Accessing symbols and special characters on the virtual keyboard [webOS 3.0] 8
by Adam Marks Fri, 08 Jul 2011 9:48 am EDT

Accessing symbols and special characters on a webOS phone was a simple task of just using the Sym or option (orange/silver) keys on the physical keyboard. Since the Touchpad and webOS 3.0 has replaced with physical keyboard with a virtual one, you need a different way of accessing these addition characters. There are three may ways of extending the functionality of the keyboard:
- Just as on a computer's keyboard, the number row across the top contains some alternate symbols. Pressing the SHIFT (up arrow) key on the keyboard will allow you to access those symbols, as well as CAPS letter. You can either press the shift key and then the symbol, or you can press and hold the shift key and press multiple symbols. Note that the 4 grey key on the lower right (, . ' and -) also has alternate symbols
- Press the
key on the lower left to change each letter into an alternate character, as well as some smiley faces. To change back to letters, either tap that key again (which now says ABC) or press the space bar - You can also press and hold on almost and key to bring up other context-specific characters, just like holding down the keyboard key for different size keyboards. Any key that has additional characters will show an "..." on the bottom left of the key. And when the keyboard shows a ".COM" button, tapping that will also give you additional options like .net, .org and .edu. Once you have the pop-up with the additional character, you can either:
- Tap on the character you want to insert it into your text
- Tap another key with the "..." to see the characters for that key
- Tap on the currently select key or any key without additional characters to dismiss the pop-up without inserting anything into your text

(2 votes)


























8 Comments
Now we need text prediction
If you think predictive text is a good thing, you should spend some time looking at this:
site:
http://www.damnyouautocorrect.com/category/best-of-dyac/
It's VERY funny and shows how helpful predictive text can be! ;)
P.S. I just read the first couple pages AGAIN and now have tears streaming down my face from laughing so hard!!!
it strikes me that these examples don't ring true. At least they are dramatized in some way IMO.
I think it's the author of this post who needs predictive text/autocorrect. It reads like it was written by someone in middle school.
On my TouchPad, that bottom row of emoticons are now 'actual' emoticons, not the ASCII versions as shown in the pic above. I don't know how or when HP did it but they did!
Where is the greek letter "alpha"???
omega, pi, and mu, all lower case.
That's all I can find.
Here's another cool one:
Hold down the "/" key (left of space bar).
You get these choices:
http:// https:// www.
Nice!