10 iPhone Tips You’ll Use Every Day

Did you know we touch our smartphones over 2,000 times a day? Well, here are ten more reasons to touch your iPhone today, as you learn these useful daily iPhone user tips:

Speak up

Siri will speak the name of the person calling you before you pick up your iPhone. Enable this in Settings>Phone>Announce Calls. You can choose to have this kick in all the time, only when you are using headphones, or in your car using Carplay.

Turnaround

Have you ever wanted to stop ‘Hey Siri’ working and prevent Notifications appearing on screen to distract you while you are in a meeting? The answer’s simple – just pop your iPhone face down on the table and Siri will stop listening for your command and the screen will stay dark.

Quicker pay

When you have enabled Apple Pay on your iPhone you won’t need to do anything much to pay for a product at checkout. Just put the registered finger on the Home button and wriggle your iPhone near the reader, Apple Pay will recognise the reader is nearby, activate itself, and then authorize itself against your fingerprint.

Bubble Effects

We all swooned when Apple showed us bubble effects in Messages last year, but there still aren’t so many people using them. I think it’s because lots of us don’t know how to access them, so here’s what to do:

• Write your message and then when sending it you should long press the send (blue arrow) icon.
• A dialog will appear that lets you use effects like Invisible Ink, or (with a second tap at the top of the display) use some built in effects like balloons or fireworks (scroll through these through a slider at the bottom of the display).
• Make your selection and send.

Charge!

Limited time to recharge your iPhone? Switch to AirPlane mode while you charge and it will charge much faster. You’ll get even faster charge if you use an iPad power adapter for the job.

Remind Me!

If you get a call and can’t deal with it at that time, then tap the small ‘Remind Me’ or ‘Message’ icons you may never have thought about that appear just above the Slide to Answer bar. These useful tools mean you can respond with a canned message such as “sorry, can’t talk right now”, or set a reminder to call that person back.

Red Dot

Suddenly have a photo opportunity in the frame while you are taking a video? Just tap the big white button beside the video red button and you will capture your image at the same time as filming your video.

A Little Flash

You can make your iPhone flashlight flash when you receive a call. Enabled this in Settings>General>Accessibility and make sure the LED Flash for Alerts setting is ‘On’. Now you’ll get a visual reminder when people make contact.

Panorama

When you take a Pano image the default setting demands you pan from left to right. It doesn’t need to be this way: tap the arrow that appears in the middle of the screen to reverse direction (right to left). What about tall buildings? Once you’ve entered Pano mode just twist your iPhone to landscape view and you’ll be able to take an up/down panoramic image.

Turn off

It’s great that Messages appear on your lockscreen, but if you leave your iPhone unsupervised you may want to prevent people reading the message previews it shows by default. You change this in Settings>Notifications>Messages where you should set “Show Previews” to Off or When Unlocked under “Messages Options.”