Unable to see indian language characters even in android 2.3
I set String myText="\u2327\u2381\u2352\"; and try to display it in a Textview but I just see 3 rectangular boxes in the android emulator. Even though android 2.3 release note says that hindi is supported I still do not see hindi character appearing in the emulator.
Answer
Even if you have a Devanagari font installed you don't get proper rendering for Hindi text on Android phones.
The same apples to all complex Indic scripts (Bangla, Devanagari, Kannada, Tamil, Telegu, Tibetan, Punjabi, Sinhala, etc)
The problem is that, although Android "supports Unicode" there is no complex script rendering support - even in the Andoid 4.0 (ICS) emulator. Due to this letters don't join up to form conjuncts properly and so the text is pretty well unreadable.
Until Google fixes this Indian languages won't display properly.
This would actually not be very difficult for them to fix. In Linux (which Android is based on) complex text rendering for Indic scripts is supported by library known as Pango or Harfbuzz which is open source - but for some reason (lack of real interest in the Indian and South Asian market?) Google chose not to implement this in Android.
Indic scripts work fine on phones which use other Linux based operating systems such as Nokia's N900. Even some Symbian phones can display Indic text through the support in Qt.
Apple iPhone's now also display Indian languages properly.
If Google and their OEMs care about selling Android phones in India they really need to fix this defect urgently.