Mobile Phones w/ Support for Chinese Characters?

antifoidulus asks: "I am learning both Chinese and Japanese(well, I can converse in Japanese, but I can only say that I want to eat stuff in Chinese!) and I was curious if there were any phones available in the US which I can use to read/write Chinese/Japanese characters. I frequently communicate with friends in Japan, and I would like be able to send Japanese mail on my phone. I have a Japanese phone, but it seems Verizon says that it will not work on their network. I would prefer to have something that I can upload Java programs to, so I can customize my language practice."

Comments

Nokia Series 90

[Fizzl]

..Will have atleast Chinese support. Keep your eyes focused at the web pages.

Loads of issues

[Saiai Hakutyoutani]

Support for Chinese characters isn't actually one package that can be supported as such. First of all, you need fonts: Traditional fonts, simplified, Korean and Japanese fonts. Then you need support for encodings, like GB18030, ISO-2022-JP, ISO-2022-KR, Unicode, etc. And last but not least you need input methods, and Asian input methods are often rather complex.

Since at least Japanese users often prefer to send e-mail over their phones rather than text messages, it would be feasible to make a Java e-mail app that supported a few input methods and encoding conversions, as well as a rendering engine for Asian characters. However, I wouldn't hold my breath. It's a good thing if Nokia's trying to address this.

Re:Loads of issues

[antifoidulus]

Well both Japanese and Korean have phonetic characters in addition to the Chinese characters. These phonetic characters are required to conjugate Japanese verbs, for use as sentence particles etc, as well as they can be used instead of the kanji. When Japanese people use their cell phones, they input the phonetic characters directly(There are about 50 of these phonetic symbols, organised into 10 groups by initial consonant, and each group has 5 vowels in it, so it's quite easy, if a bit slow, to enter them on a phone).
I'm not sure exactly how Korean works, the Hangul I know is phonetic, but they can also use Chinese characters. Though, from what I understand, the Chinese characters are usually for show(when writing the proper names of people or places etc) and serve very little grammatical function in day to day writing anymore, but I could be wrong.

The problem is your network

[beswicks]

I cannot speak for the US, but in the UK, this is REALLY easy.

All you need to do is find out the requirements for your network, and then buy a phone from hong kong, that has chineese input, and works with you carriers network.

Thats what my friends do, and they can then send each other SMS, over the UK networks, in chinese, using the 12 key input system i described in another post, and it 'just works'(tm).

So my recomendation would be find a phone from hong kong that works with a US network, and buy the phone and switch networks, you can even use the phone in 'english' and have the chinese as a possible option.

If you want an exact recomendation, look at Motorola, the one with the circular display, where the key guard 'spins' around the display to show the keys. The chinese ones have the 'stokes' written on the number keys, so they are kinda obvious.

Hope this helps.

Therre is *NO* GSM in Japan

[gorim]

You have to buy a Japanese phone that can also dual-mode with GSM networks.

Japan has a variety of 2.5 and 3G cellular networks. Long before the rest of the world, thus why so little compatibility.

But that all is changing with W-CDMA (not to be confused with plain old CDMA from the USA). Tri-band dual-mode phones that do W-CDMA and GSM are coming out that can be used globally *including* in Japan.

Treo

[Anonymous Coward]

Treo would probably be your best bet, as PalmOS can work in Japanese. Support for Japanese is possible via J-OS or CJKOS. With CJKOS, you should be able to use Chinese as well as Japanese (and Korean, if you need). I have used J-OS on my Palm once upon a time, and it worked OK. Many Japanese Palm users have been using it for a while to send e-mails from their PalmOS PDAs, so it should have no problem sending e-mail in Japanese to other devices (including phones).
Your Japanese phone will NEVER work in the US carrier, as Japanese carriers use their own standards (there is no GSM, no regular CDMA in Japan. Even wCDMA is based upon partly their standard, which does not necessary allow regular wCDMA to work in their network nor their phone in regular wCDMA network).
Besides, I don't think there is a Japanese phone that can truely let you use Chinese on. Keep it in your mind, just because Japanese use Chinese characters in writing doesn't mean they use all the Chinese characters. There are a tons of Chinese characters that does not exist in Japanese (or rarely used). Japanese phones are geared clearly towards entering Chinese characters used in Japanese (aka Kanji) writings (as well as alphanumeric). So, if you were to enter anything in Chinese, you will have to enter everything as if you are pronouncing that particular character in Japanese, not in Chinese, which means you will have to enter it quite a bit differently (trust me, I can read/write/speak Japanese perfectly).