T-Mobile HTC HD7 owners denied the choice of a Spanish keyboard

Windows Phone 7 has built-in support for multiple languages, including in the keyboard itself, where it is pretty easy to switch between auto-correction for many dictionaries, an essential feature for a software keyboard.

Unfortunately Spanish-speaking buyers of the HTC HD7 on T-Mobile USA were surprised to discover their flagship Windows phone 7 smartphone was locked into the English keyboard, with no choice to switch to any other.

Complainants on the T-Mobile forums have not received a response form T-Mobile so far, but HTC when asked about the issue replied that it was in the hands of the carriers.

In a email to a T-Mobile HTC HD7 owner they said:

If your Windows Phone 7 does not contain a display language that you would like to use, there is currently no way to get a new language pack installed on the phone. Microsoft makes language packs available (as they’re created) to the device manufacturers (OEMs) at the time of manufacturing and it is up to the device manufacturer and mobile operator to decide which languages to include. In this case, it was T-Mobile’s decision to only include English.

It is clearly disappointing news that T-Mobile would refuse to support a significant contingent of buyers, with around 35 million Spanish speakers in the USA, especially when AT&T saw no problem in including this feature in their phones.

Here is hoping that T-Mobile will reconsider and push up an update soon to address this issue. Ultimately it sounds like another issue which should not have been left in the hands of the carriers in the first instance.

Read more about this problem on T-Mobile’s forums here.

Thanks Jeff for the tip.