this is my favorite iPhone/iPad keyboard speedy typing tip:
if you're typing in the alpha keyboard and quickly want to type just a SINGLE numeric character or punctuation mark not found on the main alpha keyboard, and then return to typing alpha characters, you can do this in 1 stroke instead of 3:
- press and HOLD the .?123 key and without releasing it, drag your finger to the number/punctuation you want. then release and it types your numeral and you're back to the alpha keyboard automatically, in just one stroke. this saves manually switching away and back to the alpha keyboard (2 fewer keystrokes)
the same thing works in reverse, if you're in the numeric keyboard mode and want to type a single alpha character, just press and hold the ABC key, drag and release.
for a bunch of other keyboard shortcut typing tips - see:
http://www.labnol.org/software/keyboard-typing-shortcuts-for-iphone-ipad/13564/
for example,
- press and hold vowels to get accents, umlauts and other special versions of those characters e.g. é É ë ö õ ü û å Ã (Note: works for capitals too, just press Shift then hold the vowel). some consonants have special versions too, like ñ ç - same trick, just tap and hold
- press and hold $ key to get other currency symbols, e.g. £ ¥ €
- press and hold the period key when typing an email address in Mail, and you get a popup for common top level domains (.com .net .edu .org, etc)
