How to use the iPhone 4 keyboard
The iPhone 4 virtual keyboard is one of those inventions that some people love to hate, but despite being small, there is a lot of punch packed into it. Here are a few pointers to make it easier to live with.
First, it works in either landscape or portrait mode in most applications. It is a little larger in landscape mode, but it also cuts down drastically on the space available to the application. In order to display the keyboard, tap on any text area on your display. The individual keys, of course, work about how you would expect them to. When the keyboard first appears, it looks like the photo at the upper left of this column.
Tap on a letter, and that letter appears in the selected text box in your app. It will be in lower case, unless you first tap on the arrow key to the left of the letter “Z.” Then it will be a capital. If you have “Enable Caps Lock” turned on in “Settings → General → Keyboard” all subsequent letters will be capitalized until you tap on the arrow key again. Otherwise, only a single letter will be capitalized.
Clear across the keyboard, to the right of the letter “M” you will see a different arrow key with an “X” in the middle. That is a destructive backspace key. Tapping on it will erase the character to the left of the cursor / insertion point (see this column to learn about moving the cursor). You can “hold down” this key, just like the backspace key on your keyboard, to automatically delete more characters, then whole words. The “Return” key just below the backspace key acts like the “Return” or “Enter” key on your regular keyboard.
Just to the left of the space bar is a key marked “.?123” which changes the display to the number keyboard along with some selected symbols. In this mode, the capitalize key changes to “#+=” to allow you to access more special keys and symbols. In this mode that key allows you to toggle back and forth between the first and second symbol key keyboards. Tap on “ABC” to go back to the letter keyboard.
While we’re on the subject of text, you may want to see this column on cut, copy, and paste.
Some people can use the keyboard with their thumbs, two handed, like a conventional cell phone hardware keyboard after a bit of practice. In practice, my hands and fingers are too large to allow this, so I wind up using just the corner of an index finger to type with. Although not as fast as typing two-thumbed, it works fairly well.
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