Fwd: Unicode on mobile devices

From: Kai Hendry (hendry@aplixcorp.com)
Date: Tue Apr 29 2008 - 16:31:59 CDT

  • Next message: David Starner: "Re: Unicode on mobile devices"

    Apologies for the potential repost. I don't think my original got through.

    After a call today with an Opera employee, he informed me rightly that
    many handset manufacturers are unprepared for the license cost of
    fonts with a wide Unicode glyph coverage.
    This led me to fear a "region locking" scenario of mobile devices. Any comments?

    ---------- Forwarded message ----------
    From: Kai Hendry <hendry@aplixcorp.com>
    Date: Mon, Apr 28, 2008 at 10:38 AM
    Subject: Unicode on mobile devices
    To: unicode@unicode.org

    Since new Web growth is "predicted" to happen on mobile devices, I
     have been naively looking into i18n tests for charsets and Unicode
     glyphs. Idea is, you can buy a phone that passes this imaginary
     Unicode Acid test and you would then know it should have basic support
     for reading your culture's language.
     http://dev.w3.org/2008/mobile-test/test.html

     The good news from my little survey with contacts in Asia, UTF-8 seems
     to be gaining popularity (in Japan/Korea) compared to "legacy"
     encodings except perhaps China: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GB2312
    Also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GBK

     So assuming utf8, I wondered if it was then worthwhile to test for
     certain popular/key glyphs?
     http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of_Internet_users

     I believe the age old argument that all/most of the glyphs can't be on
     a mobile device no longer holds, with memory being so inexpensive.
     Anyone have any rough ideas how much storage space the most complete
     glyph collection would take? Perhaps I am wrong. :)

     Any helpful pointers would be great. Thanks for your time,



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