German users: Special characters on Pre? All: What are the functions when typing?

[Trekkie]

Hello

I’m Danish and would very much like to get my hands on the Palm Pre. But unfortunately there is no official release date for the phone (as of now) in my country. Because I'm tired of waiting I'm thinking of importing a Pre from Germany knowing fully that there will be some problems activating the device - as explained in this thread:

Title: Question about Importing Pre (Can't post links because I'm a new user)

Before I order my Pre, I would like to know a few things about the keyboard and special characters in general. In Denmark we have three special characters "æ ø å" which we use a lot in Danish words. Obviously those keys are not present on the Pre Keyboard, and I'm aware that you can find them via the SYM key. But if I have to go to that "menu" every time I need to type one of those characters (which are quite often), that would be annoying.

So my question for the German Pre users:
When you type German words like for instance "Über" or "Österreich", how do you do that? Are you just using the "u" or "o" key, and then the rest of the word after which a German dictionary kicks in and converts it to "ü" or "ö" for you? Or do you have to go to symbols every time to use these special German characters?

For all:
What are the features of the keyboard and typing in general? Is there word suggestion, dictionary, T9 (predictive text) etc in the phone like on any standard cell phone today? And how do those functions work?


Thanks in advance

[Dorowan]

Hello Trekkie,
For lower case umlauts you can type SYM - [a,u,o] - SYM or SYM+[a,u,o].

The default combinations for the letters you asked for would be:

ø: SYM - o - o - o - o - o - o - o - SYM
æ: SYM - a - a - a - a - SYM
å: SYM - a - a - a - a - a - a - SYM

Until now I have not recognised a reasonable auto correction.

Hope this helps.

[Andreas]

Trekkie, when you hit the symbol key on the Pre it will open up a tiny window with all the available special characters that are related to the character you just typed. I doubt that its actually any different if you have german or english language on it.

This is how it looks like on the Pre WebOS emulator set to English when hit SYM + "a"



As you can see, you can access both danish and swedish characters among all the others.

However, it takes some keystrokes to step to a certain character in that list so it would be nice if Palm could somehow rearrange them depending on what country you are in. So that could set it to Danish and have those characters appear first in the list.

[Trekkie]

Originally Posted by Dorowan

Hello Trekkie,
For lower case umlauts you can type SYM - [a,u,o] - SYM or SYM+[a,u,o].

The default combinations for the letters you asked for would be:

ø: SYM - o - o - o - o - o - o - o - SYM
æ: SYM - a - a - a - a - SYM
å: SYM - a - a - a - a - a - a - SYM

Until now I have not recognised a reasonable auto correction.

Hope this helps.

Ok. That's a lot of key presses to get the correct character. But at least it's possible .

Originally Posted by Andreas

Trekkie, when you hit the symbol key on the Pre it will open up a tiny window with all the available special characters that are related to the character you just typed. I doubt that its actually any different if you have german or english language on it.

This is how it looks like on the Pre WebOS emulator set to English when hit SYM + "a"

As you can see, you can access both danish and swedish characters among all the others.

However, it takes some keystrokes to step to a certain character in that list so it would be nice if Palm could somehow rearrange them depending on what country you are in. So that could set it to Danish and have those characters appear first in the list.

Can you (or perhaps Dorowan) try to set the language to German and see if the layout of this menu changes? Is the lower case umlauts always the first characters for instance on the German version? Perhaps you could also try to change it to Spanish and see if there is any change here?

If that's the case, then there's hope that the Danish language will also have a specific rearrangement making æ ø å appear first in this list.


Trekkie

[Andreas]

I think I need to reinstall the emulator to be able to change language, or does anyone know how to make a hard reset of the emulator so that the language selection becomes available?

[hux]

On a german setting, on SYM + A you get the ä first, followed by à, â and so on. The letters are the same, just the order is different. Seems this is depending on the language, as the germans use ä regularly.

If you do not want to press SYM + a +a +a +a +a... you could still hit the right letter on the popup box and can even scroll down in that box with a gesture.

/edit: Just read up tips & tricks for screenshots. here you go: