The iPhone Keyboard—Timesaving Tips and Tricks

One of the niftiest features of the iPhone is its touch-screen keyboard. While it's easy to use, there are some things you can do to become an even speedier iPhone typist.

• Caps lock. Using loud and clear type can help you get your point across. To engage and disengage caps lock, double-tap the shift key (this feature needs to be enabled in Settings).
• Single upper case letters. If you just want to capitalize a single letter at a time, tap the shift key once, then drag it over the desired letter. You can also hold down the shift key with one finger and tap the desired letter as you would on a regular keyboard.
• Punctuation. If you’re in a rush to send a text message but you’re not willing to sacrifice proper punctuation rules, tap and hold the numbers key. When the screen toggles to the numbers and punctuation view, slide your finger to the desired punctuation mark. Once you lift your finger, the screen toggles back to the standard keyboard view.
• Space bar double-tap. The absence of period between sentences can dramatically alter your intended message (consider the difference between “Don’t. Come back” and “Don’t come back"). Double-tap the space bar to add a period and a space to the end of your sentence (and potentially save a relationship).

Squeezing the Juice—Getting the Most from Your iPhone Battery

There’s no fate worse than having your iPhone battery give up the ghost when you’re right in the middle of performing vital online research (does John Fogerty really sing “There’s a bathroom on the right” in Creedence’s “Bad Moon Rising”?). This unlucky situation can be a cruel reminder of the importance of maximizing your battery life.

Depending on who you talk to and how they use the iPhone, the average life span of a fully charged iPhone battery is anywhere from six hours to two days. Here are a few tips to help you get the most from your iPhone battery:

• Wi-Fi. If conducting important research like the example outlined above isn't something you do regularly, turn off Wi-Fi when not in use.
• Bluetooth. If you can live without it and can manage to drive from point A to point B without actually calling anyone (you definitely use a Bluetooth headset while driving, right?), then turn off Bluetooth when you don't need it.
• Don’t fetch. Stay. You can fix your iPhone settings to fetch data less frequently. Setting the frequency to fetch on an hourly basis drains less juice than having it do so every 15 minutes. Switching it to “manual” saves you even more.
   

Saving Screenshots and Images

If you frequently find yourself uttering the words “I saw it on the Internet” but have trouble delivering the cold, hard evidence, you might want to consider taking the occasional screenshot. After all, good websites are updated regularly, and odds are what’s on the page today won’t be there tomorrow. Or maybe you’ve just reached your all-time high score in Critter Crunch and want a snapshot to mark the occasion and/or rub under the nose of your fiercest competitor. Either way, the iPhone’s got you covered. While it’s not the only cellphone capable of taking screenshots, in typical fashion, the iPhone improves upon the experience.

This is one of the simplest of the many iPhone tricks. Just press the lock and home buttons at the same time. That’s it. The iPhone does the rest for you by saving the screenshot as a .png image in your photo library. You can export the image by emailing it or downloading it to your computer, just as you would any other image.

Saving individual images in Safari and mail is also just as easy. Simply tap and hold the desired image for two seconds. A dialog box pops up, allowing you to save the image to your photo library.

High-Speed Scrubbing

Those with a violent aversion to household chores need not run away at the mention of "high-speed scrubbing," which is one of the new and improved features available with the iPhone 3.0 software. In the audio and video world, "scrubbing" describes a hand-guided function of moving backward or forward to a given point in a media file (similar to rewinding and fast-forwarding). It’s got nothing to do with dirty floors.

The updated scrub feature works in much the same way as it did in earlier versions of the iPhone, except that (surprise) it’s been greatly improved. In order to move forward or backward through an audio or video file, you simply tap the screen and guide the slider left or right with your finger. With older versions, it was easy to overshoot the desired destination and could prove difficult if all you wanted to do was advance ahead a few seconds. The updated scrub feature allows you to establish the speed at which the slider moves. Just tap and hold the scroll bar. The vertical position of your finger in relation to the scroll bar controls the scrub speed; for example, the farther down the screen you slide your finger, the slower the scrub speed.

Taking Auto-Correct to Skool

One of the most useful tools on the iPhone is the auto-correct feature. Unfortunately, it's also one of the most maddening. Auto-correct identifies misspelled words and pops up with a short list of potential matches. To many, this function is essential to everyday communication, while for others, it’s an annoyance (having your smartphone pipe up with its own idea of what you meant to say when you intentionally typed “aight” is about as irritating as getting checked by the grammar police). Luckily, there's a solution.

Taking Your iPhone to Skool
Whenever auto-correct offers a word suggestion that you want to ignore, tap the "x" in the pop-up window. It may take some time for your iPhone to “learn” to accept some of the most commonly used words in your individual lexicon, but it will begin to pick them up after a while.

Turning Off Auto-Correct
... is not an option, unfortunately. Although the demand is high, no official method exists to turn off the spell-check robot through your standard iPhone settings.

Breaking Down the Language Barrier

It's no surprise that sometimes, 26 letters just isn’t enough. Aside from the fact that English is evolving into something more akin to code, other languages rely on accent marks and other special characters to convey meaning.

What does this mean for the average iPhone user? For those pushing against the limitations of the English alphabet, here are a few little-known iPhone tips to help you explore what's beyond A through Z:

Typing Letters with Accents
You can type a letter with an accent or other special mark by holding down the desired letter and choosing from the pop-up window that will emerge. For example, holding down the "e" key allows you to choose from e with a spanish accent mark, e with a french accent mark, e with am umlaut, and others.

Extra Punctuation/Symbol Options
Press and hold down the punctuation keys to discover alternative character options. For example, holding down the dollar sign key allows you to choose from the symbols for Pound, Euro, yen, and Korean Won.

Dotcom
Tap the “.com” key to automatically add it to the end of an entered URL. Hold it down to access other domain options like .net, .org, .edu, etc.

Syncing Your iPhone to Your Computer

You can sync your iPhone to your computer and export a broad range of information that makes transferring your address book, calendar, internet favorites, and media files almost effortless. Some information can be transferred both ways (from your computer to your iPhone and vice versa), but there are limitations.

Unidirectional (One-Way) Syncing
Audio- and video-related content like music, movies, TV shows, and podcasts can only be transferred in one direction—from your computer to your iPhone. Any changes to these files have to be made on the computer, and the files can’t be altered once they’re synced to your iPhone. Likewise, any video or pictures you’ve taken with your iPhone can only be synced from your phone to your computer.

The only exceptions are official iTunes purchases that you’ve made with your iPhone—these can be synced to your computer, but in order to do so, your computer has to be authorized to use your iTunes store account.
Bidirectional (Two-Way) Syncing
Some data can be moved from your iPhone to your computer and back again. Information like your calendar, address book contacts, notes, and internet bookmarks can travel both ways. When iTunes recognizes differences in your contact information between the two systems, it alerts you to potential conflicts before making any changes.

Shake It But Don't Break It—The Shake to Shuffle Feature

The iPhone's accelerometer allows for some of the niftiest features you'll find on any smartphone, including the built-in iPod's Shake to Shuffle feature, which allows you to skip to a random song by gently shaking the device. Shake to Shuffle may at first sound like cause for concern; after all, the iPhone's a delicate (and expensive) piece of equipment. Should we really be shaking it around?

The Shake
As long as you don't accidentally lose your grip of the iPhone and send it soaring, you'll be okay. And as long as you don't shake the thing too violently, your iPhone ought not suffer any ill effects. Remember: This is an iPhone, not a glowstick—all it needs is a gentle side-to-side or up-and-down movement. If you're especially accident-prone, phone insurance might not be a bad idea, just in case.

Enabling and Disabling Shake to Shuffle
Having the Shake to Shuffle feature enabled when you're on the move could result in an extremely schizophrenic listening experience, which is why the feature is disabled when the phone is on standby (aka locked). To enable the feature for use when the phone's awake, tap Settings>iPod and move the Shake to Shuffle slider to the "on" position.

A Genius Breakthrough in Automated Playlist Creation

The Genius playlist is one of the latest innovations in interactive listening. A growing population of music fans who are less interested in full albums and more interested in creating unique listening experiences are outgrowing the limited usefulness of their iPod's "shuffle" button. Enter Genius, which injects "shuffle" with a little bit of intelligence: it not only creates a one-of-a-kind music playlist that won't be recreated, but it also chooses songs that go well together.
This is where Genius earns its name. Without ears of its own, how does iTunes know which songs go well together? Remember that your digital music files are tagged with data. This information (like artist name and musical style) is fed into iTunes and used to group similar musical files. Genius uses this information to group songs that it determines will sound good together... and usually succeeds.

Create
If you've created Genius playlists on your computer, you can sync them to your iPhone and take them with you. Otherwise, you can create a playlist directly on your iPhone by tapping the atomic symbol under the iPod's scrub control. Keep in mind that, in order to use the Genius feature directly on your iPhone, you first have to enable the feature on your computer and sync.

Save
You may be pleasantly surprised by the choices Genius makes, so much so that you'll want to save the playlist for future listening. To do this, just tap the "save" button on the screen.

Sharing Contacts Made Easy

One of the things that made the iPhone so popular (and has allowed it to maintain that popularity) is its practical solutions to everyday situations. Take this classic quandary: You're on the phone with someone and he/she asks you for someone's phone number. Back in the old days, it wasn't such a problem to rifle through the old Rolodex or little black book to find that information. Nowadays, however, when that little black book is your cell phone, it's a little harder to access the information while you're actually using the phone (especially for those of us who have trouble walking and chewing gum at the same time). Luckily, there's an iPhone feature to solve this dilemma.

Share Contacts
Spare yourself the agony and suffering of disconnecting the call, hunting through your address book, committing the information to memory, then losing it when the moment of delivery arrives. On the iPhone, all you have to do is pull up the desired contact and tap "Share Contact." Once you select a method of delivery (either MMS or email), your message will be delivered with a vCard attachment, which recipients can save directly to their list of contacts.