I have an East Asian 344 firmware loaded on my device from Bell in North America (it was the only one I could find since the normal East Asian sources for this firmware do not seem to have it at the moment (indeed the 9700 is generally missing from their lists) e.g.Singapore or Hong Kong are usually the best). It claims it has romaji input for japanese but in practice this does not work. Japanese fonts do display properly

My Device.xml has 9700 with JPN_INPUT=true. The alxs loaded correctly from desktop manager and worked for Chinese and Korean languages. I have no other meaningful load issues with my device.

Anyone know when Jap input will be available or do I just have to wait till the east Asian carriers start peddling it?

So I guess no one is disputing that Japanese Input simply does not work. Anyone got any idea of when Japanese input capable firmware will be available for 9700

I have found a package that works with Vodafone UK devices from Smartone Vodafone

9700jEastAsia_PBr5[1].0.0_rel554_PL5.1.0.98_A5.0.0.351_SmarTone_Vodafon e.exe

But this does not work on German devices. Am discussing with Vodafone DE

I tried to hybrid .330, .344, .355 eastasia OS with newer .405 and .415 to enable chinese input. No luck. I guess it has something to do with the platform version difference.