In the last 12 months the number of Unicode supported phones sold in Indian Market has 
increased significantly. Many of the phones by Nokia, Sony Ercisson and LG have started having Unicode support, but their inbuilt fonts are still limited. Even though it supports Unicode Windows Mobile phones don’t yet have Indic support and we have not heard any public roadmap announced by Microsoft for supporting them in near future. Even if you copy a Tamil or Hindi Unicode Opentype font (Check your EULA) to a Windows Mobile phone, the characters will not get displayed correctly due to absence of Uniscribe rendering engine. Apple iPhone supports Unicode and seems to have few Indic fonts in-built (for example Tamil) but it lacks Indic Rendering (Apple AAT which is roughly Windows Uniscribe or Linux Pango equivalent) so the characters get displayed jumbled, which is the same behaviour of Windows Mobiles.
Even with all these developments, one problem as developers we face is the lack of published list of phones sold in India that have Unicode support. In our Mobile lab in Vishwak we have compiled the following list of phones that support Unicode – we tested for Hindi, but your mileage may wary for other languages like Tamil, Telugu depending on the state (market) you bought the phone. One easiest way is to see if the Keypad displays the Indic language you want to see.
- LG B2050
- LG KG110
- LG KG195
- LG KG200
- LG KG271/KG276/MG161B
- LG KG300
- Nokia 2610
- Nokia 2626
- Nokia 2630
- Nokia 2650
- Nokia 2760
- Nokia 3110 Classic
- Nokia 3500 Classic
- Nokia 5070
- Nokia 5200
- Nokia 5300
- Nokia 6021
- Nokia 6030
- Nokia 6070
- Nokia 6080
- Nokia 6101
- Nokia 6230
- Nokia 6230i
- Nokia 6233
- Nokia 6270
- Nokia 6280
- Nokia 6300
- Nokia 7260
- Nokia N95
- Sony Ericsson J230c/J230i
- Sony Ericsson J300i
- Sony Ericsson K508i
- Sony Ericsson K510c/K510i
- Sony Ericsson K550c/K550i
- Sony Ericsson K790c/K790i
- Sony Ericsson T290c/T290i
- Sony Ericsson W200c/W200i
- Sony Ericsson W580c/W580i
- Sony Ericsson Z530c/Z530i