I couldn't believe to my eyes when I saw the unboxing of an italian N900 here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybXCVXl85j0

What did Nokia do to put the stinking accented characters in the keyboard?

The just removed the up/down arrows and put them as a secondary function of left-right keys.

The ARROW KEYS!

The first thing I checked for the keyboard was the arrows placement and I was happy to see them correctly placed, now this surprise...

I am REALLY, REALLY, REALLY frustrated.

How on earth one would decide to put arrows as secondary function and not some accented key?!?

I don't know what to do... cancel my order and buy from uk?

It's the worst news until now, yes, a s**tty arrow could make me rethink about my order

I'm pretty sure you'll be able to remap the keys to your liking without much effort.

well, change kb layout to EN? then just memorize the positions of the arrow keys etc?

I am sorry to say this but this is really silly. After a week of real world usage these threads would make more sense...

e: and thank god finnish model has åäö straight in keyboard without extra keypresses. far more useful than arrows imo

I read of this decision some time ago, but I believe it was about some other european state.
Hopefully, the unpacking was made on a testing phone, therefore they could have changed idea and give us the phone with the arrow keys.
However in the other thread about it, someone specify that is just a matter of keymaps, therefore you could change it and obtain all the 4 arrow key in the software.
However it's horrible!

Yeah, the letters on keyboard are just printed on them. It doesn't matter what it says on top of the physical key, as it is the software that decides what symbol or letter is inputted when you push the key.

It's plain stupid to cancel the order just because of this.

Didn't thought about remapping keyboard, good advice! Perhaps because fiddling with shortcuts and hot keyboard swaps won't be the case with my main communication device... anyway Ossipena I agree, let's wait to have the toy in our hands and future and live usage will tell. On the other side, I am rather pretentious with such an expensive toy.
Side note, I am a Maemo fan/owner/community member since 770 (have had 2 of them, one WSODed). The fact is that I really considered previous NITs toys, I will consider my N900 my main working device. Perhaps was it better to wait step 5?

I agree, but when you are in a hurry between a meeting and another one you have no extra mental strength to spend to remember correct keys, it's simply something not ergonomic to fiddle with keymaps in such a use case.

Agreed again, but please consider that I preordered on August, 28th... URGH!

disclaimer: this is humour!

every time somebody says "I'LL CANCEL MY PREORDER", god kills a kitten

point is that you'll remember that by heart after a week or two, no matter what there reads in the kb. same happened to me with my german laptop with qwertz (we use qwerty by default)

i preordered 2. sept (bout 15 minutes after the preorder sales had been opened). so?