FarsiTel is a localized version of Android for Middle East residents, specially Persian-speaking users (both in Iran and Afghanistan), developed by Sharif FarsiWeb, Inc. and marketed by Iranian’s Congenial Mobile Co. Unfortunately, despite all its capabilities, Android has no support at all for Arabic and Persian text rendering, including numeral, writing directions, and input methods. FarsiTel added full support for essential requirements for Arabic and Persian people and fine-tuned the operating system for the lifestyle of local users.
The main additions are:
- Arabic and Persian text rendering
- A soft keyboard for Persian text input
- Providing Iranian calendar as a system-level setting
- Persian translation of user interface
- A new Persoarabic font, designed to be legible in small sizes on the screen
Arabic and Persian has so much in common, specially when it comes to technical support in software. FarsiTel fulfils all the essential requirements for both Arabic and Persian users, including Unicode-compatible support for bidirectional text and Arabic shaping, displaying numerals with localized digits, adding support for alternative calendar, and a localized keyboard with word completion. So technically an Arabic version of Android is within reach. Releasing this for Arab market depends on seeing interest from manufacturers or careers.
You bet! Persian UI is just one of the features FarsiTel provides. You can safely use FarsiTel with other languages (like English or French) and enjoy the latest version of Android plus Persoarabic text rendering, Iranian calendar, and Persian keyboard for messaging and surfing web.
At present, we’re only licensing FarsiTel to device vendors, specially manufacturers and their official local branches. So stay tuned for the launch of new devices with FarsiTel OS in a near future! However, the odds are that we release FarsiTel as a standalone product to the public.
- Applications developed specially for FarsiTel
- Applications developed for Android
- J2ME applications (running these needs a third-party emulator)
It depends on many factors, including CPU model. As a rule of thumb, you can assume that any device capable of running Android could afford FarsiTel too. So like Android itself, FarsiTel is not limited to cell phones, but can power netbooks, tablet PCs, portable media players, and even TVs.
Developing software for Android/FarsiTel needs a fair knowledge of Java or C/C++ and familiarity with the SDK. We’ll release the SDK for FarsiTel very soon. In the meantime, you can use Android’s SDK provided by Google.
There are more than one way to do that. You can put it on the web, publish it on a CD or a similar media, or give it to us to publish it among FarsiTel users in our application store which is going to be launched very soon.
