Monday, June 9, 2008

iPhone 3G Expands Language Capabilities

According to its tech specs, Apple's iPhone 3G, which was announced June 9 and should be available July 11, has language support for English, French, German, Japanese, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Danish, Finnish, Norwegian, Swedish, Korean, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Russian, and Polish.

International keyboard and dictionary support is available for English (U.S.), English (UK), French (France), French (Canada), German, Japanese, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese (Portugal), Portuguese (Brazil), Danish, Finnish, Norwegian, Swedish, Korean (no dictionary), Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Russian, and Polish.

I understand that a software upgrade for the iPod Touch will be available in July to give it the same language features.

From reports I have received, fonts are now present for a number of additional languages, but the software is still not capable of correct display of complex scripts like Arabic, Devanagari, Tamil, and Tibetan which can be handled by the full OS X without problem.

7 comments:

pqs said...

Apple should understand that there is people that need to write in other languages (catalan, in my case). They should provide a keyboard without any dictionnary, this would be better than correcting the words all the time.

Tom Gewecke said...

What you say makes sense. To tell Apple, go here:

http://www.apple.com/feedback/iphone.html

Anonymous said...

Wo! Hebrew and Arabic emails can now be read with iPhone. Shame I can't input tho...

goofy said...

Devanagari also displays correctly!

Tom Gewecke said...

How about Vietnamese, Thai, Tamil, and Tibetan? Here is a test page. Is everything good now?

http://homepage.mac.com/thgewecke/ltp.html

goofy said...

Arabic, Thai, Tamil, Tibetan and Hindi all have problems in Mobile Safari. Arabic, Hebrew, Thai, Tamil, Tibetan and Hindi have problems in Mail.

Hindi is fine in the music player.

goofy said...

I should add that I have an iPod Touch with the 2.0 software. Maybe it's different on the iPhone, altho that would be annoying.