Yes, but think twice. What about writing small äöü and big ÄÖÜ?

Press the blue Arrow and Shift together and then a Arrow key?

I try to live with the german layout. It is okay. But 4 Coursor Keys would even be better! You're right.

4 coursor is really needed especially if you want to play any nes or gba games or is the emulator programmable so i can use wasd?

best regards crown77

you can remap the buttons.

I agree, this 2 arrow thing is the biggest BS ever, next to the delay after delay. I've lost half my enthousiasm because of these, but its still the best phone to buy right now with that hardware + linux.

I also would have preferred having umlauts etc. on Fn+arrow combinations... however I thought it would not be so bad since, as explained in the manual, there is a key combination to switch the *hardware* keyboard layout between first and second language: Ctrl-Space.

Yippie, I thought, so I just press Ctrl-Space whenever I use a game/program where I need four arrow keys. Sadly, there is a bug that prevents that for everybody except Russians (sic! ): https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2501

Please vote for that bug, so we'll have fast switching between two and four arrow keys after the next maemo update!

I didn't think about that, because French accentuated keys don't shift to capitals (I have to switch to caps lock under Linux, and even caps lock doesn't work under Windows).

By the way, most French don't even know that the accent is supposed to stay on the letter when in capitals (most don't write them even with a pen and paper, even on formal documents). That might explain why the French keyboard doesn't provide a clean solution for capital accentuated letters.

Maybe a dead trema would be a solution ? for our ÄËÏÖÜäëïöü, we use a dead key, like for our ÂÊÎÔÛâêîôû. Only our éèàùç have a dedicated key, which respectively give 270%9 when pressing shift (yes, we need to press shift to get numbers). (ÉÈÀÙÇ with caps lock, under linux)

I don't see how we could fit all the french accents without putting them all as dead keys. Using ^, `, ', and ¨, maybe ?

Does anybody know if it is possible to add a custom keyboard layout with dead keys, to the possible choices of the N900 ?

Yes, why not Shift and Blue Arrow together? It would be perfect for me, as you can easily do it with one thumb.

So my suggestion is Blue Arrow and left/down/right for æ/ø/å (in my case, as I am Norwegian) or Shift+Blue Arrow and left/down/right for Æ/Ø/Å

Now for the business-end of this problem:
As I don't currently own an N900 (WANT one!) and would not know about remapping the keyboard anyway, I am hoping Very Much that someone with a phone and a bit of knowhow can try to do this particular setup and see how it works..

Pretty Please?

ANY help is much appreciated!

I have received the device on 12/24/2009, and my experience with it made me change my mind.

I finally discovered that I use the accents a lot more than the up/down arrows, so I'm pretty happy with the French keyboard as it is now. I won't be buying a QWERTY keyboard spare part as I intended to.
I use the stylus to move in a text, and the "hjkl" keys to move in Vim. The Ctrl + left/right to move to the next word is still usable since the left/right are the basic keys, Fn makes them go up/down.

The äëïöü letters are still a bit painful to make (need to type Fn > Sym > " > a/e/i/o/u), but these letters are quite rare in French language so it's a minor gripe.

My apologies to Nokia designers, this keyboard's quite good !

I have a question... Is there a way to use "ç" without "using" a lot of the 160 characters?

In my N96 and N81 i just needed to disable something in the options like "extended Characters" and then, i could put accents and using only 1 character for it.

In the N900 the "ç" is only a problem if it's not the first character of the SMS (it's weird). Using "ç" in a word will use 90 characters!

@sinetype: Use Ç instead of ç and the problem is gone!! Yes it's weird to have a capital letter in the middle of a word, but it works.