Now days mobiles are ubiquitous, covering almost all the regions and languages in the world. Cell phone manufactures supports phone menus in different languages but they are limited. If an user writes his message in Marathi (Devnagri Script, India) and sends it to a person who do not has
any support for Marathi in his cell phone, then he will not able to see the message correctly. Instead, he will see all unreadable characters.
There could be so many such cases even in one country. The country like India, which has large number of users with different native languages. It is practically impossible to support all the languages inside cell phone. And here comes the sigh of relief, Unicode.
Unicode provides the platform to encode and decode almost every symbol from different scripts. Its universally accepted standard, which uses UTF-8, UTF-16 etc. encoding schemes. If cell phone has Unicode support then any user can send and understand his own language. As Unicode includes Universal character set, which can be used in any countries.
Therefore, Unicode provides simplest solution which can be easily ported on mobile. SMS is the best candidate for its usage!!
Most of the mobile phones (even low end mobiles) manufacturers have provided the Unicode support, however, the problem still lies with the font rendering onto the tiny screen.
Even after recognizing the character, it has to be presented on to mobile screen, some times due
to limited capabilities of the phones, not all the language fonts are available.
This is the biggest limitation on this issue. There are couple of good blogs available on the internet which talks about the issues related fonts for different languages...
- (C) Anand Paithankar