Chalk up another country on the iPhone list: the iPhone 3G has now officially launched in Jordan, where it’s being sold exclusively by wireless operator Orange. Purchase of the phone requires a one year contract, and the device is available with three plans ranging from 30JD to 80JD per month (between $43 and $115), with the higher plans lowering the cost of the handset.


Jordan is the second predominantly Arabic-speaking country to get the iPhone after Egypt, which brings that much more attention to the iPhone’s atrocious support for the language. Despite the iPhone 2.0 software adding options for interface localization in sixteen languages and over twenty different input options—including radically different alphabets such as Cyrillic, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean—the iPhone’s support for Middle Eastern languages has been poor since its release. The phone’s interface can be displayed in neither Arabic nor Hebrew, and there’s no way to enter text in either language.

This is rather inexcusable, given its support for even more obscure languages. Hopefully Apple will address this at some point.

Labels: iPhone

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