My boss announced this morning that he had broken his Samsung smartphone, so he needed a new phone and wanted to know what his options were. Everyone in the company uses Blackberry phones except the Korean staff because UK Blackberry phones don't come with Korean support.

This also bugged me because I get emails from my Korean colleagues and often I can't see who has emailed me (by recogition of the characters) it just comes up as black blocks (or rather did come...).

So I set about the task of finding out how to add Korean fonts to my Blackberry 8310, and I will tell you now the RIM website is totally unhelpful. What it comes down to is: you can have Korean fonts in most Blackberry phones, however it all depends on the software you are provided with by your operator. Why on earth they don't just make the language packs downloadable is beyond me, perhaps it is something to the cost of licensing the fonts but it doesn't seem that hard. Plus we have an office with five Koreans here and none of them even thought about Blackberry until today because of this issue.

After some cleaver research I determined from the community support forums that the Asian language is a file which is added into the configs in some cunning way. Equipped with this knowledge I found a site which explained exactly how to get the files and where to place them. After this I was easily able to upgrade my UK phone to have Korean, Japanese and Chinese font support. What you need is to download the latest Blackberry Desktop Manager and the latest software from your phone service provider. I have reproduced the original posting below because the website wasn't working the first time I tried to get this:

========== camarokris

I work at sprint and I had 3 calls today on how to get these on the 8130. so the last call i was on with for almost an hour and a half (he was an awesome guy) working on different ways to do this.. here is what i came up with

first you will want to go to

C:\Program Files\Common Files\Research In Motion\Shared\Loader Files

then go into the directory of the OS u are running or upgrading to

open "specification.pkg" with notepad
hit Ctrl+F and search for "browser"
then after the first ">" after browser past in "<file id="CJK.alx" size="83643"/>" minus the quotation marks of course

save this file into the same directory as "specification.pkg" is located

http://theotakucafe.com/blackberry/CJK.alx

download and upzip these files into the java directory

http://theotakucafe.com/blackberry/java/cod1.zip
http://theotakucafe.com/blackberry/java/cod2.zip

or copy all the files one by one from here

Index of /blackberry/java

once done open desktop manager and app loader.
in the device app selection scroll down until you see
"Blackberry Japanese"
"Blackberry Chinese"
"Blackberry Korean"

and choose one or 2 or all

have fun this is tested on the 8830/8130/8330 now for sprint but should with with any OS out there

*NOTE: I am not responsible for any bricking or breaking of blackberries"

==========

Reproduced to help as many people as possible, all credit where it is due to the original author. I also claim no responsibility for what this might do to your phone or your system. It worked for me it might not work for you.

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