A while ago I made a page on how Chinese is supported on cellphones and how it works. Unfortunatly I couldn’t find much information on the internet, contacting the helpdesks of several cellphone compagny left me with an empty inbox … so I was wondering if some of you know more about this topic.
to see what i have (not much) : http://seba.ulyssis.org/thesis/gsm.php
(or pda related since cellphones and pda’s are almost the same nowadays)
It varies enormously from manufacturer to manufacturer, and model to model by one manufacturer, and even as to the intended destination market (country) of apparently identical phones.
The only consistant theme I have seen is that if you buy a phone in Taiwan or China, it will most likely receive SMS in English, Simple Chinese and Traditional Chinese. Sending - well that is a whole different story.
It varies enormously from manufacturer to manufacturer, and model to model by one manufacturer, and even as to the intended destination market (country) of apparently identical phones.
The only consistant theme I have seen is that if you buy a phone in Taiwan or China, it will most likely receive SMS in English, Simple Chinese and Traditional Chinese. Sending - well that is a whole different story.
Eh? No probs in sending SMS in Chinese between different manufacturer’s phones as the coding is standarized.
Eh? No probs in sending SMS in Chinese between different manufacturer’s phones as the coding is standarized.[/quote]
Ok so how do i keep the phone operation in english language, but have the option to send SMS in simplified or trad chinese? I have a nokia. can’t seem to have that choice.
any suggestions?
only when your cellphone is put on traditional chinese you can send chinese messages (using bopomofo), when put on simplified chinese you can send chinese messages using pinyin …
So does anyone know what encodings/standards are used ? I think it’s UCS-2 . And for input methods most compagnies use T9-software, but i wonder why they don’t let you the choice of choosing your input method ? maybe messages aren’t sent in Unicode at all ?
I’m puzzeled with the question and there doesn’t seem to be good information out there 
[quote=“seba”]only when your cellphone is put on traditional Chinese you can send Chinese messages (using bopomofo), when put on simplified Chinese you can send Chinese messages using pinyin …
So does anyone know what encodings/standards are used ? I think it’s UCS-2 . And for input methods most compagnies use T9-software, but i wonder why they don’t let you the choice of choosing your input method ? maybe messages aren’t sent in Unicode at all ?
I’m puzzeled with the question and there doesn’t seem to be good information out there [/quote]
yes, i did notice that option, but that’s a terribly inefficient method. i don’t want to have to change the base language everytime I want to sms and then back again.
There must be a better way around this. bueller?
I am afraid there is no such option. The reason is probably that an “English” SMS requires only have of the data (1 byte) than the Chinese one (2 bytes) for each character, i.e. if the phone has enabled Chinese messaging even English text will be 2 bytes (1 byte full of zeros).
So when the phone is in “English mode” it is assumed you text in English only but the manufacturer offers you more characters to be send instead. I think.
It’s not to hard to memorise the shortcut (a good thing aboutthe Nokia OS), so I just do menu-4-4-1-3 to change to Chinese, write the message, then menu-4-4-1-2 to change back.
Brian
It’s not to hard to memorise the shortcut (a good thing aboutthe Nokia OS), so I just do menu-4-4-1-3 to change to Chinese, write the message, then menu-4-4-1-2 to change back.
Brian[/quote]
Ok thanks. but the next question is. I bought this phone in Taiwan. Naturally it doesnt have pinyin simplified SMS input (although it does have simplified general mode). how and where do i get the pinyin input. Sorry, but i find zhuyin much slower ie too used to pinyin.
hmm. i don’t really understand all the problems you guys are having. i have a motorola v.66. one of those flip phones. bought it in taiwan over a year ago, but went in and changed everything to english. when i send messages, i can choose multiple methods including both bopomofo and pinyin as well as a ton of others(no idea what they do). i often switch between pinyin and english mid sentence.
sending sms’s for me has nothing to do with what language the phone menus are in.
is the english manual for your phone online?
My wife has a very recent Samsung - you can write Chinese SMS in pinyin (not zhuyin) while in English menus. My ancient motorola (LM2000) only allows writing Chinese if Chinese is the selected language - however iTap (also known as T9) knows about pinyin.
Incidentaly the Samsung has smart pinyin - push the keys once for each character and all the chinese character possibilities are offered.
so it seems Nokia is way behind 
or somebody should check out the latest cellphones of them
so smartphones are getting a bit smart after all 
[quote]sending sms’s for me has nothing to do with what language the phone menus are in.
is the English manual for your phone online?[/quote]
Nokia doesn’t support this function. You can make a suggestion here however:
[quote=“rian”]My wife has a very recent Samsung - you can write Chinese SMS in pinyin (not zhuyin) while in English menus. My ancient motorola (LM2000) only allows writing Chinese if Chinese is the selected language - however iTap (also known as T9) knows about pinyin.
Incidentaly the Samsung has smart pinyin - push the keys once for each character and all the Chinese character possibilities are offered.[/quote]
I have been using an Ericsson T68i for about a year now (which I bought in Taipei through Chunghua Telecom) and have had great success with using Pinyin to enter text in my SMS messages, phone book, whatever, while my menus are all in English.
The newest flagship phone from Ericsson - the oh-so-beautiful t610 - does NOT, however, support Pinyin out of the box, but I’m pretty sure there’s a firmware update out there to be had if you go to a service center somewhere.
I’ve also heard that most phones from Hong Kong ship with pinyin as a standard input system, FYI, so if you have any plans to be there…
so the consensus is, short of buying a new phone or menu-changing-tricks, I am shit out of luck.
Has anybody any experience with Bluetooth-equipped PDAs or phones? Specifically I’d like to know if there is a way to share ADSL Internet access from a Windows PC over a Bluetooth serial connection to a cellphone running Opera under Symbian. 
Gobs of guanxi for helpful replies! Actually it’s not so much the phone end of things that’s the problem … it’s getting the Bluetooth to talk TCP/IP and stability problems that I’m in need of help with.
I can’t answer your question in the configutration you’ve mentioned monkey, but I can tell you and others my success story with using my Ericsson T39mc with Bluetooth to get Internet access to my PowerBook G4 17" through GPRS.
Bascially, it works like this to establish a TCP/IP Internet connection wireless anywhere on the road with in range of a cell:
It is horribly complicated and setup is different for each phone and corresponding laptop settings. But don’t give up. I called Chung Hwa’s support and after about 20 minutes (speaking in Chinese however), I got walked through how to configure my phone and laptop. Why was it so easy? Because apparently Chung Hwa has a database of all the phones out there with GPRS capability. You see, connecting to my phone via Bluetooth is a piece of cake. Getting GPRS set up is a pain. Note, I did have to switch to the Chinese menus on the phone so I knew how to be walked through on the phone.
Chung Hwa has several plans for data. I’m experimenting with one plan where I pay about 600NT a month for a huge (in terms of GPRS) amount of monthly bandwith. However, there are pay-as-you-use plans too.
It is not incredibly fast (not really ideal of Web surfing), but will work nicely for Web-based e-mail, e-mail clients, instant messaging, etc, the stuff I need when I’m sipping tea up in the tea gardens of mao1kong1. They don’t have Wi-Fi there yet.
Thanks Jeremy, but that’s using GPRS to feed your notebook. I’m looking to do it the other way around – I want a fast Internet connection to my phone, not a slow one to my PC. :?