Chinese Language Features
in Google Android Smartphones

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Most Android 2.x smartphones include simplified and traditional Chinese locale support, which gives you Chinese fonts and the option to change the entire interface into Chinese. But how, you may be asking, do I write Chinese on my Android phone?

That's easy: just one or two quick downloads from the Android Market, and any Android device will have Chinese input methods. HTC and others have begun automatically installing their own proprietary Chinese keyboards worldwide so you may already have one on your phone — in which case you could just skip to my page on how to switch input methods — but stay with the rest of us, I think you'll want to know about other Android input method projects too.

In the Market app on your phone, search in English for these free downloads:

• Google Pinyin IME (谷歌拼音输入法) for simplified and traditional character Hanyu Pinyin and stroke input, and
  
  
• android-tc-ime (注音輪入法, 倉頡輸入法) for traditional character Zhuyin / Bopomofo phonetic and Cangjie stroke input.

After the IMEs have installed themselves, on your phone's Home screen press the Menu softkey, select "Settings", scroll down and press "Language & keyboard". Make sure each input method you want to use is selected with a checkmark.

If you want Google Pinyin to work in traditional characters, press "Google Pinyin settings" and press to check the box by "Traditional Chinese". (You can also switch from within the keyboard as well.)

I'll show you how to switch between Android English and Chinese input methods and adjust IME settings on the next page. First, a little more background info.

More Chinese input methods

Google Pinyin IME and android-tc-ime are the primary Android Chinese input method projects. Your device may also include a proprietary input method such as the HTC "Touch" keyboard Chinese version, and there are many others available in the Android Market, some free and some not, including an HKIME for Cantonese Jyutping. I have not tried those other downloads so please read user comments carefully. Q9 also sells an Android IME package, but they sell it only direct from their own website and I'm not comfortable buying apps outside of the Market at this time.

Google Pinyin for Android began supporting traditional characters as of version 1.2.7, which arrived on my phone via the Market app on the evening of June 23, 2010. That version also added an English word completion feature similar to the main Android keyboard, so now sometimes I use Google Pinyin for writing in English as well.

Android Phone Versions, Outlook Syncing, and My Favorite $1 App

The above instructions and opinions will get you started with most Android 2.x phones sold outside of Asia, including the Google Nexus One, the Motorola Droid or the HTC Droid Incredible or Droid X.

But the less-expensive range of Android phones may be missing these features. It's not just the Android 1.x one-trick "feature phones" like the Motorola CLIQ: lately even some low-end Android 2.x phones seem to be missing Chinese! I can't keep up with the latest list, and apparently neither can Google and the Open Handset Alliance, so I'm always interested in hearing from you about how well Chinese is supported on your phone, and whether third-party solutions for getting more languages on your phone will work for you. Try searching for "MoreLocale" in the Android Market, for example.

Obviously any Android phone sold only in a Chinese country market, like the LG GW880 (shown by a lovely hand model above) will be customized with many Chinese features preinstalled.

It took me awhile to wrap my head around Google's cloud-based approach to synchronizing my contacts and calendar after years of cable-syncing between Outlook and my Blackberry (and before that, various Palm phones and PDAs). I won't waste your time here describing everything I tried and evaluated, or even my trials and tribulations of setting up my final solution for my Google Nexus One, but it consists of a $50/year 1-user Google Apps Premier Edition account and Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook.

My favorite $1 app so far: Dr. Klukas' Clocks Around the World. OK, €1 actually. But see the cool slider at the bottom of the screen? Slide it to figure out the best time to call someone in another country. The developer also gives away a free Date Tools app that calculates days of the week and the # of days between two dates. It even has a Chinese calendar but last time I looked the first days of each month were missing the 初一, 初二, 初三.

Next » Android English & Chinese IME switching and settings

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