Windows Phone does not support PinYin

It does, however, offer BoPoMoFo and handwriting.

Just a big heads up for anybody considering this platform. I got myself a Nokia 1020 and the camera is definitely living up to its hype.

but if you just want a phone with a great camera, why not go with Sony? At least there are hundreds of Pinyin input apps on Android.

It does have pinyin input, but only for simplified characters.

Bing maps also doesn’t work well in Asia, with a very limited set of points of interest and addresses. Want to use Google maps? Too bad, you can’t.

Also the audio player doesn’t support audio scrubbing (skipping around inside the track by dragging the bar). Want to skip to the end of a long audio book, you have to hold down the Fast forward key for like a minute, but don’t move your finger as the FF button is also the “track skip ahead” button. Oh and it never remembers where you are in a track.

This kind of lack of polish from Microsoft, lack of support for Asia, lack of a notification centre (if you miss a notification, then after 5 seconds it just disappears forever…lol) and lack of apps + games made me totally abandon the platform half a year ago. Moved to Android, never looked back! Maybe it’s caught up a bit now, but I doubt it.

I’ve never understood the “Pinyin for Simplified, Everything But for Traditional” philosophy. Samsung Galaxy’s default keyboard is the same, and I had to download Google Pinyin to address that bug. Yes, bug.

Blame it on Taiwanese people being utterly unwilling to accept the best Romanization system their language has ever seen.

Exactly. It’s a political issue, not a programming one. I suppose most of the companies that use pinyin entry for traditional chinese are thinking about Hong Kong, anyways.

Exactly. It’s a political issue, not a programming one. I suppose most of the companies that use pinyin entry for traditional chinese are thinking about Hong Kong, anyways.[/quote]

Hong Kong doesn’t use pinyin.

It’s a userbase issue. People who need to use pinyin with trad characters is limited to foreign language learners in Taiwan, and maybe a few specific individuals (people in China studying history); that’s literally it. So although it’s technically easy to implement, the addition and subsequent support may not seem worth it.

I’m lucky i bought a Sony Xperia phone, as the default keyboard is nice and the input options (pinyin, bopomofo, handwriting, plus the hong kong ones) are separate from the output options. It’s a nice setup, as are the keyboard options on iOS.

Anyway OP is lucky to have handwriting; when i bough my original Windows 7 phone in Taiwan, it had no Chinese support at all (input or UI) until update 7.5. It was available to buy it Taiwan for almost a year before that, in English only; must have sold so few I wonder why they even bothered launching the platform here.

Exactly. It’s a political issue, not a programming one. I suppose most of the companies that use pinyin entry for traditional chinese are thinking about Hong Kong, anyways.[/quote]

Hong Kong doesn’t use pinyin.[/quote]

Whoops! then I suppose they’re just using common sense.

I just bought a windows phone :frowning:

I’ve never understood the “Pinyin for Simplified, Everything But for Traditional” philosophy. Samsung Galaxy’s default keyboard is the same, and I had to download Google Pinyin to address that bug. Yes, bug.[/quote]

I’m glad I’m not the only one who is struggling with Android keyboards. It’s really starting to piss me off.

The Samsung Chinese keyboard is great, but as you said, there’s only support for simplified.

The google pinyin keyboard is just crap (where is 里? why does it suddenly appear in compounds like 公里?) But it seems to be the only solution to pinyin/traditional

I need to switch frequently between English, simplified and traditional and there’s no way to access all 3 from the same keyboard.

Why can’t apps remember what keyboard is used, so I can always get traditional for Line and simplified for QQ?

If anyone can write up a good FAQ for this, it would be much appreciated.