I had posted an article on iPhone Tips & Tricks over the weekend with the focus on iPhone’s Keyboard to improve the usability of your iPhone’s soft keyboard. If you found them useful, here are some more interesting iPhone Tips & Tricks that offer pointers to make good use of iPhone’s revolutionary new multi-touch interface.

Apple posts "Finger Tips"

We all know Apple loves their videos: they first released the iPhone Guided Tour, then the Keyboard video, and then the then easy-to-digest videos cleverly titled "Finger Tips" demonstrating various iPhone functions. Tips include:

1. Silence the ring
2. Delete a message
3. Create your favorites list
4. Assign a ringtone
5. More song controls
6. Browse in Cover Flow
7. Magnify to edit
8. Mail preferences
9. Set a passcode
10. Reset your iPhone

Take decent photos

The camera is one aspect of the iPhone that’s counter-intuitive.

Unlike other cameras out there, the iPhone takes a picture when the "shutter button" is released, not pressed. Many digital cameras feature a "two-stage" process i.e half a press to focus, full to capture the image, but most take the photo upon a full press, not release, of the shutter button.

So here is a way to get some nice snapshots from the 2.0 mega-pixel camera of your iPhone, but this is only after you follow the process mentioned below:

1. Press and hold the shutter button
2. Compose the shot
3. Release the button

Hopefully your photos come out better after this tip!

How to Reset the iPhone

If for some reason your iPhone freezes and stop responding to any of your commands and you’ve tried the button, switch or touch screen input but nothing will make it respond.

You are left with no option but to reboot or reset the iPhone. Here’s how to do it:

To reset the iPhone, press and hold the Sleep/Wake button and the Home button at the same time for at least 10 seconds.

Quick scrolling in Safari

Thanks to iPhone’s finger-based input, navigation on the iPhone is super easy. However, the only thing that isn’t easy is scrolling long web pages. Here comes the tip to solve that! If you are browsing a long web page, all you do to reach the top again is tap the status bar. Doing this will cause the browser to quickly scroll up, revealing the address bar. Ofcourse you can open another tab but in case you don’t want to, this is a good trick.

Stop automatic synchronization

Sometimes you want to connect your iPhone to your Mac just to give it a charge but you must have noticed that iTunes launches each time and starts a time-consuming synchronization. You want to prevent this?

The solution is pretty easy. Here are the steps:

1. Connect your iPhone to your Mac and launch iTunes.
2. Click on your iPhone in the sidebar
3. De-select the "Automatically sync when iPhone is connected" option in the first tab.

Voilà! The next time you connect your iPhone to your MAC, you won’t have to bother about the time-consuming synchronisation.

Having Problems Accessing a Public Wi-Fi Hotspot?

Here’s a simple iPhone trick that could be very useful when you want
to access many different Wi-Fi Networks. If you’re in an airport or a
coffee shop and you can’t access the hotspot, the first thing you
should do is try to renew your DHCP lease.

To do so do the following:

1. Go to "Settings > Wi-Fi" Networks and pick the network.
2. In the DHCP panel, select the "Renew Lease" button. 

In most cases, this should re-establish a Wi-Fi connection.

But if it looks like you’re connected on the Wi-Fi network and every
time you access a web page it uses the Edge network, it might be
related to a bad WEP password.

To solve this do the following:

1. Go to "Settings > Wi-Fi" and
2. Tap "More Info" next to the Wi-Fi network name
3. Then tap "Forget this Network".

Then try to make a new connection to this Wi-Fi network again.

Locate your callers

Ever wanted to find out the location of your callers, here’s a neat
feature for you that almost works beautifully. Lets say you’ve received
a call from a number you don’t recognize, go to "Recents" and touch its
blue arrow. A window appears that lists the number as well as the
geographic origin, based on area code.

Of course, if the caller has moved locations after purchasing the SIM or is on roaming, this information would be incorrect.

Tell Gmail not to send your iPhone a copy of sent mail

Want your iPhone stop sending copies of their outgoing Gmail. Here’s how to do it.

1. Go to Settings -> Mail -> (Your Gmail account) -> Advanced.
2. Switch "Use Recent Mode" from ON to OFF.

The first time you do this, you may end up downloading a bunch of old messages into your iPhone Inbox. But after you get rid of those old e-mails by disabling "recent mode", your iPhone will stop sending you those outgoing copies.

However one issue still remains: it has been observed that copies of outgoing mail sent from gmail’s website still get sent to the iPhone although copies of iPhone-originated mail do not.

Special Link Types

The iPhone offers three special kinds of links that receive special
treatment. Each of these links can appear in Safari or in your mail.
When clicked, they tell the iPhone to launch a specific application to
handle them.

1. mailto: link –

It works exactly just like the Web-based mailto: link that’s been in
use for the last decade and also works exactly the way it would work on
your PC, when you click on the link, it will open your iPhone’s email
application, creates a new message and addresses it to the target of
the link, e.g. mailto:[email protected].

2. tel: link –
This one is easy to guess as well, it
opens the iPhone’s calling application and calls the number used as the
link’s target i.e. the infamous click-to-call feature.

3. The third kind involves Google Maps where instead of opening
Google Maps links in Safari, they automatically open in the iPhone Maps
widget. It doesn’t matter whether you click them in Safari or Mail. The
iPhone recognizes the link and launches the Maps widget for viewing.

In case you missed my last related article, here is the link: iPhone Tips & Tricks – Focus: iPhone’s Keyboard

PS: I am still to get my hands on the iPhone to check these out, so most of this is from the smart folks out there (reliable sources ofcourse). In case you find that any of the above Tips & Tricks don’t work with the iPhone do let me know. And if you have a tip or trick of your own even better, please do let me know.

(Rate this post):