Apple has started to air two new iPhone 4S commercials that focus on Siri. The first ad is titled “Road Trip” and features a young couple winging a road trip with the help of Siri. The second ad is titled “Rock God” and features a teenagers journey with music, aided by none other than Siri. Both follow the same recurring theme as past iPhone 4S commercials and have the same background tune. You can watch both of them below.

As usual with Apples commercials, the objective is to show how people interact with the iPhone and Siri in real life situations. Although they aren’t as fun as the classic Santa Siri ad, they both do a good job of conveying how useful Siri is for getting directions, finding food and events, retrieving information, sending text messages, and many other daily tasks.

These ads started to air earlier in the week, but weren’t posted online until this evening.

Restoring an iPhone or iPad to it’s default factory settings is easy whether you are restoring as a troubleshooting step or just preparing to transfer ownership of the hardware. You can reset the iPhone on the the device itself, but if the device is unresponsive, stuck on a boot loop, or otherwise needs to be restored directly, the next choice is to connect the iOS hardware to a computer and use iTunes.

Using iTunes is also typically faster than resetting through the iPhone or iPad itself, so keep this in mind if you tried the on-device method but it took forever.

How to Restore an iPhone or iPad with iTunes

If you want to restore to factory settings, do not restore from a backup during this process:

1. Launch iTunes
2. Connect the iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch to the computer and select it within iTunes, if it’s not visible check the “Show” button
3. Click on the “Summary” tab and click on the “Restore” button



4. iTunes will prompt you to back up the device, this is recommended but if you want factory settings only click “Don’t Back Up”
5. At the confirmation screen, click on “Restore” to begin restoring the device to factory settings

When finished, iTunes will alert you the device has been restored, but restoring may take a while. When the device is done, the iPhone/iPad/iPod touch will boot up and be reset completely to factory settings. This means that pre-iOS 5 will require the device to be connected to iTunes to finish, or after iOS 5 you will be presented with the familiar set up screens.

As mentioned before, to maintain the factory settings do not select to restore from a backup when this process is finished, otherwise you’ll simply be left with a device that has a freshly installed iOS but with the same data as when you started.

If you encounter error 3194 during this process, you probably jailbroke your device at some point and need to change the the hosts file.

The iPhone is connected to a computer with it’s USB cable, you launch iTunes and… the iPhone isn’t shown in iTunes. What gives? Fixing this problem is probably a lot easier than you think, and after fielding a call about this I found the simplest explanation was the solution as to why someones iPhone wasn’t appearing in iTunes:

• Ensure the iPhone is connected to the computer with a functioning USB cable
• Launch iTunes
• Hover over the “DEVICES” item in the sidebar until the “Show” button appears and click on it

The iPhone will now be visible, as technically it was always in iTunes it was just hidden. It seems like the “Hide” button can be clicked accidentally, which can lead users to believe they have a more serious problem than there is. Save yourself some work and try this first the next time the iPhone isn’t in iTunes devices list.

If you attempted this and the iPhone (or iPad or iPod touch) still isn’t showing up in iTunes, you may need to reinstall iTunes itself.

Bored with how your iPhone looks? If you have it jailbroken, you can install iPhone themes and make the device look a lot different than iOS by using an app called Dreamboard.

If you haven’t jailbroken yet, backup the iPhone and then proceed with Absinthe for iPhone 4S on iOS 5.0.1 or Redsn0w for iOS 5.0.1 on other iPhones and iPods. Dreamboard is then found as a free download in Cydia, so search for it and install.

Many Dreamboard themes are available via Cydia, here’s a handful:

• Endroid - Android HTC lookalike with updating weather widget and clock, this is the default Android theme
• OS7 – Makes iPhone look like Windows Phone 7, complete with tile animations
• WebOS – If you want your iPhone to look like a now extinct Palm device
• Kindle Fire for iPhone – Gives the iPhone an interface like the Kindle Fire
• OS X Lion Ultimatum – one of the fancier themes, makes iOS look like Mac OS X Lion
• Apple Desk – looks like an actual desk, complete with iMac and keyboard

There are plenty more, and while a lot of the themes are free, others cost a buck of two. Some paid themes have to be downloaded manually and then moved to the iPhone with SSH and SFTP from a Mac or PC, others can be installed directly on the phone.

Heads up to Lifehacker for the basic theme ideas, but if you’re serious about theming the iPhone don’t miss iDownloadBlogs theme page for tons of videos on the process.

The Absinthe Greenpoison jailbreak utility for A5 based iOS hardware has been updated to version 0.4, fixing several bugs and adding support for PPC Mac users and those running Mac OS X 10.5 on either Intel or PPC platforms.

This version is aimed at new users, and if you already have the jailbreak installed on the iPad 2 or iPhone 4S there is no reason to re-do it with this version. However, a new version of the Corona tool was released as “corona 1.0-8″ and can be found on Cydia to resolve some of the the bugs that have persisted for some iOS 5 jailbreakers. Older Mac users should be pleased the new Abinsthe version supports them, and instructions to jailbreak the iPhone 4S or iPad 2 with iOS 5.0.1 remain the same regardless of device or host operating system.

The official changelog for 0.4 is short:

- Mac: added support for OSX 10.5, PPC and Intel CPU
- added consistency check on startup to make sure required files are in place
- Windows: fixed bug in payload generator that might cause a crash

Download Absinthe 0.4

• Mac
• Windows
• Linux

Again, this is for iPhone 4S with iOS 5.0 or iOS 5.0.1, or iPad 2 with iOS 5.0.1. Other hardware requires the redsn0w jailbreak for iOS 5.0.1. All 5.0.1 jailbreaks are untethered at this point.

To get the most out of an iPhone you’ll obviously want to have internet access, but for those who live in regions where wi-fi access is ubiquitous, you can potentially save some money on a monthly cell phone bill by not having a data plan.

No, I don’t mean only turning off data on the phone, I mean having a simple voice and SMS plan without any data plan at all. These voice and text plans are quickly disappearing, but they can result in a low bill of around $25 per month with plenty of talk time and text messages. To accomplish this, you’ll need a few things.

Requirements:

• Unlocked iPhone – the iPhone must be GSM unlocked, either from a software unlock or an original hardware unlocked device. Apple sells the iPhone 4S unlocked for $649 and up
• A simple cell phone plan and it’s SIM card without data – usually from an older “dumbphone” or a cheap pay-go phone

Depending on how old the data-free plan is, you may need to trim down the SIM card so that it fits into the iPhone 4 and 4S micro-SIM slot. This wouldn’t be necessary for iPhone 2G, 3G, or 3GS though.

Setting Up iPhone With No Data Plan

If you have those two things, setting up the data-free iPhone is easy:

1. First turn off data by launching Settings, tap “General”, tap “Network”, flip the “Cellular Data” switch to OFF
2. Now insert the old data free SIM card into the iPhone and wait a minute or so to get service

The first step is important because it prevents the iPhone from attempting to use data, which can inadvertently sign you up for a data plan with some carriers. AT&T has been known to detect and automatically add data plans to smartphones, whereas T-Mobile is reportedly less likely to do so. After the old SIM card is inserted you should quickly get service and be able to make and receive phone calls and text messages.

For using an iPhone 4 or iPhone 4S with T-Mobile, you may want to follow our T-Mobile iPhone 4S set up guide to configure MMS, but skip the ‘Cellular Data Network’ section.

Of course, the unlocked iPhone aspect is fairly expensive and can quickly make this whole idea cost prohibitive. If you’re looking for more ideas to lower the monthly iPhone bill though, the next cheapest option – and it includes data – is to set up a prepaid iPhone, which the iPhone is unofficially capable of supporting on a pay-go basis with AT&T, or if you have an unlocked device this can work with T-Mobile too.

Thanks to Anthony F for the tip and information about AT&T.

Sending contacts from an iPhone is very easy, all data about the contact; from name, phone number, picture, email, URL, etc, can be exported as an inclusive vCard bundle and sent to someone else by email or text message. While we’ll focus on sending contacts between iPhones, these vCards are also usable by other iOS devices, Macs, Windows, and even Android phones.

Send Contacts from an iPhone to Someone Else

• Launch “Phone” and tap on “Contacts”
• Navigate to the contact you want to share and tap on their name



• Tap on “Share Contact”
• Select how to send the contact to another iPhone, choose “Email” to send it as an attachment to an email, or choose “Message” to send the contact through iMessage or SMS text

Depending on the choice of sharing method, either the Mail or Messages app will open and contain the selected contact in a preformatted message. If you choose Messages, the recipient will either need SMS service or iMessages enabled. From here you choose the recipient of the contact as if you were sending a standard email or text message and click send as usual.

On the receiving end, if someone sends you a contact all you need to do is tap on the contact name vCard (.vcf) to see a preview of the information, and then tap either “Create New Contact” or “Add to Existing Contact”.

If you were curious, the vCard format is not proprietary to Apple and the iPhone, these documents are widely considered the standard for virtual business cards, and should work on virtually any modern communication device, be it a smartphone, tablet, or PC. Obviously the standardization makes it much easier than manually typing out name, phone numbers, emails, and whatever else, so get in the habit of using the iPhones vCard sharing system and you’ll thank yourself later.

It’s pretty hard to get excited about a USB cable, but the Dexim Visible Smart chargers are ridiculously cool in a super geeky way.

You need to watch the video below to see the effect, but basically the cable glows while it is charging or syncing to “visibly show the electrical current flowing through the cable.” The lights actually change speed based on the battery capacity of the iPhone, iPod, or iPad, with the animated lights moving quicker the lower the battery charge is, and finally stopping motion once the battery is charged.

You can buy the glowing Dexim charger on Amazon for about $30.

Coolest USB cable ever? Yea, I think so. Heads up to Gizmodo for the find.

If you haven’t set up iCloud and Find My iPhone yet, now is a good time to do so. This friendly reminder comes to us from a recent New York Times article, which details the story of a police officer using iCloud to bust an iPhone thief and return the iPhone to its rightful owner using none other than the free Find My iPhone service:

The ace up the sleeve of Officer Garland, an avid Apple consumer was something called “Find My iPhone,” a free 5.4-megabyte piece of software, or app, that he had on the iPhone in his pocket.

Punching in the victim’s Apple ID … he quickly determined by the location of a small gray phone icon on a digital map that the robber was near Eighth Avenue and 51st Street.

As Officer Garland and his partner drove there, the signal source shifted, closer to Eighth Avenue and 49th Street. There, a man later identified by the police as George Bradshaw, 40, of New Lots, Brooklyn, stepped outside a Food Emporium.

Officer Garland pushed the “Play Sound” button on his phone. Instantly, a pinging beep — not unlike the sound of a submarine’s sonar — began emitting from Mr. Bradshaw, 20 feet away.

The victim later identified the robber and got her iPhone back.

So have you configured iCloud and Find My iPhone yet on all your Apple gear? It’s easy to do, read our guide on setting up iCloud and follow the instructions below to enable the specific Find My iPhone (or Find My iPad and Find My Mac) feature. You’ll need iOS 5 or later on the iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch, or OS X 10.7.2 or later on the Mac.

Setting Up Find My iPhone (or iPad)

You will need an Apple ID, iOS 5 or later on an iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch, and iCloud setup.

• Launch the Settings app
• Locate and tap on “iCloud” – if you are asked for an Apple ID you haven’t setup iCloud yet
• Near the bottom of iCloud settings, look for “Find My iPhone” and switch to “ON”, allow the app to use location services

It’s that easy to turn on, but you’re not quite finished yet because you will want to also install the Find My iPhone app for iOS. The Find My iPhone application is a free download on the iOS App Store, and lets you locate the iOS devices or Macs on a map, send messages and pings to the devices, and even remotely wipe them of their data.

Setting Up Find My Mac

Assuming you already have iCloud enabled in OS X 10.7.2, setting up Find My Mac is very easy:

• Launch System Preferences
• Click on “iCloud”
• Click the checkbox next to “Find My Mac” and then click “Allow”

The Mac will now be accessible via the iOS Find My iPhone app in the device list, and can also be pinpointed on a map using the iCloud.com website.

The iPhone 4S might not be offered officially for T-Mobile use, but if you buy an unlocked device and set it up properly, you can use the iPhone 4S and Siri on the T-Mobile network without incident. In fact, over a million iPhones are already on the T-Mobile network, and the company is going to actively support unlocked iPhone devices on their USA network due to immense demand. If you want to use an iPhone 4S on T-Mobile, here is everything necessary to do that.

Requirements:

• Unlocked iPhone 4S bought from an Apple Store without a contract, intended for AT&T use
• A computer with iTunes
• Wi-Fi with internet access
• The original AT&T micro-SIM that came with the iPhone 4S
• An activate T-Mobile Micro-SIM card

Assuming the requirements are met, read on to get started.

Activate the iPhone 4S for T-Mobile

The first set of things to do involves activating the phone, if you’ve done this before on another network it’s no different here.

1. Turn the iPhone off
2. Remove the default micro-sim card
3. Insert the T-Mobile micro-SIM
4. Turn the iPhone on with the T-Mobile sim inserted, ignore anything on the phone for now
5. Connect the iPhone 4S by USB cable to a computer
6. Launch iTunes
7. iTunes will find the iPhone 4S and notify you the device is unlocked

Now that the iPhone 4S is unlocked, you will be able to make calls but you need to do a few more things to get full functionality.

Setting Up the iPhone 4S for T-Mobile

After the device has been activated on the T-Mobile network, you’ll be able to make calls but you may need to perform the following to get data and MMS working on the device itself, this isn’t always necessary so presumably it depends on the precise T-Mobile network:

Before beginning, disable Wi-Fi by tapping to Settings > General > Network > Wi-Fi > OFF

• On the iPhone 4S, tap on “Settings” , then tap on “General” and then “Network”
• Tap on “Cellular Data Network”
• Set the following configuration:

APN: epc.tmobile.com
Username: Leave Blank
Password: Leave Blank

• Set the following configuration under MMS:

APN: epc.tmobile.com
Username: Leave Blank
Password: Leave Blank
MMSC: http://mms.msg.eng.t-mobile.com/mms/wapenc
MMS Proxy: 216.155.165.50:8080
MMS Max Message Size: 1048576
MMS UA Prof URL: http://www.apple.com/mms/uaprof.rdf

• Tap on the Home button to save and exit out of Settings
• Reboot the iPhone 4S
• Launch Safari to test internet connectivity

Generally you’ll end up with EDGE for internet connectivity, but some areas including parts of Alabama, Georgia, Nevada, California, Oregon, and Washington actually have full 3G access. For now the 3G accessibility is hit and miss, but T-Mobile is apparently slowly expanding their network to be compatible.

Here’s a video of an iPhone 4S on T-Mobile’s EDGE network using Siri:

Are you using an iPhone 4S on T-Mobile? Let us know how you’re liking it.

Action Movie FX is a really fun free app that adds high quality special effects to videos, and it’s all done on the iPhone in a surprisingly easy package. Created by Hollywood studio Bad Robot Productions (makers of movies like Cloverfield, Star Trek, Super 8, and the latest Mission Impossible), the app came out a little while ago but has been updated to include another free special effect, demolition ball, alongside a missile launcher and a car falling from the sky. These aren’t poor quality effects either, they’re impressively made as you can see in the videos posted below. Other special effects, like tornadoes, helicopter crashes, air strikes, and gun fire, can be bought as in-app purchases for an extra $0.99 to add more fun into the mix.

Download Action Movie FX for free from the App Store

The app is compatible with iPhone 3GS and onward, but realistically it’s best coupled with the iPhone 4, Phone 4S, iPod touch 4G, and iPad 2, because of the higher resolution cameras and faster processors. You’ll also need iOS 4.3 or later but you should be on iOS 5.0.1 by now.

Here are a three short sample videos from YouTube showing off the free special effects:

Missile Launcher:

Demolition Ball:

Car falling from sky:

iPhone serial numbers aren’t just randomly generated, they actually contain some interesting information about the device and it’s history, including what factory it was made in and when, the color of the iPhone, and it’s storage capacity.

If you want to follow along here with an iPhone, you can get the serial number by tapping on Settings > General > About and scrolling down alongside other info like model, IMEI, and baseband firmware version. If the device is connected to a computer you can also look under the “Summary” tab of iTunes to find the serial number.

Reading an iPhone Serial Number

Serial numbers come in the form AABCCDDDEEF which can be read as follows:

• AA = Factory and machine ID
• B = Year manufactured (simplified to final digit, 2010 is 0, 2011 is 1, etc)
• CC = Week of production
• DDD = Unique identifier (but unrelated to UDID)
• EE = Color of device
• F = Size of storage, S is 16GB and T is 32GB

For example, the serial 79049XXXA4S is from factory 79 (presumably Foxconn), was manufactured in 2010 in the 49th week, and is a black 16GB iPhone 4. Some older phones have slightly different labeling, like the iPhone 3G and 3GS may refer to 16GB as “K” rather than S, but for newer hardware this should continue to be accurate unless Apple changes something.

This was discovered a while back by iFixIt during the whole iPhone 4 Antennagate thing as they were trying to figure out what devices were impacted, and if Apple was quietly making changes to the hardware. At this point it’s just a fun way to learn more about your iPhone, so thanks to Tim R. for sending in the tip.

On the much less technical side, you can also use the serial number to check warranty information for the phone, including eligibility for an extended AppleCare plan.

Update: The serial numbers of iPhone 4 CDMA and iPhone 4S are a bit different and don’t follow the same structure. Here are the three digit suffixes for iPhones that do fall into the readability list (thanks Michael):

VR0 (iPhone 2G Silver 4GB)
WH8 (iPhone 2G Silver 8GB)
0KH (iPhone 2G Silver 16GB)
Y7H (iPhone 3G Black 8GB)
Y7K (iPhone 3G Black 16GB)
3NP (iPhone 3GS Black 16GB)
3NR (iPhone 3GS Black 32GB)
3NQ (iPhone 3Gs White 16GB)
3NS (iPhone 3Gs White 32GB)
A4S (iPhone 4 Black 16GB)
A4T (iPhone 4 Black 32GB)

Rather than closing out of the Camera app to view pictures you have taken on the iPhone, just swipe left from within Camera to reveal all photos contained within the camera roll. You can continuously flip through, and the standard photo options are available too, from sending as MMS or email to deleting the image.

The A5 jailbreak tool Greenpois0n Absinthe has been updated to version 0.3, the third release is relatively minor but includes a few bug fixes and adds support for Linux. As before and as the name implies, the app focuses on jailbreaking A5 based hardware only, meaning the iPhone 4S and iPad 2, both of which must be running iOS 5.

If you already are jailbroken with the Abinsthe utility, v0.3 offers no advantages to you and does not need to be run again. If this is the first time you’ve run the tool, follow our guide on how to jailbreak iPhone 4S or iPad 2 with Absinthe.

Download Absinthe 0.3

• Download for Mac
• Download for Windows
• Download for Linux

If you don’t have an iPhone 4S or iPad 2, you can still use redsn0w to jailbreak iOS 5.0.1.

Can’t remember what folder you stuffed that iOS app into? If you have a ton of apps on your iPhone or iPad, try rearranging them all by their actions (or by verbs), rather than by the apps category.

Although you’ll have to do this manually by moving apps around and renaming or creating folders yourself, it’s actually more intuitive and it’s easier to find things based on what they help you to do rather than some rough categorization that isn’t always the most descriptive. You could go beyond iOS and do this with OS X Lion’s LaunchPad as well, but the larger Mac screens and optional nature of Launchpad seem to make folders much less necessary there.

Great little tip idea from @ginatrapani on Flickr