iPhone Tips and tricks

"Power" iPhone users may not get any worth out of this page, but for the casual or new to iPhone user, please find some useful tips we have listed. We hope you get at least one new tip out of this!

Home Button Shortcut

In the latest iPhone software update (v2.2), Apple added a new shortcut to the Home button.
By pressing the Home button when you are on any Home screen (lets say you have pages of icons and have scrolled across) will bring you right back to your first home screen. This shortcut is great for those of us who just can't stop downloading apps.

Create Free iPhone Ringtones

Here's a solution for creating iphone ringtones from songs that you already have. This method is a little clumsy, but free and uses iTunes to do the work. Once you get the hang of it its easy to do.

  • Find the mp3 or wav file that you want to convert to a ringtone
  • Drag this file into iTunes
  • Click on the file in iTunes and select 'Convert Selection to ACC in the Advanced Menu
  • Now select 'Show in Finder'
  • Right Click on the file and select 'Get Info'
  • Rename the file so that after the . there is .m4r , confirm that you want to change the file from .m4a to .m4r
  • Drag the new file back into iTunes
  • Connect your iPhone and Sync - ensuring you have selected 'Sync all Ringtones'
  • On the iPhone tap Settings >> Sounds >> Ringtone and then select your custom ringtone from the list.
  • Press the Home button to save your settings.

Visual Voicemail

Visual Voicemail will only work on a 'legitimately' activated iPhone, so if your iphone has been unlocked then use the following fix to get the voicemail button to work for your iphone and your carrier.

  • Touch the Phone Button >> Keypad
  • On the Keypad enter: *5005*86*XXX#
  • Change XXX to your providers 3 digit short dial for voicemail
  • After entering this code - Tap Call
Your voicemail button is now synced with your voicemail.

Silence your ringer and send call to voicemail

If a call comes in and you want to mute your ringer, pressing the Sleep/Wake button or one of the volume buttons will immediately silence your phone. If you'd like to send a call directly to voicemail, you can press the Sleep/Wake button twice to decline it. You can also do this if you're wearing an iPhone headset by quickly pressing the microphone button twice.

Take Screenshots on your iPhone

With the iPhone 2.0 software, screenshots are now enabled by default. To take a screenshot, you now hold the Home button while pressing the Sleep/Wake button. Your screen will flash and a grab of the current screen will be placed in your iPhone's Photo app, which can then easily be imported using iPhoto or Windows Explorer .

iPhone wont Ring or has gone Silent?

If your iPhone has not been ringing in awhile and you have checked the Sound settings etc and still cant figure out why there is no ring tone, check the tiny switch on the top left and see if it shows a little orange dot. This is a manual switch to put the phone in slient mode, and can be bumped on easily when in a pocket or bag. If like us you spent ages trying to check your sound settings, this may be a very useful post!

Scroll to Top

Tapping the status bar (the bar at the top with the phone status and clock etc) will make scrollable content scroll to the top. It comes in handy in situations like when you’ve scrolled down a long web page or mail message and you quickly need to get back to the top easily.

Caps lock

To keep the shift lock on in your iphone, double-tap the Shift key to lock it. This tip's actually kinda intuitive but we found out the hard way, and were surprised by the number of people who aren’t aware of it.
Note: For this to work, you need to make sure Enable Caps Lock is turned on in the Keyboard section of General settings.

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