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?"

Comments

Complex language support?

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought you meant Perl support.

CJKOS

[Lemuel]

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.

Palm OS handles those, but one-at-a-time

[bcombee]

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

A couple programs

[Rob Simpson]

Neopad Nihongo Input Kana
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.

Re:Oh for God's sake. . .

[Jasin Natael]

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...