One of the features I love about iOS 5 is the ability to get notifications on the iPhone screen when new e-mail comes in even when my iPhone is turned off. To enable this, go to Settings -> Notifications -> Mail and turn on View in Lock Screen. With this feature turned on, even if your iPhone is sitting on your desk in sleep mode with the iPhone screen turned off, you will see the screen come on for just a few seconds when an e-mail comes in with basic information about the new message. I love that I can be working on something else, I see my iPhone screen come on for a second with the notification of the new e-mail, and then I can return to whatever I was doing unless that e-mail looks important enough to read right away. This is much better than a simple beep or flashing light that doesn't tell me anything about the importance of the e-mail.
Better still, if you get additional e-mails, notifications will build up. Thus, I can always take my iPhone out of my pocket, tap the button to turn on the screen, and then I instantly see on my lock screen the new e-mails that have come in. If nothing needs to be read at that time, I can return to whatever I was doing, and I only need to take the time to jump to the Mail app if I know that there is a new message that I want to see right away.
And here is where's today's tip comes in — when you see a notification on your lock screen about a new message that you want to read right away. If your iPhone screen is locked, you know that you need to swipe the bottom of the iPhone's lock screen to unlock the iPhone using the Slide to Unlock arrow. But if you want to jump directly to one of the e-mails noted on your screen, instead of swiping at the normal location at the bottom of your screen, swipe on the icon right next to the e-mail that you want to read:
This performs the normal slide to unlock function, but additionally tells the iPhone to open up the e-mail that you selected. I have a sense that this feature is not well known because I have frequently had other iPhone owners see me do that over the last few weeks and then ask me to explain so that they can do it too.
This trick works with more than just e-mails. If another app gives you a notification that appears on your e-mail screen, you can slide the icon on that notification to unlock the screen and jump to that app. But I find this tip most useful for e-mails considering the large number of e-mails that I receive every day.
The slide to unlock feature on the iPhone is so natural that it seems obvious, but it wasn't always so. In Chapter 36 of his biography of Steve Jobs, Walter Isaaacson describes the origin of this feature during the development of the iPhone:
Jobs spent part of every day for six months helping to refine the display [on the iPhone]. "It was the most complex fun I've ever hand," he recalled. "It was like being the one evolving the variations on 'Sgt. Pepper.'" A lot of features that seem simple now were the result of creative brainstorms. For example, the team worried about how to prevent the device from playing music or making a call accidentally when it was jangling in your pocket. Jobs was congenitally averse to having on-off switches, which he deemed "inelegant." The solution was "Swipe to Open," the simple and fun on-screen slider that activated the device when it had gone dormant. ... In session after session, with Jobs immersed in every detail, the team members figured out ways to simplify what other phones made complicated.
One of the things that I love about the iPhone is that there are so many tiny features like this one that are so well-designed that they seem intuitive, and yet they are so useful and even fun to use that they make the iPhone delightful.
