iPhone meme

The iPhone’s touch-screen keyboard is certainly slick - but it takes some getting used to.

The biggest adjustment for me has been the need to plow ahead through the inevitable typos and let the iPhone software guess what I’m typing and fix the spelling as I go. It has been pointed out that the iPhone doesn’t really have a spell-checker, per se. It makes guesses about what I’m trying to type, but doesn’t always catch obvious typos. Also, if I ever accidentally “accept” a typo, by clicking the little “x” to ignore a suggestion, that typo itself seems to become a future suggestion. Yikes. Adaptive and smart, but perhaps a bit too much so!

So, I’m doing my best to unlearn spelling, trust suggestions, and not accidentally accept too many typos. I’m also finding that I’m using the iPhone primarily for “inbound” communication like email and RSS, and perhaps a bit less for outbound email and blogging. We’ll see if this changes as I get used to the keyboard.

Related - The omnipresent Pogue has a nice list of iPhone Keyboard Secrets that is woth a look, including this one that has helped me out:

“The suggestion feature can be especially useful when it comes to contractions, which are normally clumsy to type because you have to switch to a secondary, punctuation keyboard to find the apostrophe. So you can deliberately leaving out the apostrophe. Just type “im,” “dont,” “cant” and so on. The iPhone proposes “I’m,” “don’t,” or “can’t,” so that you can just tap the Space bar to fix the word and continue.”

Nice tip!

What sorts of things are you typing on the iPhone? Got other iPhone keyboarding tricks? Let us know in the comments!