From: Cristian Secară (orice@secarica.ro)
Date: Thu Jun 01 2006 - 17:30:14 CDT
On Thu, 1 Jun 2006 23:52:53 +0200, Philippe Verdy wrote:
> Given the average lifetime of mobile phones of about 3 years (which
> depends mostly on its battery, one of the most expensive part of it),
> Idon't think it's too late.
It's to late because users have already habituated with this particular
situation.
> Modern mobile phones can handle more languages, [...]
In fact they can handle more languages, but in practice, at once, they
only handle group of languages, based on strange (geographical ?)
associations.
Frankly speaking, I find this resonably enough.
> For Romania, I think that a profile made on European standard
> (MES-1 or more) or WGL4 would be fine.
If with WGL4 you mean Windows Gliph List 4 (?), then this does not
fully cover the Romanian language: Romanian characters U+0218-021B are
not included in WGL4.
As far as I can tell, no one is to blame: I suspect that WGL4 was set
up when Unicode was below version 3.0, so no U+0218-021B could be
associated with.
> I see no reason why mobile phones can't handle the correct display
> of all these characters.
This (missing glyphs) is only a part of the problem. What I have said
remains true from the user perspective: extended characters are more
difficult to access from a phone keyboard, so very few people are
willing to extend their typing time. This is particularily true if the
user has to browse across a whole bunch of accented characters just to
reach the one he needs. The Romanian language with stripped accents
above / below characters is still well readable (or "understandable"),
so users will take the shortcut without remorse.
Cristi
-- Cristian Secară http://www.secarica.ro/
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