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TMO Quick Tip - iPhone: Typing Special Characters

Wednesday, July 16th, 2008 at 7:30 AM - by

At first glance, the touch-interface keyboard on the iPhone, iPhone 3G and iPod touch might seem a little limited because special characters like accented letters aren't displayed along with other characters. In reality, getting at those accented letters isn't hard to do, and you don't even need any special keystroke combinations to do it.

To see all of the special versions of a letter, just press and hold the letter on your handheld's virtual keyboard and wait for the fly-out menu showing the extra characters to appear. Next, slide your finger to the letter you want and release the key.


Press and hold to see extra characters.

For example, if I need an è character in a word, I hold down the E key and slide my finger to the è character on the fly-out menu. This works with every iPhone or iPod touch application that uses the keyboard, and any letter or punctuation symbol that includes special characters like accents or alternate punctuation symbols.

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jimothy said:

member since 04 Jun 2004 with 612 posts, unranked, send him a message or view his profile

Wed Jul 16, 2008 9:47 am

You can also use this technique when entering URLs in, for example, Safari. Tap and hold on .com, and other choices (.org, .net, .edu, and apparently, .co.uk on UK phones) will pop-up.

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A guest said: (hide)

Wed Jul 16, 2008 6:45 pm

I'd like to throw out the caveat that this works great in the English keyboard, but not in other keyboards. I tried out a new iPhone to test its Russian keyboard, and that only includes mainstream Russian Cyrillic letters - it doesn't include or allow Belarusian or Ukrainian variants like ґ or ў.

And no, I'm not angry at Apple or anything. I'm disappointed, but I do realize that I'm in an incredibly small minority of people who'd like to send e-mails in Belarusian or Ukrainian. Maybe next time, right?

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A guest said: (hide)

Wed Jul 16, 2008 7:11 pm

Ya, and that remote Brazilian tribe is pretty dissed that their letters aren't on the iPhone either...

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