Yes Apple devices now appear have pretty good support - though they
are not that widely available in India and the price is prohibitive
for most people. Nokia N900 and N9 are also very good - but again the
price is prohibitive and Nokia seem to be abandoning their Linux based
operating systems - and afaik Windows phones don't have this support.
The latest version of Android is supposed to have support for
Devanagri and Tamil - but people report problems with incorrect
character reordering and other scripts are not supported. It also
seems some manufacturers, including Samsung, have implemented their
own complex script support in a few models sold in some markets - even
on older versions of Android. But It is hard to figure out which
models. Also on some Android phones complex script rendering seems to
work OK in the webkit browser - but not for SMS or any other
application. I guess webkit is doing its own rendering.
In general it seems the support for complex scripts on "smart phones"
is about at the level it was on PCs ten or twelve years ago - except
this time Apple seem to be ahead of Microsoft whereas on PCs it was
the other way round.
It is unfortunate that when making mobile operating systems companies
didn't include complex script rendering support from the beginning.
On 19/03/2012, Tom Gewecke <tom_at_bluesky.org> wrote:
>
> On Mar 19, 2012, at 8:24 AM, Christopher Fynn wrote:
>
>> Has anyone done a survey of which mobile devices support Unicode and
>> complex script rendering?
>
> As far as the iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch are concerned, my understanding is they
> support display of Unicode Devanagari, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Tamil, Telugu,
> Sinhala, Oriya, Malayalam, Kannada, and Bengali. But so far only a Hindi
> keyboard has been provided. There are some apps that will permit input in
> some the other scripts for some purposes.
Received on Tue Mar 20 2012 - 01:38:47 CDT
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