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The iPhone, like most smartphones nowadays, dispenses with physical buttons in favor of a multitouch display. (The iPhone was a pioneer in popularizing multitouch.) This display is the heart of many things you do on the iPhone, and the controls change depending on the task at hand.

Unlike some other phones with touchscreens, don’t bother looking for a stylus. You are meant, instead – at the risk of lifting another ancient ad slogan – to “let your fingers do the walking.”

It’s important to note that you have at your disposal several keyboard layouts in English, all variations on the alphabetical keyboard, the numeric and punctuation keyboard, and the more punctuation and symbols keyboard. Three keyboards are shown in Figure 2-1 in the Notes app and three in Safari.

FIGURE 2-1: Six faces of the iPhone keyboard.

The layout you see depends on which toggle key you tapped and the app that you are working in. For instance, the keyboards in Safari differ from the keyboards in Notes, sometimes in subtle ways. For example, note in Figure 2-1 that the Notes keyboards have a Return key in the lower right, but the Safari keyboards have a Go key in that position.

What’s more, if you rotate the iPhone to its side, you’ll get wider variations of the respective keyboards. A single example of a wide keyboard in the Notes app is shown in Figure 2-2.

FIGURE 2-2: Going wide on the keyboard.

Discovering the special-use keys

The iPhone keyboard contains a number of keys that don’t type a character (refer to Figure 2-2). These special-use keys follow:

❯❯ Shift key: Switches between uppercase and lowercase letters if you’re using the alphabetical keyboard. If you’re using keyboards that show only numbers and symbols, the traditional shift key is replaced by a key labeled #+= or 123. Pressing that key toggles between keyboards that have just symbols and numbers.

To turn on caps lock mode and type in all caps, make sure caps lock is enabled. You do that by tapping the Settings icon, then tapping General, and then tapping Keyboard. Tap the Enable Caps Lock item to turn it on. After the caps lock setting is enabled (it’s disabled by default), you double-tap the shift key to turn on caps lock. (The upward-pointing arrow in the shift key turns black when caps lock is on.) Tap the shift key again to turn off caps lock. To disable caps lock, just reverse the process by turning off the Enable Caps Lock setting (tap Settings, General, Keyboard). Before going through this drill, double-tap the shift key to see if you have to enable or disable the setting.

❯❯ Toggle key: Switches between the different keyboard layouts.

❯❯ International keyboard key: Shows up with a globe on the face of the key only if you’ve turned on an international keyboard, as explained in the sidebar titled “A keyboard for all borders,” later in this chapter. If you haven’t selected an international keyboard, this key displays an emoji instead, as explained in the next item.

Note: When you select a keyboard in a different language – or English for that matter – you can select different software keyboard layouts (QWERTY, AZERTY, QWERTX) and a hardware keyboard layout (if you connect a hardware keyboard via Bluetooth).

❯❯ Emoji key: Displays smiley faces and other emoticons, along with a gaggle of other tiny symbol options, from pictures of bells and boats to balloons and animals. As just noted, if you’ve chosen an international keyboard, you won’t see the emoji key, not at first anyway (unless you hold the iPhone sideways or in landscape mode). In this instance, keep tapping the international keyboard until the emoji keys appear.

❯❯ Delete key: Erases the character immediately to the left of the cursor.

If you hold down the delete key for a few seconds, it begins erasing entire words rather than individual characters.

❯❯ Return key: Moves the cursor to the beginning of the next line. As mentioned, the Return key becomes a Go key on the Safari keyboard.

❯❯ Dictation key: Lets you use Siri to dictate your words. More on Siri in Chapter 5.

The following set of keys appears in landscape mode on all iPhone 6 models, as shown in Figure 2-2:

❯❯ Arrow keys: These two keys let you move the cursor in either direction without wiping out the letters, numbers, or characters that it crosses.

❯❯ Cut, copy, paste: Dedicated keys turn up on certain models in landscape mode when you’ve selected the standard display zoom view.

❯❯ Undo key: This key undoes your last action.

❯❯ Exclamation point, question mark, comma: The iPhone 6 Plus, 6s Plus, 7, and 7 Plus in landscape mode offers dedicated keys for these punctuation marks.

Apple made a subtle but key improvement (forgive the pun) to its iPhone keyboards in iOS 9 and beyond. If you’ve enabled the shift key, the letters will appear on their respective keys as capital letters. If the shift key has not been enabled, the letters are lowercase, as shown in Figure 2-3.

FIGURE 2-3: Your keyboard is on the (upper- or lower-) case.

The incredible, intelligent, and virtual iPhone keyboard

Before you consider how to actually use the keyboard, we’d like to share a bit of the philosophy behind its so-called intelligence. In fact, with iOS 10, the QuickType keyboard managed to raise its IQ. For one thing, it leverages Siri. For another, it relies on deep neural network technology, which sounds as smart as it is. Knowing what makes this keyboard smart will help you make it even smarter when you use it. The iPhone keyboard

❯❯ Uses a bundled English dictionary that even includes words from today’s popular culture.

❯❯ Adds your contacts to its dictionary automatically.

❯❯ Uses complex analysis algorithms and the aforementioned neural network technology to predict the word you’re trying to type.

❯❯ Suggests corrections as you type, and then offers you the suggested word just below the word you typed.

❯❯ Reduces the number of mistakes you make as you type by intelligently and dynamically resizing the touch zones for certain keys. The iPhone increases the zones for keys it predicts might come next and decreases the zones for keys that are unlikely to come next, though you can’t see these changes.

Anticipating what comes next

The keyboards on your iPhone have become ever more useful through various generations of iOS. These days, the keyboard takes an educated stab at the next word you mean to type and presents what it surmises to be the best possible word choices front and center. Say you’re preparing a note in the Notes app. You start typing, This is a. Above the row of keys in the iPhone keyboard, you’d see buttons with three word suggestions: great, good, and very (as shown in Figure 2-4). If one of those were the appropriate response, you could tap the button to insert its text into your reply.