Ask anybody from a farmer to enterpreneur, poor to rich, rural to urban, be it any categorization you can think of Mobiles are ubiquitous. It is a result of great combined efforts of private cellular service providers, cell phone manufacturers, Department of Telecom, TRAI and many others. I applaud all of them for this considerable feet. It wasn’t an easy task in a country like ours which is so diverse and catering to the demands of all the sectors in a profitable manner, simply superb.
Anyways, this is a story everybody knows so no point reiterating it. Coming to my point, I was just wondering how much consideration is given to the local languages support by the cell phone manufacturers. In present time one can say it is good if not excellent. All the entry level phones have the support for local languages in my case it is Hindi. Korean giants LG and Samsung are the pioneers in this field. See any low end phone phone from their stable be it a GSM or a CDMA it supports Hindi fonts and in some cases a Hindi T9 dictionary too. Nokia too has Hindi support in phones like Nokia 1200 et al. Motorola and Sony Ericsson are lousy companies in this regard with little or no support for the local channel of communication.
My grouse is why only low end phones and why not high end phones should support local languages. Is it a shame for the companies to put local languages in their high end phones though they can put it in low end phones? Or is it a shame for the high end customers to have local languages support in their phones? **May be someone can comment Oh God you are using a cheap phone as it has Hindi support in it. On the contrary it is highly upmarket to type SMS in Hindi or to store contact names in Hindi. Any internet buff can tell you how much more efforts has to be put to design a Hindi webpage than a routine one.
I think companies should proudly advertise the local languages support as a prime feature. Company like LG has done good by launching LG KG320 Dyanamite Series phone with Hindi support. It is a mid range phone and hats off to the company for at least taking a good step forward. It is the best phone in the market which has Hindi fonts. But again why not a Viewty or a Prada or soon to be launched LG Secret can have this? I sincerely hope one day it will not be a shame to use Hindi fonts phone or may be a proper Hindi keypad phone in future.I am not a jingoist but if Chinese, Japanese and Russians are proud of their languages, why can’t we? The best mobile review site in the globe is https://mobile-review.com is purely in Russian though it has English as a secondary language. How many Hindi websites we know except a few newspaper website and a few others.
Cell cos go glocal not only global.*