The iPhones are known for the smooth experience they offer, all thanks to Apple’s great hardware-software optimization with iOS. Along with the number of things to love in iOS, the iPhone keyboard is something we all love, thanks to its great accuracy, predictions and auto-correction. While there are third party keyboard apps available for the iPhone, many of us choose to use the native iOS keyboard and if you are one of them, you should know about some of the cool hidden tricks in it. Well, without further ado, here are 10 cool iPhone keyboard tricks you should know:
1. Use 3D Touch to turn the keyboard into a trackpad
Moving the cursor around, on the iPhone keyboard can be a little tough and that’s where this cool trick should come in handy. 3D Touch, introduced with the iPhone 6s brings some cool features and you can use it to turn the iPhone keyboard into a trackpad, so that you can control the cursor with ease. You can just use 3D Touch anywhere on the keyboard and it will turn into a trackpad. You can then move around your finger to move the cursor around. You can also lighten your touch and press harder to select text.
Moreover, you can use 3D Touch on the delete key to delete text faster. These 3D Touch tricks on the iOS keyboard obviously only work with 3D Touch packing iPhones.
2. Shake to Undo
Want to quickly undo a text you typed or pasted? Well, you can shake your iPhone to undo a typed text and more. Yes, that’s right! The “Shake to Undo” feature works to undo a typed, copied, cut or pasted text. You can enable the feature in General->Accessibility->Shake to Undo if it’s not enabled already.
3. Create Text Replacement Shortcuts
On iOS, you can create text replacement shortcuts for the keyboard. For instance, you can create a shortcut for “be right back” as “brb”, so whenever you type “brb”, it will be automatically replaced with “be right back”. Cool, right?
You can add these shortcuts in Settings->General->Keyboard. Here, tap on “Text Replacements” and tap on the plus icon on the top-right. Then, enter the phrase and the shortcut you want. You can add as many shortcuts as you want and you can even edit any previously saved shortcuts.
4. Add Numbers or Symbols Quickly
When you are typing a long text, jumping to the numbers & symbols page in the keyboard to write a single number or symbol can slow you down. The good news is, you can quickly add a number of letter on the iOS keyboard without slowing down. All you need to do is swipe from the “123” button to the letter, which corresponds to the number of symbol in the punctuation page you want to type. It’s simple yet something you will really appreciate.
5. Capitalize Individual Letters
Another thing that slows down our typing speed while typing longer texts is capitalizing individual letters. Chances are, you press the Caps Lock button to type in capitals but there’s an even better and faster way. You can just swipe to the letter you want to capitalize from the Caps Lock button. That’s easier, wouldn’t you agree?
6. Dictation
Well, not necessarily a trick but not everyone is aware of the dictation capabilities in the iPhone keyboard. You can hit the mic button in the iPhone keyboard to start dictating a text and it’s pretty good, thanks to Siri’s speech recognition. Dictating a text is pretty handy when you are driving or in situations where you can’t use your hands. Also, it works pretty well, as you can even add punctuation, line & paragraph breaks, type in all Caps Lock and more.
7. Get more keys in the landscape mode
While you might be aware of this, I wasn’t. When you use the iPhone keyboard in the landscape mode, you are presented with more keys and you can always type better with more keys at your disposal. If you are using a Plus version of an iPhone, you will get additional keys to edit text, format, arrow keys, symbols and more. On the normal sized iPhone, you should get the arrow keys, the comma and period key, a key to minimize keyboard and an additional backspace key.
Note: The additional keys in the landscape mode is only available for iPhone 6, 6 Plus, 6s, 6s Plus, 7 and 7 Plus.
8. Change Keyboards or Enable/Disable Predictive Text
There are people who use multiple keyboards at a time. For instance, I’m from India and I tend to use both “Hinglish” as well as the “English” keyboard for different purposes. In that case, I need to quickly switch between these keyboards. Thankfully, there is an easy way to do that in the iPhone keyboard.
First, you need to add multiple keyboards in Settings->General->Keyboard->Keyboards page. Once done, you can just open up the keyboard and press hold on the emoji or the globe icon and select your language of choice. You can also enable or disable predictive text from the same menu, which is also pretty handy.
9. Enter the Domain Address Faster
We all make mistakes while entering the address of a website when we are in a hurry to open it. If you tend to do make such mistakes while typing the domain address, there’s a solution in the iPhone keyboard. You can just press hold the “.” button while entering a webpage in the browser to quickly enter the domain address. This should slightly speed things up for you while making sure you don’t make any typos.
SEE ALSO: 7 Cool New Tricks in iOS 10
Use these cool iOS Keyboard Tricks to enhance your typing skills
Well, those were some cool iPhone keyboard tricks you can use. Sure, not all of them are tricks per se but we are sure not everyone is aware of them. So, try them out on your iPhone and do let us know your favorite keyboard trick on iOS. Also, if you know of any other cool tricks on iOS keyboard, sound off in the comments section below.
