When I came to Taiwan I brought my trusty Australian Nokia N95 phone with me. Despite being fully compatible with phone networks in Taiwan I soon realised that Nokia phones sold in Australia don’t have the ability to display Chinese (Mandarin) characters.

Instead you get useless squares, kind of like what happens on a PC when you view a language and you don’t have that particular language pack installed.

I can’t speak Chinese fluently yet, nor can I read it and I certainly can’t write it. However after meeting a few gorgeous Taiwanese girls who couldn’t read much English let alone send SMS’ in it I soon realised I’d have to work something out.

Step one was installing the Chinese language pack onto my Nokia N95.


Foreword: Whilst the Chinese language pack for Nokia phones does contain English, upon booting up your phone will default to displaying Chinese text. Make sure you know someone who can read Chinese before installing the language pack as you’ll have to get them to change the phone language over to English.

Step 1: Backup your phone and make sure it has a full battery

This should be mandatory every time you flash your firmware but sometimes people forget.

When I backup my phone I make two copies, one on the phone’s memory card and a second on my computer. The first backup is made via the N95′s menu system and can be found in the ‘memory’ section of the menu. The computer backup is made via Nokia’s Ovi Suite software.

Making sure your N95 has a full battery is also optional but for obvious reasons I highly recommend it. The last thing you want is your phone crapping out during a flash.

Step 2: Download and install the Nemesis Service Suite (NSS)

The first thing we need to do to your N95 is to change the product code. The region your phone was purchased dictates what firmware update the Nokia updater sends your phone.

For example my phone was purchased in Australia and as such the firmware Nokia updater sends my phone contained only English, Indonesian and Filipino.

What we need to do is change your N95 product code to math the particular county’s language you are after, in my case Taiwan.

To change the N95 product code you need to download and install B-phreaks’ Nemesis Service Suite (NSS).

Installation is a straight forward process, make sure you choose ‘Virtual USB device’ (it’s the default option) during the setup program. Upon completion NSS will also prompt you to see USB driver installation. I just clicked ‘yes’ and let it do its thing.

Step 3: Locate the Nokia product code of the country you are wanting to change to

There’s no way to guess the product code of the country you wish to install so you’ll need to look it up. I used this list hosted at the ‘All About Symbian Forums’.

The Nokia product codes for Taiwan are 0534830 and 0536083. I’m not sure why there are two codes however I used the first (0534830) and had no problems.

Step 4. Use Nemesis Service Suite to change the product code of your N95

Fire up NSS and you should be greeted with a blank screen. Then plug in your N95 via USB and set it to Data transfer mode.

Next click the magnifying glass icon (‘scan for a new device’) in the top right of NSS’s user interface. A whole bunch of blue text with random information should come up.

From here you want to click on the big ‘Phone Info‘ button (second from the left) which then brings you to the Phone Info screen.

In the ‘Production Data Edit‘ area on the right you want to click on the ‘Read‘ button. After a second or so some of the fields should be auto filled out in blue text.

At this point you can check the existing product code of your phone against the All About Symbian forum list if you want to verify the existing product code.

If you’re changing your product code you want to delete what is in the ‘Product code:‘ field and punch in the new product code for the country you wish to change to.

Then click the ‘enable‘ checkbox on the right and hit the ‘Write‘ button next to the ‘read’ button below. It shouldn’t take more then a few seconds and you won’t get any notification about the product code change on your phone.

If you want to verify it was a success you should get the new product code you entered in blue when you click the ‘read‘ button again.

Step 5. Update the firmware on your N95 with the Nokia Software Updater

The actual language packs are included in the firmware updates downloaded from Nokia’s servers. Now that we’ve changed the product code for your Nokia all we have to do is update the phone with the appropriate firmware update for the phone’s new region.

Nokia Software Updater will probably tell you that your phone’s firmware is up to date but should give you the option of updating anyway. Choose this option and let the software do it’s thing.

Once finished you’re N95 should have the new languages pre-installed. In the case of Taiwan and traditional Chinese, all that’s left to do is find someone who can change the language over to English.

If you’ve done everything right you should now be able to read and type in Chinese Mandarin on your mobile phone!

1. Using SMS to talk in Chinese when you can’t speak it
2. Purchasing a prepaid phone recharge card in Taiwan
3. Review: Using Rosetta Stone to learn Chinese Mandarin