An iPhone has a hidden feature that turns its keyboard into a touchpad, which users can then scroll through text. Apple packs its smartphones and operating system with a lot of hidden features. Most recently, iPhone users came across the hidden Harry Potten spell for Siri, which can be used to light up the flashlight by saying "Lumos." With the Shortcut app on their iPhone, users can create more commands like this.
Similarly, there are a lot of features on an iPhone that can make users' life easier. For instance, long-pressing on Maps in an iPhone allows users to mark their current location and refer to it afterward. Then there is the App Library that groups all the applications on an iPhone under categories, making it more straightforward for users to access recently opened apps or search for a particular app.
While writing a message or a social media caption, users might misspell a word or have second thoughts about a particular sentence. In such cases, users delete words until they get to the typo or position the cursor by tapping into a small text box. However, iPhone users may not be aware of a simple yet valuable feature to help them in such scenarios. By tapping and holding the spacebar on an iPhone's keyboard, users can turn it into a touchpad that can be used to scroll through texts, like an actual touchpad found on laptops.
Using the iPhone's keyboard as a touchpad works in all the applications with a text box and temporarily effaces all the keys. After that, users can drag their finger or thumb on the spacebar to move the on-screen cursor in the same direction and get to the required portion of the text on screen, where they can release the spacebar and resume typing. On iPhones that support 3D touch, users can also use the keyboard's touchpad to select words or paragraphs by pressing and deep-pressing into the screen. On iPhones without 3D touch (iPhone 11 and later), users can activate the touchpad using one finger and then tap with another to enter text selection mode.
The touchpad in iPhone's keyboard is very sensitive and allows users to scroll between characters or lines by slow or swift finger movements. Overall, the feature can help iPhone users correct typos, review a piece of text and select parts. It also saves time swiping through the text box or tapping to get the cursor at the proper position. In addition, since the feature is built into an iPhone's keyboard, users are not required to tweak any settings to enable it. Apart from iPhones, the feature also works on iPads as well.
