BitPim in non-English speaking countries

Hello everybody!

I'm from Moscow, Russia. I would like to contribute to the project. I
have experience of programming in Python. The software I wrote in
Python was to do with websites, e-mail, parsing and databases. Though,
most of my programming experience over the past 15 years was with
C/Pascal/Delphi.

We have a decent CDMA-450 network in the country, though it is not
very dense (about 200k subscribers currently). Since the 450MHz
standard is relatively new, there aren't many handsets - about 17 for
Russia, in fact. Most of the manufacturers are never heard of in the
US, such as Ubiquam, Huawei or AnyData. The only brand present in the
US is Kyocera, but unfortunately BitPim does not support it. Most of
the handsets don't have any PCSync software. The only decent piece of
software I have seen is provided by Pantech-Curitel.

I own several handsets, which lack the PCSync software, have cables,
and are readable via FileSystem view in BitPim. I would like to start
coding for them straight away, but still, I've got some questions
left:

1) Is it possible (or planned) for BitPim to manage Unicode in
phonebook, calendar, SMS etc? e.g. Google calendar import has shown
squiggles instead of Russian letters, but a manual entry was OK.

2) Is there a way to define LSB Unicode datatype in the packets? Not
to say that I could have changed each p_*.py file to swap the bytes or
to decode/encode the characters from/to a specified charset (there are
at least two different charsets in Russia), if necessary.

3) Is it possible to add an interface translation for Russian? I will
provide all the necessary translations. Probably, a support of
additional languages (e.g. Chinese, Vietnamese, Portuguese) could be
built in.

4) In case when I don't have a common class for a manufacturer, does
the chipset model usually help with finding out the commands (e.g.
finding a supported phone with the same chipset and trying to use it's
commands)? Or is the command set usually common between the phones of
the same manufacturer?

Thank you very much for sharing your precious time.

Kind regards,

Konstantin Semenov.

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