Much more than a poor-man’s iPhone: Shadow
How ironic the name: Shadow. I am talking about T-Mobile Shadow that I just got. It is almost like iPhone but I had about three hundred reason why I got the phone: it is about 300 dollars cheaper than iPhone. Even though it runs Windows Mobile (yikes), I still like it. I may even say I love it. It is much smaller than expected and as slick looking as how it was described. There is an active and growing Shadow-users community at allshadow.com. It is pretty cool that it has wi-fi capability. It connected to my home network without any problem. And there are cool apps like viigo (a very fast rss reader) or Micorsoft’s Live Search Mobile (which speech recognition tool that understand me with my Japanese accent!), it is way cool. Two things, so far, is not cool: there is no sync tool readyly available for Mac (I guess Missing Sync can do the trick but it is whopping $40…) and the web browser does not display Japanese characters.
But since the Shadow is running Windows Mobile, it also means that there are few hacks available to display Japanese/Asian characters on the phone. Like CS-Star ($25 though) and Lets Japan by Askal. And through a link from aforementioned allshadows.com’s forum, I found this post:
… I’m not sure about Chinese input on smartphones, but here is how to view chinese/asian characters:
1. Find your favorite Chinese truetype font and copy it to \windows\. I use mUniFontM and will use it in my examples.
2. Add the following registry string values:
HKLM\Software\Microsoft\FontPath\FontPath=\Windows
HKLM\Software\Microsoft\FontLink\SystemLink\Segoe Condensed=\Windows\mUniFontM.ttf,mUniFontM
3. Restart.
Sounds like if I can find a good Japanese ttf fonts, it maybe pretty simple. However, as I stated earlier, I am a Mac user. So there is no Windows Mobile Registry Editor available. Doh!
