I had written in 2009 about how Nokia 2626 then an entry level phone supported Unicode rendering and Tamil texts. Today this post is kind of an update to that.
Today for a friend of mine visiting Chennai for a week, I purchased an entry level Nokia phone – Nokia 100 for Rs.1100 from Saravana Selvarathnam in Ranganathan Street, Chennai. When I played with it, I realized it supports having User Interface in 6 to 7 Indian Languages – Hindi, Gujarati, Tamil, Telugu and so on. I was curious whether it was UI alone in local language or whether I can input as well. It turned out I can input in local language (Tamil in my case) as well with ease. With some 5 minutes of practice I got the hang of the keyboard method – it is kind of a T9 version of TamilNet99 layout.
I sent the following message (see images below) from my iPhone (Airtel SIM) to this Nokia 100 Phone (BSNL SIM). It reached and got displayed just fine. I did the reverse, sent a message from Nokia 100 to iPhone – that worked as well.
I am so happy to see this seamless Tamil SMS being transmitted between operators and working across devices at extreme price points (Nokia 100 is Rs.1100 and iPhone is at a premium price of Rs.45000).
When even a basic Nokia 100 can support Tamil, why is Windows phone not supporting Indic yet? Lack of Tamil support is one of the reason I am not completely shifting to my Nokia Lumia 800 over my Galaxy S II. Windows phone is otherwise good.
Reason is Windows Phone 7 is based on Windows CE a 15 year old compact OS. The next version of Windows Phone, WP8 is based on Windows 8/Kernel which is expected to support Tamil & Indic