If you’re not a speaker of English or a handful of European languages, you’re probably pretty frustrated about the lack of international language support for Windows Phone 7. At CES, Fierce Wireless managed to get some solid information out of Greg Sullivan, senior product manager for Windows Phone. He said that support for simplified Chinese, Russian, Portuguese for Brazil, Japanese and Korean in the second half of 2011, as this is still “phase one” of the platform’s launch.
He also glowed that 9/10 WP7 purchasers would recommend the phones to their friends, and that Sprint and Verizon would be getting on board in the first half of the year.
But at least 6 months before international support? Ouch. I’m guessing that’ll be part of the major Mango update that’s expected in September/August.
[via MobilityDigest]
Currently, Windows Phone 7 can display all unicode characters by default, though it only provides system interfaces and keyboards for English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish. More keyboards (and the option to switch between keyboards on the fly) would be a *VERY* welcome feature in my opinion. It would also be great if the the Windows Phone 7 calendar allowed for alternate non-Gregorian calendars. Personally, I would like to have a Hebrew keyboard available and the option to schedule things on the Hebrew calendar.