i remember reading a little about this before but has there been an update about maemo5 supporting japanese language input on the n900? thanks in advance.

No, no update.

I use Japanese intensely and have Japanese input on the N900, however I do it like I do Japanese input on my notebook, not bothering to install a Japanese IME, instead write Japanese in GNU Emacs, than copy/paste it wherever else.

This works very good, I've even compiled Prime, a predictive input system for Japanese, which is great for a handheld device, you just enter the first one or two characters and get predictive proposals for the word you wanna enter.

I'll be posting info on how to setup GNU Emacs with Prime on the N900 at some later point in time, so will drop a note here if you're interested.

After a little Googlation, I find that Vim can also input Japanese (without an IME) using mbyte mode and an appropriate keymap file. This is a revelation! I don't have my N900 yet, but the N810 version of Vim is compiled with the necessary +multi_byte option. I'm still hazy on the details of setting this up with Vim and it appears that this will only work for hiragana (not kanji), but it's better than nothing.

I hope Prime would work apart from Emacs. Proper Japanese input is in the works for the N900. It's just not here yet. Prime would be a nice addition for general use in any app on this device.

Thanks, White Bear. Keep us posted.

Sorry to ask about a different language, but can your current method (Emacs) work with Korean also for N900?

It works, just checked. For Korean emacs has hangul, hangul3, hangul390, hangul3f, hanja, hanja-jis, and hanja3 input methods.

I verified with the version I've compiled on the N900, that it inputs Korean...

How about chinese input? furthermore, if the sms that i receive on n900 is in chinese, will it be displayed properly?

Prime works with UIM and SCIM as well.

In my mind it's not worth the hassle etc. to use it in this way on a mobile device, where CPU power is limited.

With GNU Emacs it works perfectly and I can input text anywhere, no prob, only switch back and forth for copy/paste.

Does this mean I can write Korean using that and send and receive Korean SMS?

GNU Emacs has lots of Chinese input models:
chinese-4corner chinese-array30 chinese-b5-quick
chinese-b5-tsangchi chinese-ccdospy chinese-cns-quick
chinese-cns-tsangchi chinese-ctlau chinese-ctlaub
chinese-ecdict chinese-etzy chinese-punct
chinese-punct-b5 chinese-py chinese-py-b5
chinese-py-punct chinese-py-punct-b5 chinese-qj
chinese-qj-b5 chinese-sisheng chinese-sw
chinese-tonepy chinese-tonepy-punct chinese-ziranma
chinese-zozy

I sent a Chinese SMS to myself, no prob, it displays fine, no font issues, all good.