iPhone - Key concepts

Where have all my buttons gone?

The most immediate difference between the iPhone and a regular mobile is the lack of a keypad. This is both a blessing and a curse, the latter being that there is no tactile feedback for sight-impaired users. This also means you can easily slip and press more than one virtual button at once and that when you are holding the phone at arm's length to take your own picture, you have no idea where the shutter button is, because it is drawn on the screen, which is facing away from you.

However, for the vast majority of users, and those less egotistic than the serial self-portrait takers, it is an excellent implementation, and a few minutes spent getting used to the way it works will repay very real and long-term dividends.

The first thing to realise is that the keyboard is intelligent in two very subtle ways. First, it briefly enlarges each key as you tap it, so you can sec its key cap pop up above your finger to make sure you have pressed the right one (and almost every time you will, because it is clever enough to sense the most likely key you were aiming for). Second, it offers to auto-complete words for you by dropping a suggested completion for partially entered words immediately below the cursor. The built-in default dictionary adapts to your needs quickly, and after entering a unique word just once or twice - your surname, for example - it will be offering to complete that for you, too. To accept its suggestion, just press whatever key would come immediately after the word — a space, the enter key and so on.

Finger gestures

You can frequently do away with the keyboard altogether, because the iPhone uses your fingers in much the same way as a regular computer uses a mouse. On-screen buttons can be tapped to navigate through menus, while double-tapping some elements, such as columns on a web page, will expand them to fill the screen, without you even defining the edges of the text.


Other elements can be swiped, such as album covers in the iPod and pictures in the photos application, which can be slid onto and off the screen just like real-life picture prints on a table.  

The cleverest of all the finger gestures, though, is the pinch and reverse-pinch (right), which will zoom in and
out on various on-screen elements. Test this out by starting Maps, typing in your postcode and then putting your thumb and forefinger in the centre of the screen, both pressed together. Slowly open them up and see how the map expands with them as you zoom in. Doing the same in reverse will zoom out again. This same trick works in several other applications, including photos and websites.    

Magnified selections

The iPhone screen may be high resolution, and it is certainly much larger than those found on most other mobile phones, but it is still a fairly limited space in which to fit a whole touch-sensitive operating system, with input boxes, graphics and a keyboard.

Apple's software engineers have, fortunately, acknowledged this and integrated a magnifier (right), which pops up automatically whenever the iPhone judges it may be required.

Test it by firing up the web browser (the Safari icon on the bar at the bottom of the Home screen), entering a web address and, once the page has loaded, holding down your finger over that address on the input bar. A magnifier will pop up and follow your finger as you move to the left and right through the text.

The swivelling screen

Even in its portrait orientation, the iPhone's screen resolution is so high that it is fairly easy to read the text on man}' regular, plain websites, such as the BBC News site. However, several applications also work in landscape mode, literally spinning around on the screen as you turn the iPhone on its side, thanks to the integrated orientation sensor.

Not all applications are appropriate to landscape use, but those that are really benefit. Moreover, it makes web pages much more readable by giving on-screen text room to breathe.

Some applications only work in one mode or the other - YouTube's bookmarks screen is solo portrait, while its playback mode is only ever landscape, for example - while others change their mode altogether, the most notable example being iPod, which displays menus in portrait mode, and album art when tipped on one side.

Copy, cut and paste

The absence of copy, cut and paste on the original iPhone was a bugbear for many early adopters, but Apple finally added it with the release of the iPhone 3.0 software. Using it is easy: hold down your finger on a word you want to copy and, when you lift off, a selection box appears. Pick Select or Select all, and then drag the sliders to refine your selection. When you are happy with the selection, pick Copy or Cut from the menu. Now, if you want to paste, hold down for a second or two on the screen at the point where you want to paste and pick Paste from the pop-up menu that appears.