Buy an Iphone, you can have any keyboard you want-

Appreciate the input (as you can imagine, you're not the first to suggest this), but I don't use apple products, and am a Bberry fan boy. I've never worked well with touch screens so I figure the torch 98xx is the best bet.

With an iPhone, there's no physical keyboard to worry about!

yeah, not keyboard to worry about, just my soul

Come over to the dark side, Luke

You got cookies?

We would be obliged if you would let us know this site, as I am a UK touch typist and have a very good Swiss Friend, who has never used a keyboard and we would like to get her a computer for Christmas, but was wondering how to teach her the Swiss Keyboard. She has never worked in an office or the like so want to start her slowly and make it as easy as possible. She has been a super friend

That is very clear, as it is not just the Y Z being in different places, the @ sign can be a pain (emails) as well as various " ' etc from my experience over years having to use other peoples laptops in my travels. To think once I thought just the difference between UK/US was a pain tee-hee. Also your IT department as a temporary measure might be able to set their PC' so that they can choose another keyboard whilst still having the German Keyboard. I mainly have a UK keyboard, but have my pc set so I can switch between UK/German/Greek, then I have a print-out for my memory of them.

I got used to AltGr + 2 for the @ character, after copying and pasting initially

Can't recall it off the top of my head, but will check when I get into work next. This was a program for a Mac, and I can't recall if they also had a Windows version ...

You think that's bad, when I learnt to touch-type my tutor played a record of Dominique by the Singing Nun. Yes, I'm old, but she'd stepped straight out of Mad Men ("always remember your boss's wedding anniversary, as you will probably need to go and get a gift for him to give to his wife").

And as I write on my Macbook (US layout) I am still getting the " and @ mixed up (I'm from the UK) after 4 years - it does make a big difference.

What Tom said about touchtyping plus it's a huge pain to have a mixture between phones, laptops, home & work keyboards.

I only came across the AltGr when I came to europe 2 years ago. Having used the standard (PC-compatible) NA qwerty keyboard for a good 25+ years, this was a bizzarre additio,n and took some getting used to.

On (a recent batch of) Mac PowerBooks, they have the @ on the g for the Swiss-German keyboard layout ... so [alt]+g does it.

Not sure if I mentioned this before, though, but I was playing Trivial Pursuit in Sweden from a Dutch game (don't ask) and the question (once I'd deciphered it) asked which character shared the '1' key ... I asked which keyboard; the others said it doesn't matter, they're all the same - but the Swiss-German keyboard (at least that PowerBook one I mentioned above!) has the + there ... and shifting the parentheses over by one key each (to 8 & 9 instead of 9 & 0) is more disturbing than the y & z being swapped.

I would like to note that for the Torch 9810 (at least) this is only possible for the touch screen. NOT the physical keyboard. If you get a qwertz Torch, you are stuck with y and z backward. Just found this out now, kinda dissapointing and annoying.

um, if you touch type then it doesn't matter what's printed on the keys!