Vikalpa on my Nokia 3110c

ICTs in general 1 Minute

Chamath’s comment prompted me to upload a video of browsing Vikalpa on my Nokia 3110c. The video shows me using the 3110c’s built in web browser over a GPRS connection to view content in Sinhala and Tamil UNICODE. Nothing was installed on the phone by way of fonts or software on the phone in order for the text to render as accurately as it does. Vikalpa was made mobile friendly using MoFuse.

I’ll be interested to find what other phones support vernacular UNICODE rendering. When I tried this on other Nokia models (incl. the high end N-series) and other phones, bought from outside of Sri Lanka, the fonts simply did not render properly.

And the answer to Chamath’s question is yes, the 3110c natively supports Sinhala and Tamil SMS messaging, though I’ve never figured out how to type out a message in Sinhala. The entire menu system can also run natively in Sinhala and Tamil (and some Indian languages incl. Hindi). The Sinhala script is very legible and clear, more accurate in rendering in fact than Sinhala on my Mac.

Published by Sanjana

An Ashoka, Rotary World Peace and TED Fellow, I have since 2002 used, studied and advocated Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) to strengthen peace, human rights & democratic governance. I founded in 2006 and till June 2020 edited the award-winning Groundviews, Sri Lanka's first civic media website. From 2002-2020 I was a Senior Researcher at the Centre for Policy Alternatives. I pioneered both the use of social media for activism and online citizen journalism/civic media in Sri Lanka, including setting up South Asia's first Twitter and Facebook accounts for civic media, in 2007. Having started digital security training for human rights activists in 2010, I continue to advise civil society on digital hygiene, mass and personal surveillance, privacy and secure communications to date. I also curate a comprehensive digital archive of material linked to peace and conflict in Sri Lanka, since 2002. I specialise in, advise and train on social media communications strategy, countering-violence extremism online, web-based activism, online advocacy and grounded, context-based, platform-specific social media research. My work experience over two-decades spans five continents. Through the ICT4Peace Foundation and since 2006, I help strengthen information management during crises and work on countering violent extremism online. For over a decade, this included leading the Foundation's work on these lines with the United Nations and other multi-lateral organisations involved in peacebuilding, peacekeeping, and humanitarian affairs. Since 2008, I have worked in South Asia, South East Asia, North Africa, Europe and the Balkans to capture, disseminate and archive inconvenient truths in austere, violent contexts. I completed doctoral studies at the University of Otago, New Zealand, looking at the symbiotic relationship between offline unrest and online instigation of hate and harm in Sri Lanka and, in the aftermath of the Christchurch massacre in 2019, facilitated by leading research based on New Zealand's first ever Data for Good grant by Twitter.

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5 thoughts on “Vikalpa on my Nokia 3110c”

  2. Thanks for great post! Was that the built in browser? Would be interesting to see if it runs same on Opera browsers both full and mini which I think are far advanced to the built in browsers Nokia comes with.

    Must ask Softlogic what models brought down have fonts fitted in. On the low end, nokia 1110i (around Rs7,000) and 2310 (slightly higher) have font built in , though doesn’t have browsing.

    Also wonder what the situation is with other phone makes. If any make supports a font installation, we would want to promote them heavily, speaking as a content provider.

  4. Pingback: Mobiles for Social Development « ICT for Peacebuilding (ICT4Peace)

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