How to make your Windows Mobile speak Hindi

You’ve seen numerous Windows Mobiles in the market from makers like Motorola, HTC, imate, Samsung (in fact only Nokia doesn’t have a Windows Mobile phone!!).. what you have NOT seen is the Windows Mobile displaying local Indian languages like Hindi.. watch these screenshots from my HP Windows Mobile phone:

 homeBIG

   Watch the day of the week in Hindi alongwith the name of the month. Even the appointments have the days mentioned in Hindi.

So why hasn’t Windows Mobile been able to show Hindi fonts?

While Windows Mobile supported Unicode, the core issue was the font engine in WM did not know (was not built) how to render complex characters. The reason why it was not done for WM, was that made the font engine heavy and OEMs didn’t want to increase memory footprint for that. Also, there were no fonts natively for Hindi on WM. All that changes with this application install that enables the following features.

An inscript Hindi keyboard:

keyboard

Any WM application that supports Hindi fonts can now actually display them. look at the screenshot of google maps on Win Mobile:

gmenu

And yes, even Word and Excel documents containing Hindi text render correctly on the Windows Mobile (using Word Mobile):

wordhidi

Earlier, you could not browse Hindi websites on mobiles. Now, websites that render Unicode text are also shown correctly (intentionally rendered in Opera Mini to show that it works in all browsers):

navbharat

i have tried sending a Hindi SMS to a hindi enabled Nokia phone and it has worked seamlessly!!

However, it should be noted that this solution is not a localization engine. The dates and few other things get localized because they happen to use localized fonts which are installed by this font engine. Hence, most of the menu items of Windows Mobile are not rendered in Hindi but in default English.

Now, if you want your Windows Mobile to start showing you things in Hindi, you can download the solution FREE of cost from here: http://www.eyron.in 

The solution is designed for Microsoft Windows Mobile-based devices with a touch screen for Windows Mobile 5 and Win Mobile 6 Professional.

remember, this solution is not to localize WM to Hindi, but rather enable WM to get Hindi input and show Hindi characters on the UI (not changing the UI elements from eng to hindi)..

Let me know what you think of this solution.

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Comments

Anonymous said…
yay, thanks for the link! gonna try it now! :)
Balaji said…
Hi, the link takes me to a page which says "This website is currently under construction".
The software is nowhere to be found.
I'm getting the "website under construction" message.... If possible please provide another link. Many thanks!!
Abhishek Kant said…
thanks for the feedback. the site has been down for sometime.
the website is back up again
HarshB said…
Hi - I tried installing Eyron (Hindi) on my HTC Touch Pro. I get an error: "Cannot install Multilingual Support on this platform type". Any suggestions?
Anonymous said…
Hi - I tried installing Eyron (Hindi) on my HTC Touch Diamond. I get an error: "Cannot install Multilingual Support on this platform type". Any suggestions?
Chetan said…
Hi, Its not working for windows mobile 6.1
Unknown said…
Looks great! Does it only support Inscript for input? It will be useful for the masses only if it has a phonetic keyboard like the Microsoft IME Hindi transliteration keyboard.
Anonymous said…
u can download eyron hindi keypad with skools
open sktols then cabmanager then install it with sktools in windows if any problem email me
balraj.bhanot@yahoo.in
Unknown said…
Hi - I tried installing Eyron (Hindi) on my HTC Touch Diamond. I get an error: "Cannot install Multilingual Support on this platform type". Any suggestions?
sarfaraz said…
Nice application but I could only install it in my HTC touch 3G with sktools demo version. With sktools it gives error "Cannot install Multilingual Support on this platform type" but there is no harm to ignore this error :)
Unknown said…
hi, i used htc window mobile 6.1 , when i start installation then this message "Cannot install Multilingual Support on this platform type" shown..
hindi labels are shown as boxes..
i have tried the "MANGAL" font and copied it to the "Windows/Fonts" folder..
but its doesnt work too..


will u please provide any help regarding this.
thanks in advance..
Vipul Goel said…
if anyone is having hindi language support pack for WM 6.1 then please send the cab file on my id vipul2008@gmail.com. its urgent!!

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