Wednesday, September 5, 2007

iPod Touch Language Capabilities

While the new iPod Touch strongly resembles the current iPhone (minus the phone), its language capabilities seem considerably greater. The tech specs indicate the user interface is localized in English, French, German, Japanese, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Danish, Finnish, Norwegian, Swedish, Korean, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Russian, and Polish. Keyboard input (only English in the iPhone) adds French, German, Japanese, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, Danish, Finnish, Norwegian, Swedish, Polish, and Portuguese. Dictionaries for predictive typing are available for English, UK English, French, and German.

To get accented characters, you hold down the key of the base letter.

Whether any additional languages are supported for web browsing and song info display is not known yet.

The upgraded standard iPods have no additions to their language support, described here, despite many requests for Hebrew, Arabic, Thai, etc.

8 comments:

Paul D. said...

I'm really curious to see Japanese input. I suspect it's going to suck. :(

Anonymous said...

No Arabic encoding in the safari browser!! It is windows 1256 and the famous utf8

Tom Gewecke said...

The iPod has never been able to display Arabic in any of its versions period.

Unknown said...

this guy has installed an arabic keyboard on his Touch.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUShkAE4dMw

Anonymous said...

Wish he would type something to see if it really works. The cursor is flashing at the left of the screen. If it was Arabic, it would be moved to the right side.

It is possible to load 256 character font file and name it "russian" but that doesn't do Arabic cursive. It is just a keyboard but the software which makes it work is not there.

One day, maybe iPod will support UNICODE fonts which are truly international. Unicode has 64,000 characters. iPod can only handle 256. A long way to go yet.

Tom Gewecke said...

The iPod does support Unicode -- Chinese and Japanese require thousands of characters and it can do them. But it does not yet have the special fonts and other software need to do things like Arabic of Hindi.

Meritxell from Spain said...

My iPod is set to English, but when I bring the keyboard up, some items are in Spanish, such as Space (Espacio), Enter (Intro). How can I change this?
Great blog, thank you for your help!

Tom Gewecke said...

Meritxell -- Sorry, no idea. Best to use Apple's forums for questions like that:

http://discussions.apple.com/forum.jspa?forumID=1215