One of the best features of iOS 5 on the iPhone is the Reminders app. Your iPhone can remind you to do tasks on a specific date and time, which is very useful, but I especially love location-based reminders that remind you to do something when you arrive at, or leave, a specific location such as your office, your home, or any other address in your Contacts list. Yesterday, Lex Friedman of Macworld wrote a great article about using the Reminders app that I strongly encourage you to read so that you can fully take advantage of reminders on the iPhone. Friedman also linked to an article he wrote last November about how you can share reminders with another iPhone user using iCloud. For example, you can share a grocery list with your spouse, and either of you can use your iPhone (or iPad) to update the shared list.
If you have an iPhone 4S, the Reminders app is even more handy because you can just tell your iPhone to remind you of something, which is much faster than tapping the app icon and typing in all of the information needed to create a reminder. Just tell your iPhone "Remind me to pick up my dry cleaning when I leave work" and Siri takes care of the rest.
One tip not mentioned by Friedman conerns using the Reminders app if you sync your iPhone with a Microsoft Exhchange server. The default setting is to sync Mail, Contacts, Calendars ... and Reminders. That sounds like a good idea — the Reminders app on your iPhone can share items with the Tasks tab in Microsoft Outlook — but be aware that if you have this turned on, you will not be able to use location-based reminders because that is not a feature supported by Microsoft Office. To fix this, go to Settings -> Mail, Contacts, Calendars and then tap on your Exchange account. Then simply make sure that Reminders is set to off:
Unless it is really important to you for your tasks to show up in Outlook on your computer, I recommend that you keep this turned off so that you can have your iPhone remind you to do things based upon where you are located.
