A lot of people don’t realize that there are several shortcuts, simple tricks and tips available on the iPhone to make life much easier.  Beyond that, every firmware update brings more and more.  Do you think you know them all?

One area were shortcuts and tricks come in most handy is with the keyboard.  For instance, holding down the “.com” button while typing a URL will bring up a menu with options such as “.net,” “.org,” and so on.  Also, while the “.com” button isn’t available when typing out emails, you can press and hold the period button to bring up the same menu with the various extensions.  Likewise, you can press and hold all the letters on the keyboard to bring up a menu of different variations of that letter.

Another little known keyboard trick is the use of the “shift” button for capitalization.  Instead of using the “caps lock” button to capitalize a few letters, you can press and hold “shift” while you type the letter(s) you’d like capitalized- just like a standard keyboard.  The spacebar also has some handy shortcuts, for instance tapping the spacebar twice will place a period and space automatically, while tapping the spacebar with both thumbs will automatically place two spaces in your text.  These are all very simple, but very handy.

Safari also has a bevy of shortcuts available to make navigating and other tasks much simpler.  The “domain resolution” function allows you to simply type the main site domain into the URL bar without the “www” or “.com.”  For instance you can enter “blorge” and it will automatically find “http://www.blorge.com.”  For this to work, you must have Google set as your default search engine, but it speeds things up considerably.

You can save any image in both Mail and Safari by simply pressing and holding the image until the “save this image” menu appears.  Likewise, while surfing in Safari, you can also tap and hold any URL to bring up the full URL and the corresponding site name.  Another interesting, but most of the time useless, trick is to take a screenshot of anything on your iPhone.  To do this, simply hold the home button and click the sleep button on top.  The screen will go white momentarily and your screenshot will be stored in your camera roll.

Hopefully you learned something new, and if you didn’t, consider yourself luckier than me.  It took me months to figure out the many shortcuts and tricks available on the iPhone, and I’m sure we’ve only scratched the surface.

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Entry was posted on Tuesday, February 3rd, 2009 at 12:48 am under How-to, iPhone.  Print This Post

Read more entries by Justin Montgomery.
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