iPhone Language Capabilities

> I have a report that the browser can display Latin, Greek, Russian, Chinese,
> Japanese, and Korean. Presumably other apps would do the same, but no definite
> info yet.

I can confirm that Safari on my iPhone quite nicely renders Apple Japan's
home page (well, the text at least ‹ it can't display the QuickTime movie on
that page!). Simplified Chinese seems fine, too. The text of the Seoul
National University home page displays nicely, but the title bar of that
page is gibberish. Pusan National University's site doesn't display well.
Presumably, then, the iPhone doesn't support all encodings of Hangul; I'll
assume that it doesn't do all encodings of Japanese, either, although the
handful of sites I've tested seemed to be fine.

Cyrillic works fine, with even a Javascript popup displaying a message in
Russian. Greek also shows up well.

A quick look suggests that neither Arabic nor Hebrew is supported.

As for the iPod functions, I know that Japanese will work well ‹ I have a
couple of Japanese songs in my iTunes library, and their information shows
up well on my iPhone.

Steve

On Jul 3, 2007, at 9:40 AM, Big Steve wrote:

> Pusan National University's site doesn't display well.

It looks like the people who made that page failed to put the
required charset meta statement in their html. Not very
professional....

> Presumably, then, the iPhone doesn't support all encodings of
> Hangul; I'll
> assume that it doesn't do all encodings of Japanese, either,

I'm sure it supports all encodings as long as they are stipulated in
the page code as international standards require. But unlike OS X
Safari, there is no View > Encodings menu where you can correct for
those pages where the charset= statement is wrong or missing.
  

On Jul 2, 2007, at 4:48 PM, Tom Gewecke wrote:

> I don't have the phone but the reports I've had indicate user
> interface and input are English only for this version.

I can confirm that all apps (browser, mail, address book, calendar)
displays and syncs Japanese fine. Obviously no input capabilities,
but a big step forward compared to most smart phones. But since
there is no way to adjust the encoding, I am not sure how these apps
will react when they encounter non-standard encodings.

For example, the default email encoding for Japanese is ISO2020jp (or
JIS). It seems to read standard Japanese email fine, and I assume it
reads unicode email fine (since Apple Mail sends Japanese mail in
unicode by default), but don't know how it will react when it gets a
message encoded some other way, or with the encoding information
missing.

Same goes for web pages. The standard encoding used to be EUC. Now
most pages are encoded with S-JIS. And I haven't encountered a page
so far that Safari on the iPhone won't render, but I know that there
are pages that requires manual intervention on the Mac version of
Safari (manually setting the encoding), so those pages will probably
will not render correctly on the iPhone.

Tomoharu

Tom Gewecke wrote:
> On Jul 3, 2007, at 9:40 AM, Big Steve wrote:
> Pusan National University's site doesn't display well.
>
> It looks like the people who made that page failed to put the
> required charset meta statement in their html. Not very
> professional....

Write to them in Korean or English, politely; they're prestigious
people, explaining the oversight.

They may well correct it and then spread the word. They probably don't
expect access from non-Hangul OS machines.

George