Is it known how to get the keypad interface from the Phone and Skype apps? This is distinct from the modal keypad view that appears when a UITextField becomes the first responder.
Is this just a UIView that the developers of Skype laid out themselves in IB, complete with custom graphics to get the square shape of each button? Or is there some standard Cocoa Touch way to do it?
You may be looking for UIKeyboardType in the protocol UITextInputTraits, which is implemented by UITextField etc.. See the documentation at that link.
I was getting confused by your question too. I'm not aware of any but seeing as you would need somewhere to type in anyway wouldn't it be better to make the UITextField active on viewWillAppear and turn off touches on the rest of the view hence showing the keypad like the phone app?
This isn't something that Cocoa Touch provides out of the box, no. I would imagine that the iPhone keypad is a set of UIButton objects arranged like a keypad and using custom graphics to get the visual appearance. This should be fairly easy to do in Interface Builder.