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[Quick Link: iPhone w/ Japanese Screenshots Here]
[Quick Link: iPhone w/ Korean Screenshots Here]
Ever wonder to what extend is the iPhone capable of handling other languages? I was curious as well. What I have noticed is that within the iPod interface, songs and artists can be displayed in Chinese with no problem. This tells me that the phone's OS is similiar to OSX in that they support the reading of other languages.
First Test: Browser Foreign Language Support: Successful!
So I launched Safari to see if this support extends across the broswer and other languages. Please find three screen shots where I am able to confirm that the browser supports Mandarin-Chinese, Japanese and Korean. I was pretty happy to find that it does fully support foreign text. This is a pretty big breakthrough that people seldomly write about. I proceeded to test this via my Nokia N95's browser, and after inputting Google.com.tw into the browser, Google just defaulted to the regular Google.com/m site where all English texts are displayed.
Second Test: SMS Foreign Language Support: Failed
I asked a friend to send a Chinese SMS text message to my iPhone, and the text came across as "??". To verify this, I even used Gmail to send an SMS in Chinese text to the iphone, the results are still gibberish. It amazes me that Apple could not apply the same Language support to every application.
Third Test: Email Application Foreign Language Support: Successsful!
I sent an email to the iPhone and the text came through just like it does in iPod and Safari. Which is again, pretty cool. Once again, I am baffled by the fact that Apple could not support this across all of its applications.
Foreign Lanuage input is out of the question. I saw a demo on YouTube where you can use a browser-based Chinese input and then copy and paste it to other apps. Knowing that the native OS does support foreign lanuage is a good thing. I hope we are just a few firmware away from being able to fully communicate in another language. Even so, I still think the iPhone is still a few years ahead of competition in terms of its display capabilities which now extends to foregn languge support.
(Update 3/8/2008, I finally was able to put up some pictures for your reference, click to enlarge: iPhone-Chinese Mandarin and Simplified, iPhone Japanese, and iPhone Korean Language)
(Update 5/5/2008, there are some screenshots for iPhone firmware 2.0 which shows Chinese and Japanese input. I took the liberty to translate the original article for you here.)
(Update 5/8/2008, for those searching to find more screenshots of iPhone Safari supporting Korean, click here for more pictures)
(Update 5/13/2008, for those searching to find more screenshots of iPhone Safari supporting Japanese, click here for more pictures)
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