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One of the things I dislike most with the iPhone is its sized-down keyboard with only 10 keys in a row. This may fine for English, but leaves not enough room for umlauts or accented letters.
The official way to input umlauts is to hold down the key and wait until the umlauts and accented letters pop up, but this is way too slow. For numbers and symbols there is the tap-slide-release trick, but for umlauts this doesn't work.
Is there a way to type these letters faster?
I don't know a direct solution to your question: Reduced delay. If your iPhone is jailbroken you might be able to find the preference file that sets the delay and reduce it.
One work around could be to not deal with the accents at all and have the iPhone insert them for you, as autocorrected words. You can now type full speed.
To add custom words to the dictionary:
For example, I added Word=fooxx and Yomi=föoxx, I then went to the Notepad and using the English keyboard I typed "fooxx", and the iPhone suggested föoxx. When I did this example without the "xx" it did not work, perhaps because foo is already in my dictionary.
Alternatively, if you iPhone is jailbroken you could try using Xpandr
What umlauts are you interested in? Could you switch to a keyboard layout which has them? I use åäö which are included in the swedish keyboard layout.
Apple provides several keyboard layouts for iOS. Just go to settings, general, International, Keyboards.
According to this Mac & i article iOS 5 will finally have a German keyboard with 11 keys in a row:
Edit: Only with iOS 6 this keyboard has finally arrived.
Yeah!
Worse : add the arabic keyboard, and you'll see that there's a key next to the spacebar that instantly pops up a choice of characters, when pressed. I, too, would like that kind of behaviour for accents in French ! I hate the one second delay.
Just want to inform everyone above that all you need to do is keep pressing the letter and all characters with signs above pop up, and there is the umlaut. I'm using 6s. Actually, just got it and needed the umlaut too.
