Galaxy Tab: The Missing Manual

Using the Keyboard

Tap wherever you can enter text, and the keyboard appears. When you tap in the text-entry box, a blinking cursor appears, indicating that you can start typing text. You can hold the tablet either horizontally or vertically to use the keyboard.

The Galaxy Tab doesn’t use the normal Android keyboard. Instead, it uses one devised by Samsung. And as you’ll see later in this chapter, you can also use a very nifty keyboard called Swype that lets you input text quickly by swiping your finger along the keyboard, instead of tapping keys.

Using the keyboard is straightforward; tap letters and characters to input them. As you tap you’ll feel just the slightest vibration to let you know that the Tab has input the character you tapped.

There are a few special keys, though, that you should know about:

• Shift . There’s one on either side of the keyboard. Tap one and it changes to blue, and the letters all change to uppercase on the keyboard. Tap any key, and it gets entered in uppercase. After you tap the key, though, the keyboard changes back to lowercase. If you want to type multiple uppercase characters in a row, there’s a nifty way around the problem: Keep your finger on the Shift key as you type. As long as you hold your finger there, you type in upper case. Remove your finger, ...