I use the romaji one for the phone, but I'm curious what standard or most common phone keyboard in Japan is and how to use it.
At least for the romaji one you just type out phonetically the character in English and then it inputs the hiragana and provides options to change to katakana or kanji based on the current word. I find it a bit tedious.
Are you talking about the flick keyboard? Hold down the keys you see on the keyboard to get other hiragana to pop up. Like if you hold down か and youll get results like き、こ、け to choose from. Theres an option to make hiragana smaller. From what i remember when i still used it the button was 少 (havent used the flick key since i got rid of gboard for space. Been stuck with the Desh keyboard so hopefully i got that info right). Katakana i just looked for what i typed in hiragana to be in katakana in predictive text
It makes me feel old mentioning that the kana keyboard functions similar to texting on old cellphone number pads, where tapping the same kana multiple times will cycle through the other kana available on that button. Ex: if you want to type う you could either tap and hold the あ button, then swipe up, or you could just tap the あ button three times (cycling あ->い->う).
The other thing to note is that the buttons each correspond to a row in the kana table, with the displayed buttons being the あ column. When you long tap on any of them, you can swipe left to type the い kana from that row, swipe up for the う kana, swipe right for the え, or swipe down for お.
As noted above, instead of swiping you can repeatedly tap the button to cycle through in that same order of あ, い, う, え, お. On iOS, if you want to type multiple characters from the same button (ex, you want to type the word いえ) and you're using the tapping method instead of swiping, you'll notice that the button is darker gray after typing; while it's this darker state, you're able to tap to cycle, so when you want to type the next character, you must wait a moment for the button to return to the lighter color, indicating that that tapping it will insert a new character instead of cycling the current character.
