internationalization (sometimes referred to as i18n, meaning 18 letters between the initial and the last character of the word) means recognizing that adapting a product to language and cultural peculiarities should be supported by the design of the product, so that those parts of the product which are specific to language or culture are easily adaptable.
localization (sometimes referred to as l10n meaning 10 letters between the initial and the last character of the word) means adapting a product to language and culture. localization can be done much easier with a properly internationalized product, and can become a very expensive process otherwise.
in previous postings, i have reported about the iphone's failure to properly handle non-ASCII characters in Short Message Service (SMS) messages. this is a problem of internationalization, with apple failing to recognize that iphone users may receive messages containing non-ASCII characters. this is the less annoying part of the problem.
the more annoying part is that the iphone does not let you enter non-ASCII characters. so if you have friends with names containing umlaut or accented characters, there is no way you can enter these names in the contact app. if you want to write email or SMS messages using non-ASCII characters, you cannot do it. if you want to fill out a web form with non-ASCII characters, you cannot do it.
apple must have some plan how to address this problem before launching the iphone in europe, because the days of selling non-localized products are definitely over. i just hope that this fix will then also become available for us american iphone users.
and since the iphone does not even has a facility for copying and pasting text, the usual kludge of pasting non-ASCII characters from some scratchpad does not work as well. so filling out web forms and writing emails with non-ASCII characters is simply impossible. for the contact app, you can edit the entries on a properly internationalized computer (such as a pc or a mac) and then sync the iphone. not very elegant, but at least the contact app can actually handle and display non-ASCII characters...
I think this problem has something to do that Yahoo address book and iTunes / iPhone can't sync (unknown errors poping up).
Posted by: Markus Hübner | Wednesday, October 31, 2007 at 02:38