http://www.reviewsreviewed.co.uk/index.php/mobileblog/The-days-of-flat-rate-data-plans-will-soon-be-over.html

As for Microsoft they might like to recall the advice of PW Botha to the South African parliament in October ’79: “Adapt or die”.

However, in emerging economies wireless telecommunications are cheaper to establish and the longterm industrial design of computers for emerging economies in China and India is little likely to be modelled on the tele-typewriter with attached television.

The impetus for Apple and Microsoft in implementations of the intelligent font file format for Unicode imaging, and of Adobe and Microsoft in implementations that merge document markup with document description (PDFXML and XPS), is to support non-Latin scripts.

It is not, however, simply a competition for drawing model and document model, but also a competition for the industrial design of intelligent and interactive internationalisation. A compact teletypewriter keyboard is not a sensible input method for Unicode imaging, not even for writing systems in the same world script. The challenge is that the key graphics cannot change when the writing system or the writing system and the world script change.

With best wishes,
Henrik Holmegaard

Sample Reference:

http://www.freepatentsonline.com/y2008/0001787.html

“Most computers allow a user can change the … keyboard locale, for example, from a conventional QWERTY keyboard layout to a keyboard layout for the Cyrillic alphabet. Typically, there is an indication on the computer screen telling the user what keyboard locale is currently selected. However, nothing about the physical appearance of the keys themselves changes when a different locale is selected, so there is no way for a user to know what Cyrillic character [glyph, ed.] will appear on the screen when a particular English key is depressed, unless the user has already memorized the locations of all the Cyrillic characters [key graphics, ed.] on the keyboard.”