Happy Pixels

Florian Loretan's blog on Drupal, creativity and more

Accents and umlauts on the G1

 
 
March 4th, 2009
g1
google phone
languages

Having a real physical keyboard is definitely an advantage of the G1, but what happens when you want to send an e-mail in a language that uses accents or other characters which are not present on an american qwerty keyboard? I accidentally found the solution: use a combination of the alt and shift key.

Diacritics

Press alt + shift + e, w, i, u or n respectively for an acute accent, grave accent, circumflex accent, unlaut oor tilde, followed by the letter on which you want the accent.

é = alt + shift + e + e
ö = alt + shift + u + o
ñ = alt + shift + n + n

Other special characters

ß = alt + shift + s
ç = alt + shift + c

It's not as practical as a keyboard layout switcher, but it's great when you need to write that message in French, German or Spanish without having to compromise your spelling.

Comments

Submitted by Rolf (not verified) on

Thanks for discovering and sharing this! While I was looking around, I also found a way that seems to be more intuitive to me, and : "To type the accented é in "idée" or the enya in "piñon", you simply type the letter and hold it down for half a sec, then select the option you want: è or é or ê or ë." (at http://ulyssesatlarge.blogspot.com/2008/11/quick-note-about-typing-on-g1-phone.html ).

Submitted by Florian on

I didn't know about that alternative technique, and while I'm not a big fan of having to hold keys for half a second, I do agree that it is more intuitive. Thank you for reporting this here.