One of the most used features on the iPhone is something that almost never gets written about -- the iPhone keyboard. While innocent looking enough, there are many tricks and hacks one can use to make the typing experience more enjoyable. This article will cover some of the fun ones I've used over the years to type faster and add a little emotion into my Twitter stream and text messages.
Auto Correction Preferences and the Dictionary
One of the love-hate relationships I have with my iPhone is the auto correction feature. While it catches most of what I want to type, it sometimes has a tendency to insert incorrect words. I like it when I type "teh" and it changes it to "the." However, when I need to type "electrolytes" it wants to change the word to "electoral." If I take the time to press the "x" next to the end of the autocorrected word carefully five times, it will remove that suggestion from future attempts. If you want to start fresh and reset your iPhone dictionary, go to the Settings app and follow General -> Reset -> Reset Keyboard Dictionary. This will reset the dictionary to its factory settings.
If you don't want to use auto correction at all, you can also disable it by switching Auto-Correction to OFF. Note the other interesting options in the view below; you can disable Auto-Capitalization, spell checking (those red lines under words), and you can enable or disable the ability to add a period and end a sentence with a spacebar double tap. Neat!
International Keyboard Preferences
If you've purchased your iPhone in the US, you'll have the default keyboard set to English and you won't see a globe icon to cycle through keyboards on the lower left. If you go to the Settings app and follow General -> Keyboard -> Add New Keyboard, you'll have the option to add an international keyboard. This will allow you to type in other languages besides English. Below I've added four additional keyboards.
Once you've added an additional keyboard, you'll see a new globe icon show up next to the ABC/123 toggle on the lower left. Pressing the globe icon will cycle through the available keyboards.
Below is a sample of the Hebrew keyboard:
For those that know or study Chinese, there are some nifty ways to actually draw a Chinese character with your finger and have the iPhone give you a few matches as you draw the strokes.
Chinese has several input methods, one of my favorites is called Pinyin. I simply type the phonetic sound of the character I wish to write, and the keyboard will give me several popular options I can choose from.
Emoji
Have you ever wondered how people add those interesting emoticons into their text messages and Twitter streams? They've added another keyboard called Emoji. My favorite app for this is called
Emoji ($0.99). There are also several free ones, just search the App Store. Once you download the app and load it, you'll be asked to enable it by making sure the preference is set to ON. After that you'll never need to load the app again. Go to the Settings app and follow General -> Keyboard -> International Keyboards -> Japanese -> then switch the Emoji keyboard status to ON. Once you do that, you can cycle through the international keyboards by pressing the globe, and eventually the Emoji keyboard will show up. This is where the fun begins! Add them to your Twitter stream and text messages for updates. People using iPhone devices will see the Emoji, but unfortunately most browsers will not display them on the web unless you install special FireFox plug-ins. Google "show emoji icons on desktop" for more info. Once Emoji are loaded, there are over 460 of them that you can use; separated by iconic topics at the bottom of the keyboard.
Landscape Mode
No article on keyboard hacks would be complete without quick mention of tilting your iPhone 90 degrees from portrait to landscape mode. This feature was released in iOS 3, however I don't find myself using it as much as I thought I would. The keys are more spaced out, so one should supposedly have a higher degree of accuracy when typing. You might also check out our
Keyboard2 review to see if that layout is something that helps you type faster.
Enabling international keyboards and Emoji can be lots of fun, however I must warn you it may take some time to get used to the globe on the lower left. I tend to tap it a lot when I don't mean to. Since the globe and the ABC/123 buttons are so close to each other, I'll often find myself having to cycle through several keyboard to get back to English.
Do you use multiple keyboards or Emoji? Do you find yourself typing in portrait or landscape more? Let us know in the comments.
