a blog by Peter Leonard
This picture, courtesy of the Swedish Macfeber site, shows the upcoming support for extended roman characters on Apple's iPod Touch. This is important to iPhone users as many suspect that a future version of the phone's operating system will include many of the new features we're seeing first on the touchscreen iPod.
As you can see from the photo above, pressing and holding on the "A" key pops up a list of A's with different diacritic marks. Prior to this, the only way to get å ä and ö, among other letters, was to actually swap them out for little-used brackets on the iPhone's numeric keyboard.
So far the reaction from Swedes to the input system is negative -- they don't like the idea of Šand Ä being treated as "variants" of A, since to them they're actual honest-to-goodness separate vowels. (Imagine if "V" and "W" were thought of as stylistic variants of eachother, as they are in many Nordic languages, and there was only V on the keyboard.)
What we don't know yet is if Swedish is one of the 14 languages allegedly supported by the iPod Touch's keyboard, the user guide of which claims "iPod touch provides keyboards in 14 different languages." As you can see on the photo above, there is a mysterious "globe" icon that should allow you to switch between two national layouts, for example Swedish and English. Time will tell...