All Articles in Tips and How-To

Today’s the day — Microsoft is officially launching Windows 7! If you’ve been using the beta and release candidate for a almost a year already, then maybe today will be just another day. If, however, you’ve just received your party pack, or upgrade box, or just bought a shiny new machine and your next step is to figure out how to move all your iPhone content over — well, we have a fresh new iPhone Help Forum thread for you!

Whether you’re a newcomer to Windows 7 and/or the iPhone looking to fix a problem, or a seasoned Microsoft Guru with iPhone already sorted and willing to help, head on over and let us know your issues and your advice.

Have fun and happy launch day!

Today’s the day everyone on AT&T has been waiting for — MMS lands now. Well, now-ish, because AT&T is doing a rolling roll-out, and we’ll see how the network holds up.

AT&T MMS Update: We know you’ve been eager for this service so we wanted to offer a quick update on the launch plans for MMS on Friday, Sept. 25. Late morning, Pacific Time, on Friday, the new carrier settings update enabling MMS should be live and ready to download through iTunes. We’ll provide the steps and all of the details you need right here at that time.

If you’re waiting for MMS to come your way — whether to use or just to check off your AT&T bucket list — check out our MMS for iPhone walkthrough after the break so you’re ready when yours lights up. And when it does light up, let us know when and where in the comments so we can cheer (and those nearby can lose their minds with anticipointment!)

Read the rest of this entry »

Poor battery life and iPhone are a few words that get mixed together all too often it seems. While some will say it’s fine, others will say it’s pitiful. As many of you know, battery life will fluctuate greatly between users and their individual usage patterns but TiPb wants to provide you with some simple tips and tricks on conditioning your battery to provide a maximum life and squeezing as much usage out of each charge as possible.

The battery in an iPhone is a lithium-based battery which is most common in consumer portable devices. A lithium-ion battery provides 300-500 discharge/charge cycles in its lifetime and the following tips are just a few ways to efficiently gain longer battery lifespans while extending overall battery life of your iPhone.

• Be sure to go through at least one charge cycle per month (charging the battery to 100% and then completely running it down).
• Avoid heat – do not leave your iPhone in a hot car or in direct sunlight.
• Optimization of your settings. Yes, some of these are no brainers but can be effective. Simple things like:
  1. turning off Location Services,
  2. turning off Wi-Fi and Bluetooth when not in use,
  3. fetching new data less frequently,
  4. setting the brightness of your screen below 50%,
  5. turning of the EQ while listening to music,
  6. turning off 3G while not surfing the internet (Yes, we said it…)

All of these add up to better battery life.

After you’ve tried some of the above tips and you are still not happy or your battery life is just horrid all together, you may want to try restoring your iPhone and do not restore from a backup file but rather restore as a new iPhone. All too often we hear about horrible battery life striking many of you after updating your iPhone to the latest software. If this is the case, 9 times out of 10 a separate restore as a new iPhone will clear up your battery issue.

Have some battery saving tips you’d like to share? Leave them in the comments for others to take advantage of!

Daynah from PHP-Princess.net just couldn’t abide the meager 11 pages and paltry 180 apps provided by iPhone 3.0, so she went about forcing Apple’s SpringBoard home screen manager to give her more. How did she do it?

Check the link above for the details, but the but gist is filling up more than the default 11 pages (additional apps will still be hidden), then moving built-in apps to the last spot, then moving in an additional icon to force a built-in app off the 11th screen, the downloading an app to fill in the empty spot, and… presto — 12th page.

Ninja level work-around to be sure, but if you can’t live with 180 visible apps, and decide to experiment, let us know your results!

Just downloaded the new Apple MobileMe iDisk app [Free - iTunes link] to your iPhone or iPod touch and eager to know it better? Apple wants to show you how, literally. MobileMe News covers Apple’s latest App Store app, and Apple.com has a video tutorial available to get you started.

For example, it explains that documents get downloaded to your iPhone, and recent documents remain stored for offline viewing. Nice.

If you pick up any other tricks, or have any pro tips for iDisk on iPhone, let us know in the comments!

The Jailbreak and Unlock wizards behind the iPhone DevTeam are off to DEFCON 17, the security/hacking convention that juxtaposes Black Hat 2009, and have provided a set of tips to help those at the conferences (or anywhere really) avoid getting their iPhone hacked into. The tips are really targeted at Jailbroken iPhones, but some cross over to regular iPhone users as well.

Disable all your login cookies in Safari. If you use the hotel or conference wifi, it is 100% guaranteed that your traffic will be sniffed. If you allow a web site (like twitter.com) to store your login info in a cookie, and if you connect to that site through a normal http connection, your login info will be exposed. At the very least, you’ll end up on the Wall of Sheep. But you’ll be giving up your password to anyone else sniffing too.

They also advise avoiding any public Wi-Fi at hotels, conference centers, airports, etc. (and to tether instead), and either uninstalling or disabling SSH access, or at the very least changing the root and mobile password from Apple’s default.

They also provide their suggestions for talks that might interest the iPhone jailbreak community. If anyone attends, let us know how it goes via our iPhone Jailbreak and Unlock Forum. And If you have more pro tips, send them our way!

No doubt about it, issues with battery life remain a hot topic for iPhone 3.0 and iPhone 3GS users.

Now, if your battery drain is caused simply by use — you never put the iPhone (or iPod touch) down and are always playing games, pushing IMs, watching movies, etc. your only choice is to get a few more charging cables or battery extenders. If, however, you’re doing roughly the same things you’ve always done and getting substantially less battery life for your troubles, there’s a chance a few troubleshooting steps might just help get your power problems back under control.

Read the rest of this entry »

If you’re browsing the web on a PC, you can just hit CTRL-F or CMD-F and quickly find any text on a webpage. It’s great for finding things fast, especially on long reams of text, and Safari does a nice job of it — just not Mobile Safari on the iPhone, not yet.

Editor emeritus Mike Overbo brought something very similar to us two years ago (along with a ton of others — check that link!) when iPhone 1.x made bookmarklets all the rage. Since then, Apple has added a lot of functionality, but still hasn’t deigned to gift us with Find… on page. Rafael Cimatti (via App Advice) is keeping the handy Javascript bookmarklet alive via Cydia (though it works on any iPhone). It can’t fully replace a built in command, with next, back, etc. options, etc. but if it isn’t 100% right, it is 100% “right now”.

Here’s the bookmarklet: Find…

Either bookmark it on your desktop browser (drag it to the bookmark bar on desktop Safari) and sync it over, or on your iPhone copy the code after the break, bookmark a random page, edit it, change the name, and paste in the code (check the App Advice link above for step by step instructions).

And next time you’re on a page, hit the bookmark, type in your text, and find away!

Have an iPhone Pro Tip of you own to share? Send it in!

[via Daveizzle]

Read the rest of this entry »

Apple’s lone outstretched hand to the social web, the MobileMe News “blog” is back with another helpful hint for users, this time about using iPhone 3.0 to search older email on the server:

select your Inbox or another folder from your MobileMe Mail account and access the search field by scrolling to the top of the message list. (Tap the status bar at the top to quickly reveal the search field.) Type what you want to search for and tap To, From, or Subject, or All to search all three. You’ll see the messages that match the search on your device, and you can then tap “Continue Search on Server” to see the remaining messages that are stored in the MobileMe cloud.

I’ve used this to find old order info, network machine names, and scads of other stuff buried in server-side email. Since it doesn’t (yet?) search the body of the email, it’s not as useful as Gmail’s WebApp, for example, but it’s lightyears ahead of where it was under 2.2.1.

The S stands for speed, and the 3G stands for the third generation, HSPA (High Speed Packet Access – wikipedia link) data network, which is also supposed to bring broadband-like speed to your iPhone’s internet connection. When you’re on the 3G network, you can tell by the little 3G symbol at the top of left of your iPhone’s menu, right beside the signal strength bars and the name of your carrier (AT&T, Rogers, O2, Orange, etc.).

There are several other symbols your iPhone might show instead of 3G, however, depending on the type of connection and reception available in your area and sometimes specific spot.

Read the rest of this entry »