Yes Apple devices now appear have pretty good support - though they are not that widely available in India and the price is prohibitive for most people. Nokia N900 and N9 are also very good - but again the price is prohibitive and Nokia seem to be abandoning their Linux based operating systems - and afaik Windows phones don't have this support. The latest version of Android is supposed to have support for Devanagri and Tamil - but people report problems with incorrect character reordering and other scripts are not supported. It also seems some manufacturers, including Samsung, have implemented their own complex script support in a few models sold in some markets - even on older versions of Android. But It is hard to figure out which models. Also on some Android phones complex script rendering seems to work OK in the webkit browser - but not for SMS or any other application. I guess webkit is doing its own rendering.
In general it seems the support for complex scripts on "smart phones" is about at the level it was on PCs ten or twelve years ago - except this time Apple seem to be ahead of Microsoft whereas on PCs it was the other way round. It is unfortunate that when making mobile operating systems companies didn't include complex script rendering support from the beginning. On 19/03/2012, Tom Gewecke <[email protected]> wrote: > > On Mar 19, 2012, at 8:24 AM, Christopher Fynn wrote: > >> Has anyone done a survey of which mobile devices support Unicode and >> complex script rendering? > > As far as the iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch are concerned, my understanding is they > support display of Unicode Devanagari, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Tamil, Telugu, > Sinhala, Oriya, Malayalam, Kannada, and Bengali. But so far only a Hindi > keyboard has been provided. There are some apps that will permit input in > some the other scripts for some purposes.
