China's Huawei adopts Dubai Font for phones

Telecoms company to use city font even though Mandarin version remains in the pipeline

The font to be used in Huawei phones was developed simultaneously in Latin and Arabic script and is available to 100 million Office 365 users in multiple languages around the world. AFP / Stringer

Microsoft’s first typeface to be created for a city, the Dubai Font, will be loaded as standard on a new Huawei smartphone to be launched later this year, the Chinese telecoms firm said.

A partnership agreement was signed by Dubai officials and the company Wednesday, within three months of the font’s launch by Sheikh Hamdan bin Mohammed, the emirate’s Crown Prince. He described it then as a symbol of the city-state’s ambitious digital strategy and encouraged all government institutions to use it on official correspondence.

The font will be used in Huawei’s flagship smartphone launched first in the Middle East and Africa later this year before it is rolled out to the rest of the world, according to UAE state news agency Wam.

The agreement to use the font in the Chinese phone maker’s mobile operating system was a “natural fit for us moving forward”, said Abdullah Al Shaibani, secretary general of the Executive Council of Dubai.

The font is available in 23 languages and to 100 million users on Microsoft’s Office 365 software but not yet in Mandarin. Officials said they hoped to remedy the situation very soon.

Huawei is one of the top three world’s biggest telecoms operators, shipping 139 million smartphones in 2016 giving it a 12 per cent market share, according to its last annual report.

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