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Complex Language Support for PDA's?
Jasin Natael asks: "What PDA's/Smartphones, etc. support complex languages in addition to more 'standard' languages? I'm a student of Japanese and am looking for a new PDA or smartphone that operates in English, but supports complex character sets. Input is a plus, but it's really needed for Contacts, Notes, Websites, and incoming E-Mail at a minimum. Would it be easy to add support to a Linux PDA (Zaurus) or Pocket PC for this? What about right-to-left languages, like Hebrew and Arabic?"
I use CJKOS on my Clie to give me Chinese characters, both for input as well as display in applications. It includes Japanese fonts but I have never used them. It works quite well for me.
I'm CERTAIN that a few months back I came across a Japanese package for the Palm. Maybe on Palm Freeware? That's the only Palm site I visit regularly so it could be there...
Palm OS is officially available in English, French, Spanish, German, Dutch, Portugese, Japanese, and Simplified Chinese, and there are translation modules to support Thai, Vietnamese, Korean, Hebrew, Greek, and more. Usually, a device is only set for one language at a time, but some of the overlay programs allow for an Asian language and Engligh together.
A few choice URLs:
http://www.penreader.com/PalmOS/PiLoc.html
Hebrew Localization
Chinese OS for Palm OS
Why are you even considering the world editions of the Zaurus? The Japanese models have full support for Japanese chars, plus nice dictionaries. But these models are sold only inside Japan (or through gray market), the world models don't have equivalent features.
Neopad Nihongo Input Romazi
I haven't tried either of the above, though...
Also, the program Dokusha, while also being a good English-Japanese dictionary, comes with some Japanese fonts.
I bought my PI-6500 6 years ago. It has handwriting recognition, wa-ei, ei-wa, kanji and kokugo dictionaries built-in. The handwriting recognition comes in handy when you want to look-up a kanji you don't know. It is also good practice for handwriting skills. The latest zaurus-es have these, but you used ones are really cheap in akihabara (50 bucks or less). You also might be interested in http://www.jisyo.org if you are serious about japanese study.
This is the highest-modded flamebait, so: the point is that I *have* looked around. The post is "Ask Slashdot" to get some anecdotal responses, or actual experiences back. I'm buying a PDA specifically for its complex language support, gray-market imports aren't an option, and I (and conceivably other /. readers) would like to hear about what works for other people.
For example, a few things I've found:
J-OS works on old Palms, but not anything with enough memory to be useful as a dictionary/learning tool. CJKOS doesn't support High-Res of any type and won't be updated for OS5. So much for a long-term solution. The things I've tried for Palm, while useful, are largely OLD freeware projects that crash a lot on the newer revisions of the OS.
Windows CE machines, while they do support unicode characters natively, need pagecode translation to display more common encodings (I have no experience to draw on... Is this a problem?), and have an abysmal educational software selection.
Point is: I haven't got the PDA/Smartphone to play with, and would like to hear about peoples' experiences fiddling with the language support of their gadgets before dropping a few hundred bucks on something that may not even work very well at all. I'd also be interested to find out which solutions feel like dirty little hacks, and which are virtually indistinguishable from OS-native support...
True science means that when you re-evaluate the evidence, you re-evaluate your faith.
Then set the locale to English and modify the fonts as described at this site . This gives you English Menues and English and Japanese input and gets rid of any mojibake in the Japanese applications. The Zaurus has the same handwriting recognition as all its predecessors which is the best I have ever seen for Kana, Kanji and various alphabets all at the same time.
***Quis custodiet ipsos custodes***
www.sofmap.co.jp sells clie and an older sharp zaurus (SL-B500, cheaper and also linux, with a chicklet keyboard). I have some older clies which I dislike due to their being entirely too slow for input using normal input methods. The newer clies are nice-looking too, and at least for the older ones there are apparently ways to localize them. I'd stick with linux and as much RAM as you can get though.. the new zaurus would be perfect with a little faster cpu and an extra hundred megabytes or so of ram. Undoubtedly you can run emacs with any language you like on it.