5 essential iPhone typing tips

Note: Most of these tips also apply to the iPad and iPod Touch.

1. Turn on caps lock
Sending a text message or an email IN ALL CAPS is usually considered yelling—but hey, sometimes yelling is called for, right? And even if you’re not in a yelling mood, you might need something ASAP, or maybe you’re just LOL.
Here’s the trick to turning on caps lock on the iPhone; just double-tap the shift key. When the key turns blue, the caps lock is on; tap it again to turn caps lock off.

2. Turn off auto-correct
Had enough of those little pop-up bubbles that correct your misspellings, abbreviations, proper names, or anything else you don’t want corrected? You can always tap the bubble to dismiss it, or you can simply deactivate the iPhone’s auto-correct feature altogether.
To do so, tap Settings, General, Keyboard, then switch “Auto-Correction” to off. (And if you find you miss auto-correct after awhile, don’t worry—just turn it back on.)
While you’re at it, you can also keep the iPhone from capitalizing the first word of each new sentence by switching off “Auto-Capitalization,” or have it quit checking your spelling by turning off the “Check Spelling” setting.

3. “Long-press” your way to an em dash, a bullet, a “curly” quote, or an ellipsis
Can’t find your favorite symbol on the iPhone keypad? Maybe it’s just hidden. Tapping and holding a specific key (or a “long-press,” as it’s often called) will sometimes reveal a series of additional keys.
For example, while typing the body of a message, you can find the em dash (“—”) by jumping to the symbols keyboard (press the “.?123″ key) and pressing and holding the dash key; with a second or so, the pop-up “-” will expand with more options, including an em dash, a mid-size dash, and a bullet. Slide your fingertip up to the button you want, then release. Presto!
Press and hold the period, and you’ll get a pop-up for an ellipsis (“…”). Tap and hold the exclamation or question marks for their inverted versions (“¡” and “¿”). And for a variety of “curly” quotes, tap and hold the quote key. Keep long-pressing other keys, and you’ll find even more options.

4. Add a “.com,” “.net,” “.org,” or other dot-somethings
When you’re tapping an Internet or email address into the iPhone’s browser or the “To:” line of an email message, you don’t have to type in “.com,” “.net,” or “.org” every time. Instead, just tap and hold the period key (or the “.com” key when you’re using the web browser), and a pop-up will appear with all manner of dot-somethings.

5. Create keyboard shortcuts
If you’ve updated your iPhone with the latest system software, you can create keyboard shortcuts that will replace a few letters with full words or even entire phrases—perfect for, say, quickly tapping “ut” for “You there?” or even “myadd” for your home address.