keyboard

Everyone knows that iPhone's keyboard comes with a full set of QWERTY keys, numbers, and punctuation, but you may not have realized that there's even more. Hidden underneath many of the keys are special character variations. To bring up a special character, simply tap and hold for a moment and select from the pop-up menu. For example, if you'd like to type café, simply type caf, hold E, and choose É from the menu.

There are tons of other special characters hidden behind both alphabetical keys and punctuation keys. Check 'em out!

The iPhone's virtual keyboard has quite a few tricks up its sleeve, but one thing it can't do is type a grave accent mark without a letter (a ` or backtick to all you programmers out there). So while 99% of you probably don't care, it can be a problem for those who need to enter the backtick for a Wi-Fi password.

Thankfully, there is a way to get around non-typable passwords using the iPhone Configuration Utility.

If you're like me, caps lock is rarely used on the iPhone but sometimes you just need the next couple of letters to be capitalized. A good example is if you're typing out something like "OK" or "IM", or any number of other upper-case abbreviations. Thankfully, iPhone's multi-touch is smart enough to allow you use the shift key just like you can on a computer. Simply hold down the shift key while you type on the iPhone's keyboard and every letter will be capitalized.

That's sure to save you a few taps every now and then!

Apple's inclusion of a [.com] button on the iPhone's virtual keyboard has proved to be a big time saver when typing out URLs, but what about international sites that don't use the ".com" extension? You probably know about the trick where you hold down a button to bring up a menu with alternatives for the key. Mac OS X Hints explains how to enable doing that with regional domains on the [.com] key.

Apple made it very clear that not having a plastic keyboard would change the way users interacted with the iPhone. The most important aspect of this was the keyboard's ability to change based on the particular application. The best example of this is in Safari. Because spaces aren't used when entering a URL, you're given a dot, slash, and dot com button instead. Having these are great, but Safari on iPhone is a lot like its big brother. If you want to visit Apple.com, just type "Apple" and hit return. The www. and the .com are thrown in for you. My tip for you: skip the .com button, it's not necessary.