Chinese Language Features in
Nokia Phones

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On previous pages I have described Chinese features in all the smartphones with which I have had personal experience, aside from a few Palm phones that are no longer sold or supported. I've never used Nokia phones, and I'm not actively following their progress, but I frequently get questions about them so I'll offer what little I know about those here.

Nokia was once one of the dominant players in China, and launched many phones for that market, from simple youth market phones like the X5 (pictured at left) to localized versions of the high-end N95, and they of course come with Chinese features preinstalled.

A Chinese add-on called "Diexie" (叠写) is available in China for models like the Nokia N8, N97, ^3, S60 5th Edition and probably others. I know it offers handwriting input, but I don't know if it also has Pinyin or other input methods. If you try to download it from outside China you'll get an error message, but once you're in the country you can install from the Chinese OVI page. There may however be other barriers to installing Diexie on a phone purchased outside of China, unless you can get help from Nokia, and I'm sure they'd much rather you just purchase a second phone for China... This is the page: http://store.ovi.com.cn/content/149669

Without access to Nokia Diexie, in general most of you will be out of luck, as the solution is even worse than what I dealt with on my old Blackberry: a reflashing of the OS is required, and it seems very hard to find the software for that unless you're a developer.

But there is at least one third-party Nokia S60 simplified Chinese character solution from Psyloc (see the screenshot at right), and it looks relatively easy to install. There are also Q9 Chinese input method packages for every phone on the planet but I know very little about those. Last time I visited the Q9 website it was very unfriendly, as was their buy-before-you-try sales policy. I did download their software onto my Blackberry, but it caused a Java exception at every restart before I'd even paid and unlocked, so I've never even tried Q9.

That's about all I can tell you right now. As I get ahold of more phones or do more research I'll post what I think I know here as time allows.

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