OT: question regarding French language

[halx]

Offtopic question: is a text in French still understandable if all accents are stripped, i.e. all characters are converted to their ASCII equivalents?

[amrein]

all characters are converted to their ASCII equivalents

You mean using "e" instead of "é" ? Of course. But this prevent french people from writting long text.

If those device wanted to come in Europe, they would have to have one different keyboard for each country. For spanish for example, the inverted "?" is missing, for German ... (have a look on their SL-5000D German keyboard version...)

This is no more true if you use a screen keyboard of course. This is why most tablet PDA without keyboard have just the manual and the internal OS translated (and sometime a simple change into the ROM to prevent the use of different OS language version in different contries... like DVD zone)

[_Psycho]

Offtopic question: is a text in French still understandable if all accents are stripped, i.e. all characters are converted to their ASCII equivalents?

Yes, its very easy to understand a text without accent. Thats doesnt change much, peoples know the words already.

[PsionX]

Offtopic question: is a text in French still understandable if all accents are stripped, i.e. all characters are converted to their ASCII equivalents?

La réponse est oui, mais les accents ont leur utilité (et non utilite  ).
Mais avec une rom adaptée (Cacko), on peut avoir les accents au clavier (Keyhelper) et même sur un clavier virtuel (d'ailleurs rajouter par moi-même ds le dernier fix de Cacko)...
Si par ailleurs, c'est pour envoyer du texte à des français depuis un ordinateur ne prenant pas en charge les accents.. c'est pas un soucis  
(mais il y a toujours des solutions de mappage clavier).
http://www.asciitable.com/