I first read about this tip from waitingforiphone.com which leads you a page at O’Reilly’s website. Here’s the skinny. The keyboard layout on the iPhone is great for the most part, unless you want to get to the numbers and punctuation marks via the “.?123″ key in the lower left-hand corner. Normally this would take 3 taps to get to a period.

Here’s how to do it in one single motion.

Tap the “.?123″ key but keep your finger pressed down. As soon as you do this, the punctuation keyboard layout will appear. Now (with your finger still pressed down!) slide your finger to the desired key and then release. Upon release, the desired character will be inserted into your text and the normal alpha keyboard layout will re-appear so you can continue typing alpha characters.

This is an excellent tip and will definitely speed up typing and texting for everyone.

Earlier I said that I would start blogging about problems (and solutions) I found with the iPhone, or really cool things I found. My first blog is about a problem and a solution.

One of the absolute coolest things about the iPhone that it has “the best iPod ever” integrated right into it. Man, Jobs wasn’t kidding! It’s incredible. The cover flow feature is amazing. Here’s the problem, though. I synced 18 albums on my iPhone, and about 10 of those albums did not display cover artwork. Having half of my albums showing a black default cover is no way to show off and appreciate a feature as cool as this.

Here’s the solution, for those of you experiencing the same problem:

1. Launch iTunes and select the album under your “PLAYLISTS”
2. Highlight all of the songs. On a PC you can click one song and then click CTRL+A to “highlight all”. Or click the first song, and while pressing the down arrow, keep the SHIFT key pressed down.
3. Right click any of the blue-highlighted songs and then select “Get Info”. A new window will appear titled “Multiple Item Information”
4. Drag your artwork to the white “Artwork” box and then click the OK button.
5. iTunes will then begin to apply your cover artwork to each song, one by one. This is necessary to solve the problem.
6. When it’s finished, select your iPhone device, then click the Sync button.
7. That’s it! There’s no need to reset your phone. It should work immediately after the songs are re-synced. The problem now is that iTunes must re-upload every song you’ve applied a new cover back to your iPhone. This takes a long time, but it’s worth it!

Have fun “surfing” your album covers! It’s definitely worth spending the time to do this, to make this feature look its best!

Thanks to “bigdipper” and “honebee1236″ at the iLounge for their suggestions.