Arabic Support on Windows Mobile

[- subtitle: languages natively supported on Windows Mobile]

Sometimes colleagues and customers posed this question... so maybe it's worth writing its answer here: "Is Arabic language supported on Windows Mobile and CE?? ". Looking at the documentation available to Windows Mobile manufacturers, there are no Arabic-based locales available for Windows Mobile; in contrast Windows *CE*-manufacturers can choose all the OS languages and locales available at "Language Identifiers and Locales (Platform Builder for Microsoft Windows CE 5.0)".

Windows Mobile OEM  Documentation is not public, however publicly available is the “Windows Mobile 6 Product Reference Guide”, whose Appendix B lists all the supported International SKUs - over the years SKUs have been added and possibly new ones will be added as well in future versions of the OS: have a look -- we've reached 20 for WM6 Professional(\Classic) and 25 for WM6 Standard!

Therefore:

- Windows MOBILE-manufacturers canNOT choose to support Arabic language nor Arabic locale

- Windows CE-manufacturers can choose to support Arabic language and Arabic locale

As a double-check, the following MSDN Doc page “Arabic OS Design Development” is relevant to Windows CE but NOT to Windows Mobile:

*HOWEVER* this doesn't mean that third party developers can provide locales or controls supporting Arabic internationalization. In the past I had the opportunity to work with one of this third parties for a problem a common customer was having... Surfing the web you'll surely find them and you may want to try their software: I can for example mention Paragon Software (SHDD) solution, because they're a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner. I hope I'm not missing any other Partner... [let me know if that's the case!]

Cheers,

~raffaele

P.S. Pasting the table above as text, so that it can be indexed:

Supported International SKUs on Windows Mobile