With every year comes a new installment of the iPhone – the Apple smartphone that sees people standing in lines at midnight to buy. Great craze guarantees a great smartphone, and a great smartphone often has features that you may not figure out until a chance meeting with it. Here’s enlisting 9 such features that you may not have known about an iPhone.
1. Keyboard: Long press to access symbol and back – While typing at a fast pace, it may get annoying for you to tap the ‘123’ (symbols) button to just key in one symbol or digit. Even worse – in sentences sporadically interrupted by numbers, it gets downright tedious to keep switching between the two keyboards. Instead, simply long press the keypad switch button and swipe to your required digit/symbol, saving yourself time, energy and annoyance.
2. Delete last digit of calculator by swiping right – This is a very common aspect which many iPhone users do not know. While the iPhone does not present a dedicated delete key, you do not need to rid your calculations if you happen to key in a wrong digit. Swipe to the right of your screen to delete the last-entered digit.
3. Shake to undo text – Yet another neat iOS feature that has been around for a while now, you can simply shake your phone to delete the last section of your text, if you happen to have a change of heart while typing a long message. Alternatively, the same motion gesture will allow you to restore text that you may have accidentally deleted.
4. Time your music – You might love listening to music as you fall asleep, but the worry of a worn-out battery may prevent you from doing so on your iPhone. In actuality, your iPhone can stop playing music according to a set timer. A feature that has been there in iPhones for a while, switch on your phone’s Timer, and on the ‘When Timer Ends’ option, choose ‘Stop Playing’. The music will remain paused until you access your phone next, so that you can choose to resume your playlist from where you left off.
5. Find a word on a webpage with Safari – You may wish to find a specific word on a particular article online, and Safari knows it. Once you open the page on the browser, key in the target word on the top bar, and scroll down to see if it is there on the page. You will also get to see the number of times it appears in the article, and each mention of the specific word is highlighted, which you can access with in-browser navigation arrows. You can also search for phrases, and not just a single word.
6. The ‘73’ calculator trick – This one’s for fun! A simple but enjoyable number trick, write down the number ‘73’ and give it to a friend without letting her see it. Now ask her to open up the Calculator of her iPhone, and key in any four-digit number, twice. Then, ask her to divide the entire 8-digit number by ‘137’, and divide the resultant by the original four-digit number. Ask her to match the number displayed on her screen with the one written on the piece of paper, and voila, the numbers are ‘73’! There are a number of other tricks that you can do with Calculator, too!
7. Use your phone as a leveller – Yet another iPhone feature that is not the most popular – open the Compass application and swipe right to access the leveller. You can use it to level out photo frames on a wall, or even as a photography equipment, while setting up on uneven terrain.
8. Access your last-dialed contacts with Dialer (6s/6s Plus) – This is a new feature that has been added to the new iPhones, with the addition of 3D Touch technology to the new iPhone 6s and 6s Plus. While 3D Touch has been integrated into a number of applications, one of its most useful integration is in the Dialer app. Medium-press on the Dialer icon, and it will show you the three last-dialed contacts. This is a neat little addition, should you need to quickly call back a recent contact.
9. Retina flash is your solution (6s/6s Plus) – Apple completely averted the recent trend of fitting the front camera with inbuilt or external flash modules, and instead tweaked its software to use the display itself as a flash. Retina flash is a feature that ‘fills’ the entire display with a bright jab of light, thereby acting like a soft flash in situations near to complete darkness. And, it doesn’t give you a red eye either!
Let us know if you had fun in trying all or any of the above things in comments, also share with us if you have more tips or tricks that you had fun trying out.