iPhone 101: typing accented characters

Great tip, this was driving me batty. Merci!

This is crucial for us Scandinavians, using the iPhone for texting :) Gotta have them å's, ä's and ö's ;)

IMHO, this method is kind of sucky for many European languages that really utilize the accents and umlauts. For example, in Finnish the letter ä is far more often used than, say, z or q (actually, ä is the 11th most common letter in the Finnish language) and it really is a shame that there is no way to type it directly.

You can also get the upside down question mark (¿) and exclamation point (¡) by tapping and holding down those keys. (ex. for spanish)

Note that this doesn't work for entering a web address.

Is there a trick to do caps lock? It sucks typing abbreviations when you've got to go back to shift each time.

You'd think that extrapolating from the hold down A to get Ä you'd hold down shift, but that doesn't work.

Actually one of the coolest things about the autocorrection of the iPhone for me is that I do not have to type any umlauts or accents as the correction handles this for me.
Even the example that comes with this article: I type voilà only once, then when I type voila it autocorrects to voilà.
Same works for almost any German word with umlauts in it, so I'm quite content with the keyboard, though it might be different for Scandinavian characters.

I have slightly related question...when typing in a web address, if you hold down the ".com" key, it pops up what looks like an unpopulated list. Is there any way to add ".org, .edu, .gov, etc." to this space? It would be nice...

I don't see why there's any need for the stupid lingering. Why can't that popup show up immediately? If the popup supported multi-touch instead of sliding, so that you could hold the popup with one finger and hit the letter you needed with a second finger, that would eliminate the need for the lingering.

Hey guys, another trick in the same category (and VERY undocumented :)

When you switch keyboards from letters to numbers, it's painful to press the "123" key, type the number and press on "ABC" to come back. Here is the trick : if you HOLD the "123" key and slide your finger to the wanted number, when you let go, you're BACK in the letter keyboard. Quite nice, isn't it ?

Enjoy !
G

As a matter of fact... this is an really annoying implementation of national characters (in Sweden ÅÄ and Ö). It slows down typing in my first language and it is the most annoying thing with my iPod Touch. I would rather see a solution where we could have these characters on the normal keyboard.