iPhone

The iPhone is easily one of the best gadgets ever made, but it’s not perfect, and there are a few things that are just kind of annoying. We’re aiming to address a few of those frustrations here, with these five fairly minor iPhone tips that can have a big impact, offering nice improvements to usability … Read More

Emails opened in Mail app for iOS default to loading all images attached to that message. This makes emails format and arrange themselves as the sender intended, often with nice little header graphics and signature files, but it has a potentially serious downside: increased bandwidth usage. On a wi-fi connection that bandwidth usage hardly matters, … Read More

Ever wished you could turn off the phone call portion of your iPhone, while still retaining the ability to use data, access the internet, even send iMessages? You can do that with a funky workaround we’ll cover here, and it’s an amazing solution if you’re looking for some peace and quiet but in a situation … Read More

Read Receipts allow others to be notified when you have read their messages on an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch. From the user perspective it displays as a tiny “Read” indicator below a sent message if the recipient has seen the message. There is some obvious benefit to that, but it can also be a … Read More

Apple has released a minor update for iPhone 5 users, versioned as iOS 6.1.4 with a build ID of 10B350. The brief release notes suggest the only change is an “Updated audio profile for speakerphone”, though in our own before and after testing we were not able to determine any obvious differences in speakerphone output … Read More

Siri defaults to speaking responses back through the speakers of the iPhone and iPad, and often quite loudly at that. Though you can control Siri’s volume level independently of general system audio levels, having the voice of Siri be set to a very quiet level isn’t much of a solution if you actually want to … Read More

Notification Center in iOS has both Twitter and Facebook integration and the ability to post to either service with a “Tap to Tweet” and “Tap to Post” button. On the iPad and iPhone these are accessed with the rest of Notifications by using a downward swiping gesture from the top of the screen. If you’d … Read More

The iPad and iPhone don’t freeze or crash often, but when they do it can be an epic freeze-up, where the device can either get stuck in an app or, worse, it gets frozen on the dreaded iOS “spinning wheel of death”, the little wait cursor that never goes away. Left on it’s own in … Read More

Need to delete a contact from the iPhone? Maybe you want to delete all contacts from the iPhone, iCloud, Mac OS X, iPad, and everywhere else they appear, so that you can start anew with a completely blank address book? You can do both easily and quickly, and while deleting a single contact is quick … Read More

Whether you just got a new phone number, changed a number from an old one, or you happened upon someone else’s iPhone and want to know the number of who it belongs to, you can easily retrieve an iPhone’s associated mobile number. The obvious solution might be to call another phone, but if the device … Read More

You can change the default alert times of calendar events on iPhone and iPad. Forgetting a birthday or an important event never feels good, and if you have a habit of either completely forgetting dates or not remembering until it’s too late, you can adjust the default alert times settings in iOS to better correspond … Read More

If you’re hitting the road with your iPhone, you’ll probably be relying on either Apple Maps or Google Maps to help you get to your destination. But before you settle on an uncertain route, remember to check the default routes and compare alternate routes in both mapping apps to find the best directions, and don’t … Read More

If you’ve ever encountered the “Visual Voicemail is currently unavailable” error on when going to check new voicemail on the iPhone, there are two quick tricks that almost always fix the problem. So before calling the actual voicemail number like you’re some kind of cave dweller in the stone age of cell phones, try these … Read More

Practically all apps that store documents in iCloud let you delete them from the app itself, which simultaneously removes them from iCloud and thus all other synced iOS & OS X devices. But if you’re looking to manage and remove specific iCloud documents and data, there is a better way to do it through a … Read More

Dunking a $650 electronic device into water is a pretty terrible feeling. The standard advice is to dry it off and stuff it into some rice, then cross your fingers and wait. But does that actually work? After accidentally dropping my iPhone for a swim into a pool of water where it was fully submerged, … Read More

Ever wanted to create a reminder on the iPhone that is on a unique repeating interval? Maybe of alternating days, like a reminder every other day, or a reminder every 3 days? Oddly, this option isn’t available natively in the Calendar or Reminders apps of iOS, but these custom repeat reminder options do exist on … Read More

Having been inundated with spam text messages and SMS lately on my iPhone, I went looking for a solution to put an end to it all. Though it’s not as simple as it should be, there is a way to block virtually all spam texts from ever reaching your phone, and it actually works. To … Read More

The iPad can play a variety of video formats without any additional apps or tools, and the bundled Videos app is more than sufficient to play a variety of very common movie file types including mp4, m4v, mov, and mkv. If you have such a movie on a computer that you want to watch on … Read More