iPhone Hacks & Tricks: Fast Insertion of Accented Letters

Posted on May 3, 2008
Filed Under iPhone Hacks, iPhone Tips

Don’t you think that the possibility to put accents over letter on the iPhone could save a great deal of your time? In fact, everything is perfectly OK when it is English, but when it comes to, for instance, German – the case gets worse. Those umlauts cannot do not occur in the keyboard, and still they are to be marked somehow.

So, here you are, I found a solution to this sophisticated problem. When the keyboard mode is activated on the iPhone you see a standard qwerty keyboard, SHIFT, Space and delete bars. There is a button that pops up additional symbols. BUT there are no accents among the additional symbols.

But there is a way to type accents. In order to type an accent you have to hold your finger over the button with the letter you want to be accented and wait for a second. Then you will see a pop-up menu with all the possible accents. Then you drag your finger to the one you need and let it go. After these operations you will have an accented letter.

If you want to accentuate a capital letter you need to do exactly the same operations with the only difference: before hold the finger over the letter you need to hold SHIFT button.

Moreover, this trick works not only with letters, you can use it for numbers and other symbols. It can be used if you want to get exclamation points and question marks upside down.

If you want my opinion about this feature I think it is a great feature. It saves a lot of time. You don’t have to dive into various menus all the time to find the symbols you need. Furthermore, the feature can be expanded. For instance, to each button there should be an alternative choice like SHIFT button in the standard PC keyboard.

I don’t know for sure, but the same option can be enabled on iPod Touch. In fact, it is not that useful on this device as it doesn’t have text messaging capabilities, but nevertheless, it can be used for organizing the media library and making notes.

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