@SantiR(Specifically mentioning your name to get Fitbit's attention on this, and since you responded to one of my previous posts on a separate topic)
I'd like to make a request to improve the Ionic for folks that are living in the vicinity of Hong Kong. I know this only impacts a small group of people from Fitbit's perspective, but the change will be so easy (probably a matter of replacing one Unicode font file within the firmware) so I am hoping Fitbit will consider making the Ionic (and Versa) more Hong-Kong-market friendly by making this seemingly simple improvement.
(I have done a bit of research before writing this, so there is a bit of tech jargon here, bear with me, the Fitbit dev team should know what I am talking about)
The unicode character set (ISO/IEC 10646) is the current standard for coding multi-lingual text and this standard has been constantly evolving since inception in 1991. Now most of the popular operating systems out there (Windows, Mac OS, iOS, Android, Apple Watch OS for example) have long had built-in system fonts that support the "Hong Kong Supplementary Character Set", or HKSCS, which got added initially into the unicode character set in approximately 2001 which was a long time ago.
The Fitbit Ionic/Versa OS however still lacks support for this subset of unicode, causing many characters that are commonly used by Hongkongers to not get displayed properly (like in the picture below where the ?'s enclosed within a rectangle are the characters that don't get displayed):
In extreme cases where ONLY the Hong Kong specific Chinese characters are involved (think of these as a written 'dialect' of Chinese that are used only be people in the vicinity of Hong Kong), the entire notification would look like this:
As a comparison, the Apple Watch can display these characters normally.
The only thing that the Fitbit dev team needs to do is to find an appropriate unicode font file that supports the HKSCS (https://www.ogcio.gov.hk/en/our_work/business/tech_promotion/ccli/terms/doc/e_hkscs_2016.pdf), and use that instead of the current font file within their future Fitibit firmware.
An easy way to test is to see if Fitbit supports all of these very common HKSCS characters:
冇 (ISO 10646 character code point in hex 5187)
嘢 (ISO 10646 character code point in hex 5622)
喺 (ISO 10646 character code point in hex 55BA)
鰂 (ISO 10646 character code point in hex 9C02)
If these characters get displayed properly in fitbit, then you guys can market the device in Hong Kong with an additional point of "Full Support of Hong Kong specific Chinese Characters".
Thank you fitbit for your attention ! This will not only benefit the Ionic but the Versa as well, assuming they share most of the code in their OS's (or they even share the same OS?)
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