Thursday, July 2, 2009

iPhone 3.0 secrets: 7 Hidden features

iPhone 3.0 has settled in quite well in my view and I am sure many have been more than pleased to see Apple finally give the iPhone features such as copy and paste, MMS, landscape mode typing, Spotlight search, push notifications and many more. But did you know that actually there are some “hidden” functions that weren’t announced?


You may have figured out some of them yourself already but there are actually quite a few of them. I wouldn’t like to call this a secret but rather just tips and tricks to using the new iPhone OS 3.0. Check out the full list after the break…

1.You can now have 11 home screens instead of the previous limit of 9 home screens. So you can now launch 32 more iPhone apps from your iPhone’s home screen.

2.Thanks to Spotlight for iPhone, there is no limit on the number of iPhone apps that can be installed on the iPhone running iPhone OS 3.0 assumming that you have the required storage space on your iPhone. If you install more applications then the home screen icon limit, you can now access them using Spotlight.

3.This hidden feature addresses one of the minor annoyance in previous iPhone OS. When a phone call interrupts you, after the phone call you are taken back to the iPhone app you were using before you were interrupted.

4.iPhone’s virtual keyboard has also been updated with few more extra special characters while holding certain characters down similar to the “.com” button. In iPhone OS 3.0, when you hold down the “.” you also get “…”. The dash “-” also displays an em-dash “-” and quotations and apostrophes display “<<” and “>>” and can also be curved.

5.Along with Spotlight, Apple has also added Camera app to the Home button settings (Settings > General > Home Button) in iPhone fimrware 3.0 so if the Camera application is your favorite iPhone; you can quickly launch it from your iPhone’s home screen or any other iPhone app by double-clicking on the Home button.

6.You now have another option to force quit an unresponsive iPhone app. You can hold the sleep/wake button until the red slider appears, then press and hold down the home button to quit the iPhone app.

7.You can undo typing by shaking the iPhone. When you are in the Mail, Messaging, Safari or Notes applications, after you typed a word/several words, just shake the phone and a pop-up will appear, asking you whether you want to undo what you have just entered.