iPhone OS 3.0 Beta Finally Supports Greek Keyboard and Menus

Greek iPhone users (and all of you who wouldn’t buy an iPhone because of this… issue) rejoice! The upcoming iPhone upgrade will support writing in greek. Apple held an event last night, showcasing the new iPhone OS 3.0 (and the corresponding SDK), which is available to all users that have enrolled to the iPhone Developer Program.

Since my company has enrolled, I downloaded and install the beta to my iPhone 3G, and am happy to assure you that there is a greek keyboard (in the International Keyboards section in Settings) that you can enable and type in greek. The keyboard looks to be under development, but it works great (for example, the virtual buttons appear as uppercase all the time, but you can type in both uppercase and lowercase).

The keyboard comes with spell checking and correction too, which also corrects unaccented words to their accented form (which means that you don’t have to bother with accents, it does that automatically). I don’t think there’s much work left to do, so it’s pretty certain that when the new OS becomes available to all users, the greek keyboard will be included.

But that’s not all! The new version supports changing the language to greek as well. Once you choose it, the device seems to “soft rebooting”, and after a few seconds the interface is using the greek language (i.e. in the Settings app, E-mail, Messages etc). Not everything seems to have been translated by now, but I guess they’ll have this sorted out in time of public release.

I won’t go into more details or post any screenshots since I respect Apple keeping the beta stuff as “confidential” (after all some photos have been already posted online). Feel free to contact me on Twitter (@Karageorgakis) about any questions.