One way to disable the iPhone's typing auto-correct

Sep 08, '08 07:30:00AM

Contributed by: josesensei

My fiancee Ana, recently got her iPhone in The Philippines. As she splits her typing time between English and Tagalog, she complained to me that the iPhone's autocorrect was making her Tagalog typing extremely difficult, as the iPhone kept trying to correct all her Tagalog.

She asked me if I knew a way to disable the auto-correct and although I searched around the net for a published solution, couldn't find one, so I had to look on my own. Here is my workaround.

The auto-correct feature is tied to the language that you are typing in. If you disable your English keyboard, the auto-correct feature will be disabled. But the iPhone will not allow you to disable the default keyboard if only one is activated. So all you have to do is activate at least one more keyboard, and you are good to go. As both my girlfriend and I have a need to type in Japanese, we both have Japanese keyboards enabled, so we were already set. But in general, this is the workaround:

  1. Home Screen » Settings » General » Keyboard » International Keyboards. Here you can turn on your alternate Keyboard. Try the Japanese QWERTY keyboard, for instance. Another reason I choose to use Japanese as my alternate is I can quickly see what I am typing on as the label for the space key will turn to Japanese when I am using that keyboard.
  2. After turning on your alternate keyboard, you just turn the slider to "off" for the keyboard where you want to disable autocorrect.
To switch keyboards while typing (if you have more than one enabled), tap the globe icon to the left of the space key.

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