iPhone: The Missing Manual, 3rd Edition

Chapter 2. Typing, Editing, & Searching

The iPhone is amazing, all right. But as a pocket computer, it faces some fundamental limitations: It has no real keyboard and no real mouse. Which might be considered a drawback on a gadget that's capable of running tens of thousands of programs.

Fortunately, the iPhone 3.0 software comes complete with some welcome features that are meant to address these problems. The onscreen keyboard is much smarter and more convenient; Cut, Copy, and Paste are finally available; and the new global search lets you find a data needle in your iPhone haystack.

The Keyboard

Very few iPhone features have triggered as much angst, hope, and criticism as the onscreen keyboard. It's true, boys and girls: The iPhone has no physical keys. A virtual keyboard, therefore, is the only possible system for entering text. Like it or not, you'll be doing your typing on glass.

The keyboard appears automatically whenever you tap in a place where typing is possible: in an outgoing email or text message, in the Notes program, in the address bar of the Web browser, and so on.

Just tap the key you want. As your finger taps the glass, a "speech balloon" appears above your finger, showing an enlarged version of the key you actually hit (since your finger is now blocking your view of the keyboard).

In darker gray, surrounding the letters, you'll find these special keys:

• Shift (). When you ...