iPhone Tips and Tricks

1. You can take a picture using the headphone cord. Ever want to get a bit father away from the camera when taking a self portrait? Everyone should know that you can snap a picture with your iPhone by pressing the Volume Up button, but few people realize this works with the volume buttons built into the headphones, too.
2. The Lock Screen isn’t really locked. Even without unlocking your device you can do quite a bit. Tap and hold on the Home button and you’ll bring up Siri. Double tap the Home button and audio controls will appear. And, of course, a camera button was added to the Lock Screen in iOS 5.1.
3. You can tap and hold in the Calendar to add events. The + button is always there, of course, but if you are in the Day view it’s much quicker to press on the hour you want the event to appear, as that will cause an event to be created at that time.
4. Some people complain that Apple’s smartphone doesn’t have an LED to flash to silently notify you of an incoming call or an alarm going off, a standard feature on most off this device’s competitors. Actually it does: the camera flash can be set to take care this task. Go to Settings > General > Accessibility > LED Flash for Alerts.
5. You can immediately jump to the top of a long web page, email, document, etc. If you’ve scrolled down, down, down to the end of a page and want to go back to the top, tap on the clock at the top of the screen. You’ll be taken right to the beginning.
6. iMessage does double-duty as an SMS app. When you’re texting your non-iPhone using friends, anything over 160 characters gets split in two. You can see when this is going to happen by adding a character count to iMessage. Enable this by going to Settings > Messages > Character Count
7. You can raise your iPhone to your ear and start barking out orders to Siri at any time, without needing to touch the Home button. You need to enable this, though. Just go to Settings > General > Siri > Raise to Speak.
8 You can create an image of your iPhone’s screen at any point. Press down the Home and Power buttons at the same time and a screenshot will be saved in the Images app.
9. There is a dictionary built into iOS that you can use to look up definitions at almost any time. If you see a word you don’t recognize in Safari, for example, tap and hold on it. One of the options that will pop up is “Define”.
10. It’s a very rare occurrence, but sometimes an iPhone will lock up. Maybe it won’t wake up from sleep mode, even if you know the battery isn’t completely drained. Or some poorly-written apps will crash and lock up the device. If this ever happens to you, you can force it to reset by holding down the Home and Power buttons until the device starts to reboot. Don’t panic, this can take a number of seconds.

You should try all of these features right now. Even if you don’t end up using any of them long term, a bit of practice is the best way to find out if you like one or two.