Looks like no one’s replied in a while. To start the conversation again, simply ask a new question.

Language Support for iPhone

I just got the iphone this morning. Its pretty good, except for two big problems. One is the EDGE network, which is slow, but nothing to be done about that.

The second is the lack of language support. I expected it to support the languages that OS X does, but it seems that the iphone is most limited in this regard. Of particular irritation to me is the lack of Hebrew support, as a good chunk of my iTunes library is in hebrew. In addition, websites don't render correctly with unsupported languages...

Is this going to be fixed? soon?!

iPhone, Mac OS X (10.4.10)

Posted on Jul 8, 2007 7:01 PM

Reply
13 replies

Jul 8, 2007 7:08 PM in response to telavivi

Unfortunately, there's no way to know.

Here's an article on a site you might want to follow about the Multilingual Mac. It talks about how certain language character sets, like Hebrew, were left out of the iPhone font:

http://m10lmac.blogspot.com/2007/06/iphone-language-capabilities-seem.html

Can't say anything about when or if they'll add this, but do please ask them to. I already have:

http://www.apple.com/feedback/iphone.html

Sorry I don't have better news,
Aym

Jul 8, 2007 7:53 PM in response to kjk

the iPhone email app has limited support for Japanese
text; depending on which encoder the sender used.


I would be curious to hear details about what you find the limitations to be. It would surprise me that email containing the required charset headers would not be read correctly in the Mail client regardless of the encoding. Have you found that to be the case?

Safari also should display all web pages which have the correct required charset header. I would expect problems would arise only with webmail where the wrong charset was used (because Safari has no way yet to manually correct for that).

Jul 8, 2007 8:02 PM in response to Tom Gewecke

Tom,
The limitation seems to be one of the 4 included encodings that are in Mac OSX's version of Safari, but not supported by iPhone's Mail interface. I received 6 emails from Japan (thru the iPhone's Yahoo mail interface) and one of them came in as junk characters. In a browser, you can just keep trying the other encodings to make the junk characters readable-this is not possible (from what I can tell) within iPhone's mail interface.

If I have time, I will log into the Yahoo mail account directly thru Safari on the iPhone, to see if that works better than iPhone mail-but I'm assuming they use a similar encoding scheme. I also assume that once they release the iPhone in Japan, this will be addressed 😝

Jul 8, 2007 8:21 PM in response to kjk

Another problem is typing emails in a language other than English. The automatic spelling correction constantly gets in the way which makes typing in German (as in my case) verrrrrrry time consuming (to say it nicely).
Would be nice if one could turn the spell correction software off. Multiple language support will be an easy software fix down the road, though.

Jul 8, 2007 8:25 PM in response to Tom Gewecke

I sent a note to myself via Lotus Notes, using Japanese, Chinese, and Spanish (accented) characters, and none came through properly via e-mail. I have no idea what encoding is being used. I seem to have tossed the email so I can't tell you how it looked on the Mac.

All three languages appear correctly on properly formatted web pages using Safari.

My experience,
Aym

Jul 8, 2007 8:26 PM in response to Bjorn Kemper

Bjorn,
does the keyboard even have access to stuff like umlauts, accents, etc.?

The asian language support on Mac OSX is pretty sweet (esp. since it is all built in, no downloading tons of language packs, etc.) I wasn't really expecting any support at all on the iPhone..so being able to at least read some of the japanese language emails was a pleasant surprise. Of course, now I want it ALL. 😝

Jul 8, 2007 8:38 PM in response to kjk

kjk,
No, the keyboard doesn't, but you can work around it.

However, when I type my name on the keyboard the correction software suggests right away my name from the address book, correctly spelled with an umlaut ö.

On my mac I regularly switch between English and German Keyboard layouts...
I guess, since international iphones should be here by end of the year so should be the respective language support.

Jul 9, 2007 3:20 AM in response to kjk

I
received 6 emails from Japan (thru the iPhone's Yahoo
mail interface) and one of them came in as junk
characters. In a browser, you can just keep trying
the other encodings to make the junk characters
readable-this is not possible (from what I can tell)
within iPhone's mail interface.


That's correct. If someone sends email with a mail program that fails to follow the required international standards, there is currently no way to fix it on the iPhone. That may have been the case with the message you had trouble with.

Language Support for iPhone

Welcome to Apple Support Community
A forum where Apple customers help each other with their products. Get started with your Apple ID.