Talking to industry newspaper Digitimes, Jack Tong of HTC Asia commented that WP7 wasn’t going to hit non-English Asian markets until the second half of 2011:
As for the recently launched Windows Phone 7 (WP7), Tong indicated that for Asia, the company will target English-speaking markets such as Singapore and Australia since Chinese and other language editions will not be in the first half of 2011.Early sales of WP7 devices look promising, but substantial market penetration will have to wait until the introduction of different language versions. Europe and US sales in the first quarter of 2011 will be a more accurate gauge of WP7’s market reception, said Tong.
It’s going to be a little while before you see WP7 handsets running non-Roman scripts.
[via WMPU]
This will destroy WP7 if not resolved in Q1 ’11. This is the exact reason the Zune failed. Chinese is the third most spoken language in the US (look it up). This isn’t about localization for a future country, this is about serving customers in existing launch countries. Microsoft still doesn’t get it.