Design And Implementation Of Multi-Language Supporting Component Based On Symbian S60 3rd Platform

Symbian platform is one of three most popular platforms on Smart phone, possessing the biggest market-share. The separated OS and UI platform is an architecture feature of Symbian platform, and the S60 UI platform is a typical representation which is used wide-spreadly in numbers of devices. In this paper, for the prevalent limitation of region support in Smart phone OS, the possibility to support multi-language environment based on Symbian S60 platform has been discussed. And as a sample, a component for supporting Japanese language environment has been designed and implemented.The major works and achievements of this paper are listed as below:1. Completed the research and analysis for application architecture of Symbian OS, S60 UI Platform.2. Analyzed system requirement for supporting Japanese language and completed the design of system architecture.3. Designed and implemented the core component part - Japanese Conversion Plug-ins that supports converting between Shift-JIS, EUC-JP and Unicode.4. Designed and implemented the E-mail processing module. User may convert received Japanese encoding mail to Unicode encoding for displaying it normally.5. Designed and implemented the Japanese input method editor that supports to input hiragana and katakana characters.6. Validated the Multi-Language Supporting Component in the real device environment of Nokia N73 phone, achieving the elementary application purpose.There are some conclusions from this paper. As an open OS on Smart phone, Symbian platform provides corresponding interface and API supporting for development to support multi-language environment, allowing the 3rd party developer to customize features to follow the user demands. In this paper, a Japanese supporting component has been designed and implemented as a sample of the multi-language supporting component based on Symbian S60 platform, so that the anticipated goals have been archived. But, there are still some spaces for further improvement such as to support extra Japanese character set and to support kana-kanji conversion in the Japanese IME module.