Your Smartphone Keyboard Has a Hidden Trackpad

Modern smartphones are basically mini laptops—minus the keyboard, port selection, and trackpad. As it turns out, however, your smartphone actually has a hidden trackpad, and while it isn’t as fully-formed as your laptop’s trackpad, it can help you make edits when writing on your phone.

As you might expect, this hidden trackpad appears when your smartphone’s virtual keyboard is currently on-screen. Unlike your laptop, you won’t want to use this trackpad to navigate iOS or Android. Instead, the idea is to navigate whatever text you’ve already written, whether that be a message, a Word document, or an email.

Here’s how it works, on both iPhone and Android:

• iPhone: Hold down on the space bar. You’ll see the entire keyboard go gray. Without lifting up, drag your finger across this gray space, and you’ll see the cursor move around your text.
• Android: Swipe left or right on the spacebar. This will move the cursor across your text.

This is a small feature, but one that can be hugely helpful when fixing typos on your smartphone. It’s not always easy to tap a specific part of a text block to adjust it, and this hidden hack can make it easier.