This entry is rather for German readers, but maybe someone of you finds it…god knows why…helpful as well.

The droid sadly has no umlaut-keys. There are 2 alternative ways to type these in using the keyboard.

method 1 – press a,o,u,s for a while

If you press the key corresponding to its umlaut longer than 1 second, you will see this menu:

As you can see it contains a lot of funny characters.
Either press the one of your choice on the screen or navigate to it using the 5-way d-pad and finally press on its middle button.

There is however a second way to achieve this a little faster

method 2: Shift,Alt und then U

Press either Shift or ALT, then to one of them you didn’t press. The textmarker changes after pressing ‘u’ into two dots:

If you press a,o or u the corresponding umlaut will appear. Writing ‘ß’ is even easier. Just press Shift, Alt, then ‘s’

I doubt that this will work on Droid’s. It would be nice if anyone could confirm this.

I’m likely to build an app soon making the whole process a bit easier because umlauts are needed fairly often in the German language.

Foresighted as Google is they didn’t build in a function to deactivate all that 3G, EDGE and GPRS-stuff so the time had come to investigate that matter.

I found the following (working) alternatives:

1. Apn Droid from the Market

This app simple attaches a suffix to the properties to the access points of the data-connections and therefore renders them useless.
It even includes a home-screen widget which can enable or disable the data connections. Although this app is proved and tested I didn’t like the idea that other apps will still go wild trying to connect to the internet and therefore stress the battery.

There was need for a more puristic method

2. delete or change access points

Without settings there won’t be a connection. That’s why I deleted all access points besides the MMS-one.
To achivere this do this (names of the options may be wrong as I have a German device)

Choose Settings > wireless and networks > mobile networks > access points

The list will look like this:

If you delete all access points you won’t be able to send or receive MMS (do Americans even use that?). That’s why you should leave one access point and click on it.
Scroll the bottom of the list and choose APN Type! It has to be changed to mms.

Wenn ihr alle Zugangspunkte löscht werdet ihr nicht mehr in der Lage sein MMS zu senden oder zu empfangen, deswegen lasst einen Zugangspunkt übrig und wählt diesen an.
Scrollt dann nach ganz unten zu APN Type! Dieser muss auf mms geändert werden.

That’s it for now. I’ll keep writing about Android in the future. Maybe I’ll even come up with a cool app