Mobile Radius » iPhone Tips & Tricks

5 useful iPhone tips and shortcuts

andreliem — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 05:41:01 +0000

Compared to most mobile devices, the iPhone is a fairly intuitive device that takes little time to learn and use. The downside of this is that you likely haven’t taken the time to learn some basic short cuts that can save you some time. Here is our current list of useful iPhone shortcuts (for 3G) that should be useful to you.

1 – Safari link utility
While using Safari, you can open up a link utility to open, open in a new page, copy, and view the full details of a link.
Hold the link for a few seconds and the box will popup.

2 – Scroll through contacts
Hold your finger down on the letters then move up or down to scroll faster in a controlled manner.

3 – Music – show play controls quickly
If you’re using your iPhone for listening to music and the screen is off you may find it annoying to change tracks by having to navigate to the music library. Instead you can popup up the play controls by pressing the main home button twice.

4 – Caps Lock on and other keyboard tips
The standard keyboard has some hidden helpers that you can activate. First, go to Settings->General->Keyboard. Here you can enable the shortcuts for things like enabling Caps Lock on.
To enable Caps Lock mode, simply double tap the up arrow caps key and it will turn blue to signal caps lock mode is on.
To see a ellipse or domain shortcuts hold the respective icons and a bubble will popup.

5 – Auto Sleep your music
If you’ve ever wanted to play music before you go to sleep, perhaps some nice soothing tunes, and have it turn off after a set amount of time, you can do this quite easily. Simply follow these steps:
Home – Clock – Timer – When Timer Ends – Sleep iPod

This completes our current list of tips for this post, we’ll be posting more as we find out other cool things you can do with the iPhone. If you have any useful tips that we should know about, please comment below.

Why is my iPhone slow? Tips for speeding it up.

andreliem — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 00:13:51 +0000

Is your iPhone slowing down or a lot slower than it used to be? Like most computers, the more things you install on your iPhone and the more you use it, the slower it becomes. You may not notice how slow your iPhone is until your play a more graphic intensive game. For example, I noticed that Tetris was running super slow on my iPhone after a month of usage.

Here is a list of four things you can do to speed up your iPhone. If you have any tips please comment below and I’ll add them to the list.

1. Clear your text messages
This one is pretty easy, just pop into your text messages panel and delete them one by one.

If you have a jailbroken iPhone you can follow this link for a delete all add-on: http://www.utternerd.org/Delete+all+SMS+Text+Messages+off+your+iPhone+at+once

2. Clear your Internet Cache
Go to Settings -> Safari and clear all your cache. (more if you like)

3. Power Down and restart your iPhone
-Press/hold the top power button (first) and then the home button right after.
-Wait until the power slider comes on and slide it off.
-Wait until the screen loader is done.
-Hold the top power button to turn the iPhone back.
-Let go once the Apple icon shows up

4. Restore your iPhone if all else fails
If your iPhone is still slow, then you will have to restore your iPhone through iTunes. Unfortunately this is not particularly fun as you can lose some of your settings and it can take a while. Refer to the official apple support article for this: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1414?viewlocale=en_US

Well that’s all the tips I have for now, I would like to hear of other ones if there’s something that worked for you.

Creating a custom ringtone for your iPhone (for free)

andreliem — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 05:43:35 +0000

Have you ever wanted to make a custom iPhone ringtone without downloading programs or paying a fee? If you answered yes, then keep reading as this article will show you how in a few simple steps. By using a free audio sampling site Audiko (http://audiko.net/) and iTunes, you can create a 30 second ring tone quite easily. Follow below to get started:

Step 1 – Visit http://audiko.net

Step 2 – Upload a music file you would like to sample

Step 3 – Select the starting point for your sample with Audiko’s sampling tool

Step 4 – After the file is converted, scroll down and save the mp3 to your computer

Step 5 – Open up iTunes and add the track to your library

Step 6 – Make sure your audio import settings are set to AAC (very important)

Step 7 – Find your 30 second track and click Get Info

Step 8 – Go to Options and set Start Time to 0:00 and Stop Time to 0:30

Step 9 – iTunes will create the new 30 second sample. Right click and click “Create AAC Version”

Step 10 – Copy this file to your desktop (or locate it) and rename the file extension from “m4a” to “m4r”

Step 11 – Import the new “m4r” file back into iTunes, add to RingTones and sync your iPhone!

You have now created a ring tone for free!

Additional Notes:

You don’t need Audiko if you know the exact start and end time.

Disable Cellular Network Data on iPhone with unlockit APN (How To)

andreliem — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 19:39:54 +0000

This article is for those iPhone owners who didn’t sign up for a data plan and are being charged for packets of data sent from your iPhone when a WiFi connection is not around. Normally, your provider can disable data transfer for you, but they do not guarantee it works. I found out the hard way and was charged excessive amounts for data packets being sent. After two attempts from my provider, data was still being transferred and the best they could do is credit my account 50% of the additional data charges.

To the rescue, there is a free iPhone application called “APN Changer” which changes your iPhone APN to an invalid APN. In short, your iPhone will not able to access Cellular Network Data because it is in effect configured incorrectly for this, don’t worry you can disable it easily. This application has worked for me and a lot of other people.

Here’s a quick how to:

From your iPhone visit www.unlockit.co.nz
Select Continue
Select Disable Data (FakeAPN)
Click Install
Install Profile will install (try again if it doesn’t work).

Here are some relevant screen shots to assist:

You can verify that it is working by disabling WiFi and trying to access the Internet. You should get a popup screen like below:

Lastly, you should check your data usage to make sure it’s really working. Look at the last category in the screen shot below “Cellular Network Data”. All zero bytes is a good thing!

Some may ask why someone would buy an iPhone if they don’t want a data plan. My answer is that a large majority of people have WiFi at home and at work, so the only time they would use a 3G/Edge network would be during transit, or perhaps during lunch/coffee breaks. Data plans (in Canada) cost at least 25 bucks additional per month which in one year adds up to the cost of of buying an iPhone through a plan.

If you found this application useful, you can thank Craig Whitmore and can paypal donate by visiting www.unlockit.co.nz.