Electronics and IT Department, BIS <litd@bis.gov.in>
प्रति bimal.odisha@yahoo.in
CC Head LITD ELECTROTECHNICAL
24 अप्रैल बजे 2:35 PM
Dear Mr Bimal Prasad,
This has reference to your mail dated 19 Apr 2017 addressed to DG BIS regarding queries on Standardization of Mobile phone batteries, Discouraging manufacturing of 2G handsets and Interface for Indian language input and removing character limitation for Indian scripts in Mobile SMS, we would like to submit the following:
1. Standardization of mobile phone batteries:
a. You may kindly refer to the following existing Indian Standards dealing with batteries for portable applications:
i. IS 16046:2015 Secondary Cells and Batteries Containing Alkaline or Other Non-acid Electrolytes - Safety Requirements for Portable Sealed Secondary Cells, and for Batteries Made from them, for Use in Portable Applications ( First Revision ).
ii. IS 16047:2012 Secondary Cells and Batteries containing Alkaline or other non-acid Electrolytes - Secondary Lithium Cells and Batteries for Portable Applications
b. It may also be noted that IS 16046 is covered under compulsory registration under Electronics & Information Technology Goods (Requirements for Compulsory Registration) Order 2012 of Ministry of Electronics and IT, GOI.
c. However, your comments in this reference have been noted and would be deliberated upon during the next meeting of the concerned sectional committee, ETD 11.
2. Discouraging manufacturing of 2G handsets and defining features like 16GB internal memory and VoLTE:
a. BIS is not the appropriate authority for controlling / mandating the manufacturing of mobile handsets restricting to 2G, 3G or VoLTE.
3. Regarding Interface for Indian language input and removing character limitation for Indian scripts in Mobile SMS:
a. Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) vide their order dated 24 Oct 2016 has mandated Indian language support for mobile phones as per IS 16333 (Part 3): 2016 ‘Mobile phone handsets part 3 Indian language support for mobile phone handsets — Specific requirements’ w.e.f. 1 Jul 2017. In accordance with IS 16333 (Part 3): 2016, mobile phone should have capability to support Indian languages. i.e. all mobile phones should be capable to display all the characters of all Indian official languages and should be capable of inputting all characters of English, Hindi and an additional Indian official language as per code charts given in IS 16350:2016 ‘Enhanced Inscript Keyboard Layouts’. The code charts in IS 16350:2016 are same as mentioned ISO 10646:2012 which is the Unicode standard.
b. The difference in character count (160 characters for Roman and 70 for Indian scripts) in SMS is because of the following reason:
Standard SMS message size is 1120 bits. Latin-based languages such as English and French use GSM encoding, which equates to 7 bits per character; limiting 1 SMS to at most 160 characters whereas, many other languages including Indian languages use Unicode Transformation Format (UTF) encoding which equates 16 bits per character; limiting 1 SMS to a maximum of 70 characters.
Hence Limiting the character count per SMS for different languages may not be technically feasible.
Hope your queries are clarified.
with regards,
Manikandan K
Scientist-C
Electronics & IT Department
Bureau of Indian Standards
Manak Bhavan
9 Bahadur Shah Zafar Marg
New Delhi - 110002
