Before you consider how to actually use the keyboard, we'd like to share a bit of the philosophy behind its so-called intelligence. Knowing what makes this keyboard smart will help you make it even smarter when you use it:

Rice Krispies has Snap! Crackle! Pop! Apple's response for the iPhone is Tap! Flick! and Pinch! Yikes, another ad comparison.

Fortunately, tapping, flicking, and pinching are not challenging gestures, so you'll be mastering many of the iPhone's features in no time:

www.theiphoneblogs.com/2007/01/12/practice-your-apple-iphone-pinch/

The Home screen we discuss back in Chapter 1 may not be the only screen of icons on your phone. After you start adding apps from the iTunes App Store (which you discover in Chapter 14), you may see two or more tiny dots between the Phone, Mail, Safari, and iPod icons and the row of icons directly above them, plus a tiny Spotlight search magnifying glass to the left of the dots. Those dots denote additional screens, each containing up to 16 additional icons. To navigate between screens, either flick from right to left or left to right across the middle of the screen or tap directly on the dots.

The number of dots you see represents the current number of screens on your iPhone. The dot that's all white denotes the screen you're currently viewing. Finally, the four icons in the last row — Phone, Mail, Safari, and iPod — are in a special part of the screen known as the dock. When you switch from screen to screen as described above, these icons remain on the screen. In other words, only the first 16 icons on the screen change when you move from one screen to another.

Press the Home button to jump back to the first screenful of icons or the Home screen. Pressing a second time brings you to a handy new Search feature that arrived with iPhone OS 3.0 software. We'll address Search later in this chapter.

Apple's multitouch interface just might be considered a stroke of genius. And it just might as equally drive you nuts, at least initially.

If you're patient and trusting, you'll get the hang of finger-typing in a week or so. (We've gotten quite good at it by now.) You have to rely on the virtual keyboard that appears when you tap a text field to enter notes, compose text messages, type the names of new contacts, and so forth.

As we've already noted, Apple has built a lot of intelligence into its virtual keyboard, so it can correct typing mistakes on the fly and take a stab at predicting what you're about to type next. The keyboard isn't exactly Nostradamus, but it does a pretty good job in coming up with the words you have in mind.

As you press your finger against a letter or number on the screen, the individual key you press gets bigger and practically jumps off the screen, as shown in Figure 2-2. That way, you know that you struck the correct letter or number.

Meanwhile, if you press and hold the .com key in Safari, it offers you the choice of .com, .net, .edu or .org. Pretty slick stuff.

Figure 2-2. The ABCs of virtual typing.

Figure 2-3. Accenting your letters.

Alas, mistakes are common at first. Say that you meant to type a sentence in the Notes application that reads, "I am typing a bunch of notes." But because of the way your fingers struck the virtual keys, you actually entered "I am typing a bunch of npyrs." Fortunately, Apple knows that the o you meant to press is next to the p that showed up on the keyboard, just as t and y and the e and the r are side by side. So the software determines that notes was indeed the word you had in mind and places it in red under the suspect word, as shown in Figure 2-4. To accept the suggested word, merely tap the Space key. And if for some reason you actually did mean to type npyrs instead, tap on the suggested word (notes in this example) to decline it.

As part of the 3.0 software upgrade, you can now rotate the iPhone so that its keyboard changes to a wider landscape mode in certain applications, specifically Mail, Messages, and Notes. The feature was already present in Safari. Since the keys are slightly larger in landscape mode, this is a potential boon to those of you who do a lot of typing or have largish fingers.

It's a good idea to type with abandon and not get hung up over mistyped characters. The self-correcting keyboard will fix many errors. That said, plenty of typos will likely turn up, especially in the beginning, and you'll have to make corrections manually.

Figure 2-4. When the keyboard bails you out.

Figure 2-5. Magnifying errors.

Being able to copy and paste text (or images) from one place on a computer to another has seemingly been a divine right since Moses, but getting to this Promised Land on the iPhone has taken awhile. Apple added Copy and Paste (and Cut) as part of OS 3.0. In its own inimitable way, Apple brought pizzazz to this long-requested feature.

On the iPhone, you might copy text or images from the Web, and paste them into an e-mail, text, a message, or a note. Or you might copy a bunch of pictures or video into an e-mail.

Here's how to exploit the feature. Say you're jotting down ideas in the Notes application that you'll eventually copy into an e-mail. Double-tap a word to select it, as shown in Figure 2-6, then drag the blue grab points or handles to select a larger block of text or to contract the text you've already selected. After you've selected the text, tap Copy. (If you want to delete the text block, tap Cut instead).

Now open the Mail program (Chapter 11) and start composing a message. When you decide where to insert the text you just copied, tap the cursor. Up pops commands to Select, Select All, and Paste, as shown in Figure 2-7. Tap Paste to paste the text into the message.

Figure 2-6. Drag the grab points to select text.

Figure 2-7. Tap Paste to make text appear from nowhere.

Here's the pizzazz part. If you made a mistake when you were cutting, pasting, or typing, shake the iPhone. It undoes the last edit.

Several cell phones of recent vintage let you dial a name or number by voice. Bark out "Call Mom" or "Dial 212-555-1212" and such handsets oblige. Although some third-party applications added voice dialing to the iPhone, Apple got around to it only as part of OS 3.0.

As you'll see in Chapter 7, Apple took voice controls a step beyond dialing by number or finding people in your address book. You can also issue voice commands to control music in the iPod.

You have two ways to summon Voice Control:

While Voice Control works quite nicely with the wired headset that's included with your iPhone, it does not work with a Bluetooth headset. In other words, if you use a wireless headset you'll have to hold the phone up to your lips if you want it to respond to voice commands.

Using the Safari browser (Chapter 10), you can search the Web via Google or Yahoo!. But yet another new feature that arrived with OS 3.0 lets you search for people and programs across your iPhone or within specific applications. We show you how to search within apps in the various chapters dedicated to Mail, Contacts, Calendar, Notes, and iPod.

Searching across the iPhone, meanwhile, is based on the Spotlight feature familiar to Mac owners. To access Spotlight, flick to the left of the main Home screen (or as mentioned earlier in this chapter, press the Home button from the Home screen).

In the bar at the top of the screen that slides into view, enter your search query using the virtual keyboard. The iPhone starts spitting out results the moment you type a single character, and the list gets narrowed as you type additional characters.

The results are pretty darn thorough. Say you entered "Bell" as your search term, as shown in Figure 2-9. Contacts whose names have Bell in them will show up, along with folks who work for companies named Bell. If your iTunes library has the song "One Last Bell to Answer" or music performed by violinist Joshua Bell, those will show up, too. Same goes for a third-party iPhone app called The Bell.

Figure 2-8. Tell the iPhone to dial the phone or play a song.

Figure 2-9. Putting the Spotlight on search.

Tap any listing to jump to the contact, ditty, or application you're searching for.

There — you've survived basic training. Now the real fun is about to begin.