayed on an internet tablet screen, that's a big asterisk that needs to be placed next to "internet" in the device name, with a footnote specifying "except in countries lacking Western or Chinese-ideograph-based scripts."
Unicode, internationalization, combining and displaying characters in complex scripts like Khmer (in which sometimes letters stack and the order the letters display isn't always the order in which they're keyed) or Indic languages -- this isn't really optional if one is making a device to display pages on the internet. It's required. IMO.
Nokia now sells several phones (http://www.khmeros.info/drupal/?q=en/node/2058) that have a Khmer interface (http://www.khmeros.info/drupal/?q=en/node/1891), including Khmer Unicode input. (And 17 other Asian languages.)
If it can be squeezed into a phone, I think it'll fit into an internet tablet.Read the full article. (http://www.internettablettalk.com/2007/11/01/the-internet-is-worldwide-2/)