The iPhone has many hidden (or, at least, not so obvious) shortcuts that can make the iPhone much easier and faster to use. For example, as noted in my last post, the latest iPhone software update adds the feature to press the Home button to return to the first page of your Home screen. Here are some other shortcuts that I use all the time. [UPDATE 12/12/08: Click here for a more recent post with even more shortcuts.]
- Comma shortcut. When you are typing and want to quickly add a comma, press and hold the 123 button and then without lifting your finger, slide your finger over to the comma and then release. After doing so you will have a comma and will be back in the letter mode and can keep typing your sentence. You can also use this trick to get a period, although if you are at the end of a sentence the faster way to get a period is to tap the space bar twice. In fact, the hold 123 and slide method can be used for any symbol, such as the question mark or the parenthesis, although it is a little easier for those keys closer to the 123 key.
- Scroll to top. In Safari and many other applications, you can very quickly scroll back up to the top of the screen by taping on the status bar at the top of the screen (where the time is displayed). This is useful not only because you can start reading the top of a page, but also because many applications put useful fields at the top of the page, such as the address and search field in Safari or the search field in Contacts.
- Domain resolution. When you are typing an address in Safari, you don’t need to type the “www.” part or the “.com” part. For example, if you go to the URL field and just type iphonejd Safari will automatically change it to www.iphonejd.com and take you to this website.
Reset. If something seems to be wrong with your iPhone, you can reset it to start fresh. To do so, hold down both the Home button and the sleep/wake button (the one at the top) for about 10 seconds. You can also force quit just a specific application that you are using by holding down the Home button for about 6 seconds or so.- Hold on. When you are using the keyboard, you can often hold down a key for a few seconds to see more options. For example, when you are in Safari and typing a URL, the .com button at the bottom allows you to easily enter .com, but if you hold down the .com button for about two seconds you will see other options pop up (.org, .edu, .net, etc.). Or if you are typing an e-mail and you want to add an accent to a letter you can just hold down the letter for two seconds. Hold down the E key for a few seconds and you can enter an é. If you are typing an e-mail address in the TO field of an e-mail, you can hold down the period for two seconds to see a pop up menu that lets you quickly add .com, .org, .net, .edu, etc.
- Swipe to delete. The fastest way to delete a single e-mail when you are looking at a list of e-mails is to swipe your finger from left to right across the e-mail, as if you are crossing out an item on a list. That will cause a red Delete button to appear so that you can confirm that you want to delete. If you want to delete a bunch of messages, then the fastest way is to tap the Edit button and tap the circles next to the left of each e-mail you want to delete and then tap the Delete button.
- Tap the bottom corner. As noted above, you can now quickly get back to your first Home screen by pressing the Home button. Most people switch between screens by swiping across the screen to the left or the right. Another way to do it, one that sometimes feels faster, is to tap once near the corner, just to the left or the right of the row of dots that indicate which screen you are on.
- Contractions. When you are typing an e-mail, the iPhone suggests some contractions automatically. Type cant and the iPhone will suggest can’t. (And of course, to accept a suggestion you just tap the space bar; to reject a suggestion you tap the x next to the suggested word.) But if you type well the iPhone normally won’t suggest we’ll because, well, well is a word. But for we’ll and many other words, if you type the last letter an extra time, the iPhone will then suggest the contraction for you. Type welll and the iPhone will suggest we’ll. Type weree and the iPhone will suggest we’re. In the past, I used the trick with I’ll and it’s, but now I find that when I type ill and its the iPhone automatically suggests the contraction without needing to add an extra key. This happens because the iPhone learns your words as you type and adds them to the custom dictionary — which, by the way, you can always reset if necessary by going to Settings –> General –> Reset –> Reset Keyboard Dictionary.
- Get a 3G signal. Sometimes I see that blue E at the top telling me that my iPhone is using the slow Edge network when I know that I am in an area that has 3G. A quick way to get your iPhone to lock in on a 3G signal is to turn on airplane mode for just a second and then turn airplane mode off. Airplane mode is the first option when you tap Settings.
- I’m sorry, your Honor! We all know to flip the switch and put your iPhone in vibrate mode when you are in court, a deposition, etc., right? But what if you forget and need to QUICKLY stop your iPhone from ringing before you get sanctioned? Press the sleep/hold button at the top of your iPhone once and it will silence the ringer. Press that button twice and it will both silence the ringer and send the call to voicemail — and hopefully you already had the New Voicemail alert sound turned off. (Settings –> Sounds –> New Voicemail).
Hopefully some of these are new to you, and I would love to hear about your favorite tips and tricks.
Thank you SO much for these tips. As a relatively new iPhone user (and a relatively old lawyer) I’m lagging in learning all the shortcuts of the phone. This post was a great help. Please give us more!
Bob Kraft
http://www.pissd.com
Jeff – Great work here! I’m a brand new convert from WinMo (which I still like for its do-nearly-everything-diversity, but it’s less truly ‘mobile’ than the iPhone as navigating through menus is more cumbersome) only 2 weeks now. Nearly all of your tips were new to me. I’ll follow your site with great interest; going in my Reader for sure.
I didn’t know about #5. Thank you.
Here’s my tip.
You can turn off the screen while watching a video and just listen to the audio track. Great for saving power, works well with certain video podcasts that are 90% an audio experience anyway.
* Start the video as normal.
* click screen lock, the video will stop.
* Double tap the home button, this will pop up the ipod shortcut controls, hit play.
There you have it audio only.
Actually, #5 (domain name resolution) is true in Safari (OSX version) since V1.
Years since I have typed a “.com”
Safari only adds the “www” and “.com” bookends if the DNS lookup fails. “Helpful” ISPs, like Verizon, can interfere with Domain Resolution, because instead of letting “iphonejd” fail, they resolve it to their search engine. Which, in turn, shows you ads.
With regards to #10, you can also push the volume buttons to silence the ringer or send to voicemail.
One that I like: in safari, on a web page, you can hold your thumb down on the page, then you can move another finger back and forth to zoom in and out. It’s the same functionality as the pinch maneuver, but I find it a bit more precise.
Reiterating Ben Coombs’ third bullet: While the iPhone is locked, press the home button once to wake up the “slide to unlock” screen, then double-tap the home button to bring up some quick iTunes controls. Very handy, particularly if you aren’t using headphones with a control button.
Regarding #6. It’s a small thing, but swiping right to left works too.
Just to clarify #4: Holding down the sleep/wake button by itself for several seconds will allow you to shut down the iPhone cleanly. This is the equivalent of shutting down a computer: it closes any running programs, saves data, and turns off. You can then press the sleep/wake button again to turn it back on.
Holding down both the sleep/wake button and the Home button, on the other hand, is like yanking the power cord from the computer and plugging it back in: it does an immediate hardware reset, with no cleanup. If the iPhone has gone unresponsive and can’t be shut down normally, it’s a useful way to break out of it, but it’s not something you want to do all the time.
It’s funny that you called #10 “I’m sorry, you Honor!”
I was in traffic court stating my case and had already set my iPhone to silent mode using the physical switch. However, alarms don’t pay attention to that switch and I had one go off just then – noisy as ever.
Did I ever get a dirty look from the judge. I lost my case, BTW.
I sure wish Apple would fix that.
Any way to jump to the middle or bottom of a photo album? Takes forever to scroll down through a couple thousand photos to get to the latest ones. Why can’t I do this like I can in Contacts by using the side scroller?
Ben Coombs, that’s a brilliant tip that I’ll definitely be using a lot from now on.
Here’s a tip for quickly restarting a podcast or music track from where you left off without even having to take the iPhone out of your pocket. This works even when the iPhone has been off for a long time and has gone into sleep mode. Just press the sleep/hold button at the top of the iPhone. This activates the iPhone. You can then restart the track using the button on the microphone. If you do this after a sync then it will activate the first track in your iPhone music library.
I would like to add to item one the the apostrophe character will automatically switch back to the letters without having to drag. I find the dragging slows me down a bit.
@Paul: I *love* that feature that you dislike. I generally keep my iPhone ringer off, because it isn’t appropriate for most of the areas where I work. But I also use my iPhone as my alarm clock, and this keeps me from having to constantly switch the ringer on and off each morning and night. If I set an alarm for a time of my choosing, I know I will hear it. But an unscheduled phone call or text message? Never makes a noise. Perfect!
FYI, calendar alarms *are* affected by the ringer mute switch. When you have phone calls silenced, the same goes for calendar alarms. The only alarms that disregard the mute setting is the dedicated alarm function in the iPhone’s Clock program. (In my experience, at least.)
An option would be perfect, as the iPhone’s behavior would then suit both of us, but Apple tends to be weary of over-optioning their OS.
Ever want a calculator that does more than add, subtract, multiply and divide? Just turn the phone 90 degrees while running the Calculator app!
Awesome tips….but you missed the Super Shortcut!
If you press the Home button and the Sleep/Wake button simultaneously, a screenshot of the iPhone will be saved to your Photos library.
Regards,
%$#@!
Grawlix, that is a good one! Click the link in the first paragraph of this post to see that one and others listed in my follow up post “More iPhone Shortcuts.” And thanks for the tip!
If I may nitpick: “cant” is a word too, just not as commonly used as “well”. There must be some threshold of common-ness the iPhone uses to decide when to suggest a contraction.
In addition to tip 5, Hold on, if you have international keyboards activated, holding down the period or .com buttons will also show international country codes, e.g. .nl, .fr, .de, depending on which keyboards are active.
It would be great if there was an app which allowed you ‘send link by email’ – the youtube app has it, it would be great if Safari did this also..
I discovered something neat today to add to the list:
While the phone is “asleep” you can “double-click” the home button to bring up the the iPod quick-controls without having to go into the app! Handy!
If you are NOT playing music currently, double-click the home button from the home screen or within any app, it will take you straight to the phone.
If you ARE playing music currently, double-click the home button from the home screen or within any app, and it will pop up the iPod quick-controls.
[RESPONSE BY JEFF: This is a great one, and it already appears as #4 on my follow-up post linked at the top with More iPhone Shortcuts. But keep the suggestions coming!]
Another short cut is if you hold down the top lock button and the home screen button down together for a second, the screen flashes white. go into camera roll and whatever was on your screen you took a picture of
[Jeff responds: that one is on the follow up page linked above called “More iPhone Shortcuts.” Also check out the most recent posts on iPhone 3.0 shortcuts.]
Thanks for the helpful hints. Odd that Apple keeps this stuff out of Finger Tips.
Thanks for the great shortcuts! Number 6 is pretty cool indeed.
Wish Apple would not be such a pain in the …. with settings. It has taken me around 40 clicks to set it to use low power… now to use any of the features… 2-5 clicks each…
#2 is a great feature. Anyone know how to immediately scroll to bottom?
[Jeff responds: I don’t know of any way to do that. Fortunately it is usually far more useful to scroll to the top than the bottom.]
The iPhone has a multitude of useful shortcuts. Here shows you six ways to soup up your user experience.
http://www.pupuweb.com/blog/iphone-shartcuts-to-soup-user-experience/
Is there a way to “Delete All” emails instead of having to do it one by one? Ugh!
[Jeff responds: No. You can either swipe-to-delete each one, one at a time, or you can use the edit button to tap on multiple emails and then choose delete, but you can’t delete all in one fell swoop. Some might argue that is a feature, not an omission! For mass e-mail deletion, you’ll want to just use your computer.]
Something that I found today is that you can take a screen shot of your phone’s screen by pressing the power and home button together. This will then save the pic in your photos. Quite handy if you want to show something to someone over email etc?
🙂
The screenshot function is terrific.
what about the shake to “undo” and “redo” text. that comes in handy sometimes!
PRINT SCREEN
to ‘print screen’ on the Iphone (for example if you want to quickly/easily save a picture from the internet)!
Press the lock button (on top of the phone)
and then at the same time hold down the circular menu button ( beneath the screen)
this saves the picture in the photo album (‘camera roll’) asif you have taken a photo
It works in any apps, any websites, etc..
xxx
Say when writing a long email or typing in The forums you save what you typed. then you come back to finish. But u can not scroll down to the bottom! I haft to hit return 50 times and delete 50 times to get to the bottom!
Is there a better way to scroll down?
hw to put the iphone silent always with shortcut key ?? no body has neither requested or answered that question .. i use to use several other brands like nokia it has long press key to put it on silent or retrieve for instant “if your going to the court you rather put it on silent and go inside and when you come out you turn it back normal” how to do that without going to settings is there way geniuses plz tell me … dont tell me theres no short cut key to put iohone silent permanently !!!!!!
Rafi, the switch on the side will silence most noises, but to get it completely silent you need to go to Settings and use the new iOS 6 Do Not Disturb.
Very greatful for that tip