60 things

I spent my weekend in a village called Ponmalaippatti, Trichy, Tamil Nadu. While fiddling with my N80 I noticed to my surprise a tiny ‘3G’ below the signal status bar. It was there for only a second and disappeared before I could launch ScreenCap to take a picture of it. I saw it again a few minutes, but again, it disappeared the next second. I checked the Web browsing speed and it wasn’t anything worth mentioning.

I called Airtel to ask if they’re already testing 3G here, if it’s possible, but they denied it. Wish someone explained me the mystery of the 3G logo.

Your phone’s camera: it’s not one thing, it’s many. Amit Agarwal of Digital Inspiration fame lists out some interesting uses of phone camera.

Snapping pics to locate your parked car, capture computer error messages, location of cables attached to your PC/home electronic devices, to use as a mirror are some of the uses.

Go check it out: Interesting Uses of Camera Mobile Phones To Stay Productive

S60 is getting closer and closer to desktop experience. EQ Soft’s EQ AltTab brings PC’s window-switching functionality to S60 v3 phones. This program runs in the background while you use applications to switch to.

Download it from here: http://www.box.net/shared/prjuy9iio0
It’s unsigned.

Pretty useful for S60 phones like N95, N95 8GB, N82, and N81, those with good memory. Why only top order NSeries phones? Because Call Filter - another program that needs to run in the background to do its job well - is shutdown when Opera, S60 Web browser, and similar apps are used. So such phones are for S60 v3 FP1, actually.

(courtesy: Nokia Users)

One of the major reasons why I bought my first S60 phone, Nokia 6630, was the fact that Symbian was Unicode compliant. I bought it in 2005. Two months back I got myself N80 and moved to S60 v3. But till now I’ve been unsuccessful in finding a way to read webpages in Tamil, my mother tongue.

I’ve made many attempts to get a Tamil Unicode (ta-IN) font installed in my phone without success. Last week I decided to take a risk by installing Latha, the Unicode TrueType font that comes with Windows, in my N80 using Font Router.

It didn’t work, but I think I learnt something interesting. After having installed the Unicode font and rebooted the phone, I was able to make out Tamil Unicode text in webpages in the S60 Web browser, but the browser displayed the Tamil text somewhat like Internet Explorer 5. Tamil letters are vowels and vowel+consonant combinations. The S60 Web browser split letters into separate characters, which I think is a clear indication that the browser couldn’t render Unicode.

The font installation turned all the English letters in the UI into boxes. During the past 4 years, as a language professional I’ve been involved in translation of Nokia phones to some extent. I, and my erstwhile colleagues and friends who are still involved in Nokia UI localisation, gave our output in Unicode. We believed that Nokia used Unicode text in its phones; but if that was the case and if S60 was fully Unicode compliant, I should have seen junk characters in Tamil instead of boxes. Nokia may be using images (bitmap fonts?) instead of a truetype font.

I’m not sure how many Tamil Nokia phone users want a Tamil UI for their mobiles. I don’t, but I certainly want to read news and blogs in Tamil. I’d also like to add the ability to write in Tamil, if such a basic thing as reading the text weren’t nearly impossible.

Nokia has localised many of its phones into Tamil, so at least its S60 phones should have no problems rendering Unicode. Language packs could be a good solution (they could include a font installer too).

I’d like to see if the latest S60 phones have this issue. If and when I get myself a N95 or N82, the first thing I’d check would be if it can display Tamil text.

If you have had the same problem with your language, please share your experience in the comments, so that we can explore and find out if there is a way to fix it.