It’s about time I wrote the official Oast One top ten tips and tricks for the iPhone. Little things you may not know about that could just make your life that tiny bit easier.
So – no chat, straight down to business:
1. Screen Grab
This is an easy one. Simply press both the Home and Sleep button at the same time and you’ll hear a shutter noise whilst the screen flashes white. A picture has now been taken of the screen – you’ll find it in your Camera Roll.
2. Type Tools
In most applications that use the keyboard you can hold down various buttons for extra functions. Once the pop-up appears simply slide your finger to the character you need and lift off to select it. Hold down normal letters to get alternate characters with diacritic marks such as acute accents, umlauts and like. The ‘.com’ key will give you alternates such as ‘.net’ and ‘.org’. Holding the ‘123’ key will allow you to slide to a character and select it before returning the keyboard to normal characters – saving you from having to tap the key again afterwards. You can do the same with the shift key.
3. Tidy up email
You can quickly delete pathetic spam email without having to open it up or use the edit button. Just swipe the email to the left or right in your inbox. A delete button will appear. Tap to delete the message for good.
4. No place like Home
The innocent looking home button can be used for a number of time saving tricks:
- Use the home button in the same way as the sleep button when your iPhone is locked
- When browsing your Apps, press it once to return straight to the home screen
- Double-press the home button to open your Phone Favourites for quick calling
- When your iPhone is locked double-press the home button to access your iPod controls. Excellent for changing music when on the go.
- You have some control over the above by going to Settings > General > Home Button
5. Unlock hidden Emoji
Ever wondered how to unlock the hidden Emoji (Emoticons) on your iPhone (2.2.0+)? Simply follow our instructions here.
6. Use your head (phones)
It’s surprising how many people don’t know that the microphone on the headphones houses a useful button. Simply squeeze it and you’ll feel it click. You can use this button for a number of functions:
- Click the button once to play / pause music
- Click twice to skip to the next song
- Click thrice to rewind the current song / skip to the previous song
Whilst on a call:
- Click to answer an incoming call / end a call
- Click twice so send an incoming call to voicemail
- If a second call comes in when you’re on one: click once to switch to the new call or twice to ignore it.
7. Sleep button
You can use the sleep button to silence a call or send it to voicemail. Press once to silence, twice to route it to voicemail.
8. Text to fit
Whilst browsing text in Safari you can zoom in to columns of text by double-tapping on them. The iPhone will scale column of text to fit the width of the screen. You can do the same with images and menus. Double-tap again to zoom out. You can also zoom in and out of images in Camera Roll by double-tapping.
9. Save images
You can save images to your Camera Roll from Safari by holding down on the image. A pop-up will appear with a save button. Useful for changing your Wallpaper image.
10. Tap areas
There are various areas on the iPhone you can tap and certain times to useful effect. For example – if you tap to the left or right of the white dots along the bottom of your home screen it will switch pages without the need to swipe. In Safari if you tap the bar along the top of the screen the page you are viewing will scroll all the way back to the top (also revealing the address/search bar).
Please note that I am running iPhone software 2.2.1 on my iPhone. Some of the tricks mentioned in this article may not work on previous versions.