You will quickly find two on-screen keyboards on your iPhone: the smaller one visible when you hold your iPhone in a vertical orientation, and the larger landscape keyboard when you hold the iPhone in a horizontal orientation. The nice thing is that you can choose whichever keyboard works best for you.
Typing on the Screen with Two Thumbs
You will find when you first start out with your iPhone that you can most easily type with one finger—usually your index finger—while holding the iPhone with the other hand.
After a little while, you should be able to experiment with thumb typing (like you see so many people doing with other phones such as the BlackBerry smartphones). Once you practice a little, typing with two thumbs instead of a single finger will really boost your speed. Just be patient, it does take practice to become proficient typing quickly with your two thumbs.
You will actually notice after a while that the keyboard touch sensitivity assumes you are typing with two thumbs. What this means is that the letters on the left side of your keyboard are meant to be pressed on their left side, and the keys on the right are meant to be touched/pressed on their right side (Figure 2-1).
Figure 2-1. Typing with two thumbs while holding the iPhone vertically.
TIP: If you have larger hands and find typing on the smaller vertical keyboard challenging, then flip your iPhone on its side to get the larger, landscape keyboard (see Figure 2-2).
Simply turn the iPhone sideways in many apps and the keyboard will change to a larger, landscape keyboard to make it easier to type (see Figure 2-2).
Figure 2-2. Turn your iPhone on its side to type with the larger Landscape keyboard.
Saving Time with Auto-Correction
When you are typing for a while, you will begin to notice a little pop-up window directly below some of the words you are typing—this is called Auto-Correction.
NOTE: If you never see the Auto-Correction pop-up window, then you will have to enable Auto-Correction by going into your Settings app > General > Keyboard > Set Auto-Correction to ON.
You can save yourself time when you see the correct word guessed by just pressing the Space key at the bottom of the keyboard to select that word.
In this example, we start typing the word "especially," and when we get to the c in the word, the correct word "especially" appears below in a pop-up. To select it, we simply press the Space key at the bottom (see Figure 2-3).
Figure 2-3. Using Auto-Correction and suggested words.
Your first inclination might be to tap the pop-up word, but that simply erases it from the screen. It is ultimately faster to keep typing or press the Space key when you see the correct word, as there will be more situations in which the word is either correct or will become correct as you keep typing — less finger travel in the long run.
TIP: The Auto-Correction also looks through your Contacts list to make suggestions.
After you learn to use the Space key, you will see that this pop-up guessing can be quite a time saver. After all, you were going to have to type a space at the end of the word anyway.
Sometimes the Auto-Correction word is incorrect; in this case, you simply need to press the Backspace key
and then you will see a pop-up appear with the original word before the Auto-Correction changed it. See Figure 2-4
Figure 2-4. Dealing with Auto-Correction words that are not correct.
TIP: With Auto-Correction, you can save time by avoiding typing the apostrophe in many common contractions, such as "wont" and "cant." Auto-Correction will show you a little pop-up window with the contraction spelled correctly; all you need to do to select the correction is to press the Space key.
With some words, you have to add an extra character for the Auto-Correction to figure out:
Type "Weree" to get We’re.
Type "Welll" to get We’ll.
Hearing Auto-Correction Words Out Loud
You can set your iPhone to speak out the Auto-text and Auto-Correction words as they appear. This might be helpful to selecting the correct word. To enable this type of speaking:
1. Tap the Settings icon.
2. Tap General.
3. Tap Accessibility near the bottom of the page (you need to swipe down).
4. Set the switch next to Speak Auto-text to On.
After you enable this feature, whenever you are typing, you will hear the Auto-Correction word that pops up. If you agree with the word you hear, press the Space key to accept it; otherwise, keep typing. It can save you some time from looking up from the keyboard.
