Re: [Indic-computing-users] indian languange computing and the mobile phone

[Pavanaja U.B. <pav...@vi...>]

Hello,

Unfortunately there is so much deserving to be accomplished in this area. Some phones 
do allow Hindi. But they are limited to SMS and they do not follow any standard like 
Unicode. Hence if you send Hindi SMS from Reliance CDMA phone, it will appear as junk 
on a GSM phone.

There are smartphones from Microsoft. They are Unicode enabled. But again the 
rednering of Indic opentype fonts is not present.

On Java front, once again, so much is deserving.

I am afraid, this being a highly promising area, people will jump into this, employing their 
own encoding and rendering mechanism, just as they did 20 years ago in the Indian 
language DTP and computing area. This will lead to the same chaos we had in computers 
w.r.t. Indic. 

It is high time that Govt must step-in and standardize the implementation of Indic on 
mobile phones, smart devices, etc. Best thing to do is that people should adopt some 
standard like Unicode and device a mechanism for input and display of Indic for Unicode 
on these devices.

Thanks and regards,
Pavanaja

> Hi everybody,
> 
> I would like to put a few points up for discussion concerning the use of mobile phones 
for computing :
> 
> Device and network capability
> ------------------------------------
> - The number of users of mobile phones is already greater than the PC penetration in 
India.
> - A sizeable number of these mobile phones are Java enabled. The entry price for a 
Java enabled
>   phone has dropped considerably (around 8K nowadays, I guess) and can be expected
>   to drop further in the future. We can probably assume Java support filtering down to 
>   even entry-level handsets in 2-3 years
> - GPRS enabled phones can be had for as low as 5K.
> - All the major operators (except BSNL) have GPRS / CDMA data capability in their 
networks. 
> - A Java enabled phone with WAP/GPRS is largely an uncharted territory for local 
language computing.
> - Quite a few information delivery type of services can probably be delivered via a phone. 
> 
> Device drawbacks
> ----------------------
> - Nokia supports an Hindi interface on some of their phones
> - By and large, localised interfaces and local language support is 
>   ignored by all the device vendors
> - No standard way to input local language text using only the numeric keypad 
>   of a phone. I still have to understand how it is exactly done on the Nokia phones
>   with Hindi support. 
> 
> But there is hope.......
> -------------------------
> - Java does provide a programming environment (however limited) on the handset.
> - Java does provide for user defined fonts.
> - To some extent it frees us from vendor proprietariness. The Java MIDP API being fairly 
open.
> 
> So my thoughts are ......
> ----------------------------
> - Does it make sense to define a way to input other language text, for example, Kannada 
?
>   Is anybody working on this ?
> - Has anybody tried to get local languages displayed on a phone in Java? We can 
probably build
>   a completely open local langugae messaging service using Java / GPRS.
>   
> 
>   Amit
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dr. U.B. Pavanaja
CEO, Vishva Kannada Softech
Think Globally, Act locally