Did you take a great picture but your iPhone camera orientation was upside-down or sideways? If so, it’s easy to correct it and rotate photos directly on the iPhone or iPad without any additional app downloads. You’ll need iOS 5 or later to use the simple rotation adjustments feature.

1. From the Photos app, tap on the photo you want to rotate
2. Tap “Edit” from the upper right corner
3. Tap the arrow icon in the lower left corner to rotate the picture 90° counterclockwise
4. When finished, tap the yellow “Save” button in the upper right corner

Each tap of the arrow icon will rotate the image another 90 degrees, so if you want to flip something around completely tap it two times. If you’re not satisfied with the rotation results tap on “Cancel” or “Revert to Original” to go back to the default version.

Notice the iPhone and iPod touch will only show a little arrow icon, but the iPad will display actual “Rotate” text alongside that icon. The “Edit” option will not be visible from the lock screen camera roll, you must be in the Photos app directly.

Battery life has been an ongoing issue for some iOS 5 users, particularly those with iPhone 4 and iPhone 4S. The recent iOS 5.1 update aimed to fix that with “improved battery life” mentioned in the release notes, but just how improved is it? With casual use since the update was released, the consensus at OSXDaily suggests the improvement is substantial, and thus if you haven’t updated your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch to iOS 5.1 yet, it is highly recommended to do so now.

Every user is going to notice different gains depending on their device usage and general battery health, but overall the improvements seem to be most noticeable on cellular iOS devices, particularly iPhone 4S, iPhone 4, and iPad 2 3G models. The assumption is that some of the potential location services issues has been resolved, though its certainly worth mentioning that users of the standard Wi-Fi models and iPod touch also report a nice boost, even if it doesn’t seem to be quite as dramatic (likewise, the original drain problem usually wasn’t as bad either).

Monitoring Your iOS Device Battery Life
To get a good feel for the improvement and to monitor battery drain, it’s best to have made note of the prior usage history and then compare it to the iOS 5.1 battery usage, but those who have already updated won’t be able to do this obviously. Nonetheless, it also helps to turn on the “Battery Percentage” indicator and make a mental note of usage data too. Here’s how to do both of these in iOS:

• Tap on “Settings” and tap “General”
• Tap “Usage” and then swipe down to “Time since last full charge” to find the usage time (actively using the device) and standby time (device is on, but not in use)
• In the same “Usage” screen, swipe “Battery Percentage” to “ON” to follow precise drain

The percentage indicator displays alongside the battery icon in the upper right corner of the screen:

Update iOS, Calibrate the Battery, and More
Update to iOS 5.1 and hopefully any lingering battery drain problems will be resolved once and for all. Don’t forget to calibrate an iOS devices battery about once a month by letting it charge to 100% and then running it down to 0% before recharging again, that helps keep the battery in good health. It’s also a good idea to disable battery draining services you don’t use often, be it Bluetooth or Push Notifications, and you can check out some general iOS 5 battery life tips we have discussed before for more on that.

On a side note, if you’re unable to download and update iOS 5.1 try the DNS change we discussed recently, it should resolve that problem immediately and allow you to update without the network errors.

Did iOS 5.1 help your iPhone and iPad battery life too? Let us know in the comments.

iOS 5.1 was released a few days ago but some people are still having problems when trying to update. The download can time out, not start at all, or sometimes throw an error message saying “Unable to Check for Update. An error occurred while checking for a software update.” or “The network connection could not be established.”

If you’re having trouble downloading iOS 5.1 from Apple’s servers, try these fixes:

• Reset Network Settings on iOS Device: Tap Settings > General > Reset > Reset Network Settings
• Clear Hosts File: Look at your hosts file for anything blocking Apple’s servers and comment them out, this is mostly relevant to jailbreakers and if you see “Error 3194“
• Change DNS Servers: Adjusting DNS on either the computer you are downloading from or iOS device if using OTA can resolve the issue, instructions on how to do so are below

Changing DNS seems to be the most reliable method, here is how to do so in iOS and OS X.

Changing DNS in iOS

1. Tap on Settings, tap on “Wi-Fi”, and tap on the blue arrow next to the router name
2. Under “DHCP” tab tap on “DNS” and replace with: “8.8.8.8″ for Google DNS, or “208.67.222.222″ for OpenDNS
3. Tap the Back button and attempt to use OTA again

Change DNS in OS X

1. Open System Preferences from the Apple menu
2. Click on “Network” and then click on ‘Advanced’ in the lower right corner
3. Click the “DNS” tab and then add a new DNS server by clicking the “+” icon, adding either “8.8.8.8″ for Google DNS or “208.67.222.222″ for OpenDNS
4. Drag the newly added DNS server to the top of the list, click “OK” then close out of System Preferences

On a Mac you may need to follow this up with flushing DNS cache, so open the Terminal and type the following:

dscacheutil -flushcache

Now try opening iTunes and updating, or try to download iOS 5.1 firmware directly from Apple again.

An unrelated but pleasant side effect of changing DNS can be that your wi-fi speeds increase, give it a try and let us know if it works for you.

Thanks to Aygie and Sayed for the DNS tips!

You may have noticed that iOS 5.1 changed the behavior of the lock screen camera compared to it’s predecessor, this has caused some confusion as to how it works compared to iOS 5. You’ll notice that if you tap on the camera icon now it just causes the screen to bounce. No, the bouncing screen doesn’t mean the camera isn’t working anymore, it’s aim is to indicate how it works.

You now swipe up to activate the lock screen camera in iOS 5.1. Likewise, you can swipe down to deactivate the camera and return back to the lock screen.

Get used to the new gesture, it’s actually faster than the double-tap home button method before in iOS 5, and you’ll be able to take pictures quicker than ever after you get accustomed to it. There also doesn’t seem to be a way to return to the old behavior anyway, so old habits will have to be broken here.

iOS 5.1 has been released, alongside the new iPad 3 and new Apple TV. The update brings a variety of new features and bug fixes to iOS including the ability to delete images from Photo Stream, camera shortcut visible by default on lock screen, improved camera face detection, Japanese language support for Siri, genius mixes for iTunes Match, updated AT&T network indicator, improved battery life, and more.

You can get the iOS 5.1 software update directly on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch by using OTA Update, otherwise you can update through iTunes or by downloading the IPSW and performing a manual upgrade.

We have included links to the firmware files below, they are hosted by Apple.
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Turning on the iPhone camera grid makes it easier to take better pictures, here’s how to enable it:

• Launch the Camera app from home screen or lock screen
• Tap on “Options” at the top
• Swipe Grid to “ON”
• Tap “Done” to hide the Options again and return back to Camera

The grid will not appear on finalized images in the photo stream.

What’s the point? If you’re new to photography or don’t know why the grid is potentially useful, the grid makes composing images using the “rule of thirds” easier. Essentially that means by dividing a picture into horizontal and vertical thirds and placing compositional elements along those lines and intersections, you’ll end up with better pictures. It’s an old artistic technique that has been around for hundreds of years.
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If you’re suffering from email overload, sometimes the easiest thing to do is just mark everything as read and start over again. While there is no select all or mark all as read option in iOS, you can mark multiple emails as read on the iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch as long as you select them manually with a tap. Here’s what you’ll need to do:

• Open Mail app and tap on “Edit” in the upper right corner
• Tap each email you want to mark as read so that a red checkbox appears on the left alongside the message
• Tap on the “Mark” button in the lower right corner
• Tap “Mark as Read”

The “Mark” buttons label will change to include the number of emails selected so you can be sure of how many messages will be marked as read.

As shown in the screenshots, you can also use bulk message selection within Mail search, making it easy to find and mark messages from a single sender or of a theme as read.

Miss a phone call? Rather than tapping through to the recent call log and finding the last caller, you can immediately return a missed call by swiping to the right on the phone icon alongside the callers name, directly from the iPhone lock screen.

You’ll need iOS 5 or later and Notifications Center must be configured to include phone alerts to do this. The feature should be enabled by default, but if it’s not and you want to turn it on, tap to Settings > Notifications > Phone and make sure Notification Center is turned ON and alert style is set to “Alerts” or “Banners”.

Thanks for the tip Laurence

Remember that retro iOS ’86 concept theme for iPhone that popped up recently? We were hoping it would become an iOS theme, and it has. To use the iOS 86 theme you’ll need to jailbreak your iPhone or iPod touch running iOS 5.0.1, here is how to do that with absinthe for iPhone 4S, or use redsn0w for jailbreaking other iOS 5 devices.

After you have jailbroken, do the following:

1. Launch Cydia and add the source repo: http://repo.ithemes.it
2. Search Cydia for “iOS 86″ and install it
3. Search Cydia for “Winterboard” and download that
4. Launch Winterboard to find and activate iOS ’86 theme (complete the look with a white wallpaper)

I haven’t had the time to test this quite yet, but apparently the theme doesn’t change other UI elements or any icons outside of the iOS 5 native set, so if an app isn’t bundled with iOS don’t expect a nice retro black and white icon. Nonetheless, this is a great first start and it’s pretty cool for those of us who were impressed with the original concept.
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iOS has additional system wide zoom abilities accessible by a gesture, much like OS X’s zoom feature. To use the extra zoom gestures on an iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch, first you’ll need to enable them in iOS:

1. Open Settings and tap on General
2. Scroll down to “Accessibility” and tap on “Zoom”, flick the switch to ON
3. Verify the zoom gesture works by using a three fingered double-tap on the screen

Once zoom is enabled, using three fingers you can:

• Double-tap with three fingers to activate zoom and zoom in and out on any application
• Double-tap and drag with three fingers up and down to increase or decrease zoom level, from 100% to 500% zoom
• Drag three fingers while zoomed to move around screen

This zoom feature is systemwide and will work in any iOS app running on the device, including even the lock screen, and it works in addition to the standard pinch and spread gestures that are active in many apps already. Standard app functionality also remains while zoomed in allowing for manipulation of onscreen controls and data.