Best new feature in iPhone OS 3.0

After installing the new version of the iPhone OS this morning, I just found the best feature! It’s no the landscape keyboard mode in many apps, but rather the keyboard itself!

Compare the two screenshots below. First, the German layout is identical to the English except for the swapped “X” and “Y” keys. Germans like that, but they miss easy access to the German umlaut keys. To get to these, one must press-and-hold a vowel and select the umlaut from a popup menu.

German iPhone keyboard layout

Now look at the second image. Notice that there are more keys on the right-hand side – these are the Danish “umlauts”. How nice that they are directly accessible! Other umlauts are still available in the usual manner.

Danish iPhone keyboard layout

Question: when these umlauts made it into the Danish layout in OS 3.0, why hasn’t the German layout changed, too? (Perhaps it doesn’t matter because the built-in spell check properly replaces vowels with umlauts.)

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