Does Windows Phone 8 support Dzongkha?

HTC's new 8X, running Windows Phone 8

Dzongkha on mobile phones still presents a major challenge. The Dzongkha-enabled Nokia N900 that we developed back in 2009 as a proof-of-concept is still the only phone that has full support of both the official Dzongkha keyboard and perfect rendering of Dzongkha/Tibetan fonts.

HTC and Nokia have recently announced new phones running Windows Phone 8, Microsoft's recent attempt to grab some market share for mobile devices.

Will Windows Phone 8 support Dzongkha keyboard or display? Well, not according to the specs. Here are the official lists of languages:

Display. The following display languages are supported: Chinese (Simplified and Traditional), Czech, Danish, Dutch, English (UK and US), Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Malay, Norwegian (Bokmål), Polish, Portuguese (Brazil and Portugal), Russian, Spanish, and Swedish. The specific display languages that are included in your phone are chosen by your mobile operator or phone manufacturer.

On-screen keyboard. The following on-screen keyboard languages are supported: Chinese (Simplified and Traditional), Czech, Danish, Dutch, English (UK and US), Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Malay, Norwegian (Bokmål), Polish, Portuguese (Brazil and Portugal), Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, and Ukrainian. These input languages are available on all phones, regardless of which display languages your mobile operator or phone manufacturer chose to include.

None of the supported Display languages requires complex rendering (such as letter stacking), which might hint that Windows Phone 8 has no support for complex scripts. Whether the support is there but just not enabled remains to be seen. In the meantime, if what you need is a Dzongkha-enabled mobile phone, don't count on Windows Phone 8.

Dzongkha Rendering on the N900

I got the following email from one of our readers in China, which I read on the Nokia N900. Here's a screenshot of the email on the N900. The answer, apparently, is in the screenshot!

Dzongkha on Amazon Kindle E-Book Reader

An e-book reader is an electronic gadget that is used to read digital books. The most popular e-book reader is the Amazon Kindle. Here's an example of reading Dzongkha on the Kindle. The Kindle uses "electronic ink", which means the content can be viewed in direct sunlight, much like a real book.

A new poll. Topic: BBS News.

Our Facebook poll is now closed. 42% of participants - almost half - check their FB account more than once a day. 29% of users check their FB about once a day. 19% log on to FB less than once a day. And only 10% do not have an FB account.

And now to this month's poll: BBS news. We are interested to know which editions of the news, if any, you watch. The English version, The Dzongkha one, both, or neither?

N900 Dzongkha support now included in ukeyboard

We previously blogged about Dzongkha support for the N900 smartphone. Some more good news: Our Dzongkha keyboard is now included as one of the standard languages in the popular ukeyboard package for the N900.

Mr. Roman Moravcik, the developer of ukeyboard, has kindly agreed to include Dzongkha in the software package.

You're probably asking yourself, what does this mean? Well, this means that if you have the N900 phone, you can easily and simply enable its Dzongkha capabilities by simply installing the ukeyboard application. No special tweaking or hacking required!

Here are some more Frequently Asked Questions the N900 and Dzongkha:

1. You keep mentioning the N900. Can this work on other phones?
   Unfortunately, the answer is no. N900 runs Linux which supports the rendering of Dzongkha and easily programmable keyboards. These features are not currently available on most other phones, including the iPhone, Android-based phones, and most other Nokia phones.
   
2. Can you send an SMS in Dzongkha to other phones?
   You can send an SMS in Dzongkha, but the receiver - unless he or she also has a Dzongkha-enabled Nokia N900 - will probably not be able to read it, since most phones cannot display Dzongkha characters. The Dzongkha characters in these phones will usually appear as empty squares.
   
3. Where can I get the N900?
   Nokia started selling the N900 in India a few months ago. The MRP is a whopping Rs 25,000 (around US$570 in today's exchange rates). The price of the N900 in the U.S. is "only" $399 (about Nu 17500). Hopefully the price of Dzongkha-supporting mobile phones will become affordable in the upcoming years.
   
4. What about those cheap Nu. 1500 Nokia handsets that are sold in the market?
   Most cheap-and-best Nokia phones (and also the more expensive ones) do not support Dzongkha. Technically, these handsets have enough computing power to support Dzongkha rendering, but it basically up to Nokia to provide this support.

Want to learn how to use the Dzongkha keyboard? DzType is here!

We are glad to announce the launch of DzType, a first-of-its-kind web-based application that aids in teaching the Dzongkha Unicode keyboard.

Learning to type Dzongkha using DzType is fun and easy. As you move from one unit to the next, you learn how to master more keys on the keyboard. By the end, you will be a pro.

The software is free for all. You can run it online or offline (download the package here). Installation is simple and does not require high computing power. Even old and slow computers can be used.

The audience for the tool includes schools (today's students love technology!), colleges, monasteries, and any government, corporate or private organization where individuals can benefit from knowing how to type in Dzongkha.

This is the first project of the Rigsum Centre for Advanced Learning Technologies (CALT), who's mission is to research and develop technologies for advancing education and learning in Bhutan.

Disclosure: The writers of this blog are the directors of CALT (the low rate of blog posts in the last days was due to the DzType launch - we will now resume to our usual blogging rate.)

More Dzongkha Smartphone Screenshots

Here are some more screenshots of the first-ever smartphone with Dzongkha support. Note: The Nokia N900 is available in India with a a price that hovers around Rs 25,000.

SMS in Dzongkha (Cont'd)

Warning: This post is more technical than usual.

My post on mobile Dzongkha drew quite a lot of attention. I also received requests asking for technical implementation details. Here's a short explanation on enabling Unicode Dzongkha on the Nokia N900.

The Nokia N900 is a mobile computer with phone functionality. It comes preloaded with Maemo (a distribution of Linux). Now be warned: the N900 does not compete with iPhone or most other smartphones for that matter. This is not a sleek and sexy machine. It's more of an experimental (and rather bulky) gadget oriented to geeky folks (like me!) that like to experiment with software and hardware. As such, it is not a very popular device, but it does have its following.

Enabling Dzongkha Unicode on a computer usually involves three parts:

• Dzongkha font file. This is a file that contains the various glyphs for the Dzongkha characters. 
• Rendering engine. Usually part of the operating system, a rendering engine is a program that makes sure the characters are displayed correctly. While English is simple to render - just put each character to the right of the previous one - Dzongkha is much more complicated, due to vowels and stacking of letters.
• Dzongkha keyboard. This is a way to translate keystrokes into the various Dzongkha characters.

The most recent version of the N900 operating system already has a good rendering engine for Dzongkha, so the two missing parts were the font and the keyboard. Adding a font was easy. I downloaded a Dzongkha font from the DDC website (initially Jomolhari, but later replaced by Uchen), and copied it to one of the phone's font directories (~/.font). This is similar to installing a font in Windows.

The more tricky part was adding a keyboard. The N900 has two keyboards: a hardware slide-out keyboard with three rows of keys, and a "software" touch screen keyboard. I decided to focus on the touch screen keyboard, since it is easy to change the key labels when they are displayed on the screen. To add a new software keyboard, I used the ukeyboard open source utility, which uses "keyboard definition files". A keyboard definition file maps the keys to characters. In the case of Dzongkha, I used the DDC's Dzongkha keyboard layout. Here's an excerpt from the keyboard definition file, showing one of the rows:

row {
key ཀ alpha
key ཁ alpha
key ག alpha
key ང alpha
key ི alpha
key ུ alpha
key ེ alpha
key ོ alpha
key ཅ alpha
key ཆ alpha
key ཇ alpha
key ཉ alpha
key ཝ alpha
}

To summarize: It's relatively simple to enable full Dzongkha functionality on the N900, mainly due to the fact that it's running Linux with all the trimmings, and the availability of a keyboard utility. Since the N900 is not a phone for the masses, this is more a proof of concept than a practical product. The DDC plans to bring Dzongkha to more popular platforms, such as iOS (Apple's operating system for the iPhone) and Android.

SMS in Dzongkha

Is this the world's first Dzongkha-enabled smartphone? Perhaps. I've been playing recently with the Nokia N900, a smartphone cum mobile computer running Linux. After installing a Dzongkha font (Jomolhari, created by Chris Fynn) and tweaking the on-screen keyboard, the prototype was complete. I was then able to surf Dzongkha-enabled websites, read and write Dzongkha emails, and even send text messages (SMS) in Dzongkha. This is not a product, but rather a proof-of-concept: Dzongkha can be used on existing mobile devices. Now let's wait for one of the mobile operators to offer a daily zakar SMS service in Dzongkha...

Sending an SMS in Dzongkha

Surfing the DDC's website

Online Dzongkha-English-Dzongkha dictionary

One of the biggest and heaviest books found on the shelves of Thimphu bookstores is the Dzongkha Development Commission's (DDC) 2006 Dzongkha-English-Dzongkha dictionary. While it is fun to browse such dictionaries, it is often more efficient to take advantage of digital capabilities such as search. Luckily, the DDC created a very nice online resource. It includes 4 components: searchable Dzongkha-English, English-Dzongkha, and Dzongkha-Dzongkha dictionaries, as well as a listing of Dzongkha-English entries, organized alphabetically (shown in the picture). Click on a letter at the top to see the words starting with that letter. Then choose an option from the second set of options (rows 6-8 in the picture) to see words starting with that letter/vowel combination.