ΩJr. Failure Notes

Default Windows Mobile 6 lacks Unicode support - ΩJr. Failure Notes

This information lives on a webpage hosted at the following web address: 'https://omegajunior.globat.com/failurenotes/'.

Well at least the Dutch version I received pre-installed on my Samsung telephone does. This became apparent after adding unicode characters into a web design in order to reduce image weight.

A.E.Veltstra
Friday, May 28, 2010

On our desktop computers, unicode fonts kicked into gear to show the characters we desired. On the cell phone however, Opera Mobile 10 as well as Internet Explorer showed small rectangles instead. (See the forum thread: http://my.opera.com/community/forums/topic.dml?id=586552 )

After copying some unicode fonts to the telephone and restarting it, the characters showed up as desired. However:
1. We can't expect other users of any mobile phone to add unicode fonts.
2. We can't throw the unicode font of our choice (MS Mincho) into an @font-face... it weighs 8MB. Bye bye, reduction.

We wonder whether MS designed their mobile OS to lack unicode support when distributed to those cultures that seem to lack a need, and include unicode support when distributed to any non-Roman language culture.

Or maybe a different party made that decision, like our mobile phone provider.

Rather ignorant, if you ask us.

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