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!

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

Windows 7 and the iPhone — Help and How-To!

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!)

iPhone 3.0/3.1 MMS Walkthrough

Messages is the new SMS, and is renamed to signify the addition of MMS (multi-media messaging service). It allows, in the case of the new iPhone OS 3.0 software, for you to receive, vCards (contacts), audio, location, and — for iPhone 3GS only — video to be sent using the Messages interface to any other smartphone or feature-phone that supports MMS and those file types.

Once you receive an MMS, you can tap the icon in the message bubble to get a better look at it. In the case of a contact, you’ll see a page similar to what you get when you call up a contact in Phone, except at the very bottom you’ll have extra, saving and sharing related options that we’ll cover later in the Phone app section.

Location opens in Google Maps as you’d expect, audio and video in iPod, and images pop up full screen where you can tap the share icon to Save Image — but strangely not re-share it…

When it comes to sending MMS, only picture sending can be initiated from within the Messages app itself. Everything else starts a “share” function from another app (i.e. Share Contact is in Contacts, Share Location is in Google Maps, Share Audio is in Voice Recorder, etc.)

There are two ways to insert a picture into MMS. The first is to tap the camera icon, bottom right. A requester will ask if you want to Take Photo or Choose Existing. Take Photo will call up an embedded version of the Camera app. Frame your picture, tap the camera icon, look at the preview and either hit Retake to try again or Use to insert the picture into your MMS window. (If you want to erase it later, just backspace over it like you would a text character you want to delete)

Choose Existing will call up an image picker (like the Photo App). Pick an Album, pick a picture, and tap Choose to confirm.

The second way to insert a picture into MMS is to paste it…

The new, system-wide Cut, Copy, and Paste service has also been introduced into Messages. It works in a similar way to the implementation in the Notes app, and we’ll cover it more fully there. One difference is that double tapping a previous SMS will give you the Copy popup allowing you to duplicate the entire contents of the SMS to the clipboard. Tapping on an empty entry box will launch the Paste popup, so you can stick the contents back down in an message of your own. If the entry box already contains text, double tapping will select the closest word, and double tapping an holding will select the closet word and popup the loupe.

Again, we’ll cover this more fully in the section for the Notes app.

Messages also now includes line-item deletion and forwarding. Tap the Edit button at the top right, select the messages you want — as many of them as you want — and then hit the red Delete button at the bottom, or the blue Forward button beside it. Edit still isn’t the most elegant name for the combination of deletion and forwarding, mind you, but the functionality is consistent with the Mass Edit feature introduced for Mail in iPhone 2.0.

Lastly, Apple has also answered the call for pervasive landscape-style keyboards, and Messages is one of the text-entry apps that received it. For those who want a Cadillac-wide typing experience, enjoy!

(Note to Apple: a way to “lock” the iPhone in portrait or landscape mode would be appreciated, especially when typing while reclining and every little angle change sends the UI spinning.)

Still no MMS for AT&T users. That’s being released on September 25 (though whether it will require an iPhone 3.1.1 update, or just a new carrier file is unknown).

With iPhone 3.1 you can tap the action button at bottom, left to save them to the camera roll, just like you could previously do with pictures under iPhone 3.0.

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

AT&T iPhone MMS Arrives Today — Here’s a Walkthrough!

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!

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

iPhone 101: How to Maximize iPhone Battery Performance

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!

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

iPhone Ninjary: How Get More Than 11 Home Screens in iPhone 3.0

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!

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

Apple Posts MobileMe iDisk App Video Tutorial

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!

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

Pro Tips: How to Secure Your Jailbroken (or Regular) iPhone Against Hackers

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.

Reboot iPhone

If, all of a sudden, your iPhone starts burning through battery and getting hot at the same time, there could be a “rogue process” just churning away in the background. The answer to that is a good old-fashioned power cycle.

Hold down the sleep button until the red “Slide to power off” arrow appears. If your iPhone is frozen or otherwise in dire straights, you can hold down the home button at the same time as the sleep button to force quit all applications and bring up the red arrow. Then just swipe, let the iPhone turn off, wait a few seconds, and hold down the sleep button again to turn your iPhone back on.

Redo Push

Since iPhone 2.0 we’ve seen Push gone wrong really cause a hit to battery life. With 3.0, Push Notification means not only could mail, calendar, and contacts start misbehaving in the background, but your IM, Twitter, games, and all sorts of other apps can as well.

Apple says Push can cause a 20% drop in battery life, but if you think yours is worse then it should be, the next step is to redo anything that involves Push, including MobileMe and Exchange accounts, and apps using Push Notification. Now, you might want to try doing one at a time, check your battery life, and if you don’t notice any improvement, try the next one. If you find the culprit quickly, that approach could save you some time. If you just want to get it over with, you might want to do them all at once.

For the accounts, go to Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendars, choose your MobileMe and/or Exchange accounts, scroll down to the bottom and hit delete. For apps, go to Settings > Notifications and look at the list of any apps using Push Notification. Go back to the Home Screen, hold down the home button until the icons start to jiggle, and delete the Push Notification app.

Then, for accounts, go back to Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendars, hit Add Account…, choose Mobile Me and/or Exchange, and re-enter your settings. For Push Notification apps, either sync them back from iTunes or go to the App Store app and re-download them.

Restore as New iPhone

We won’t lie to you — this is the nuclear option. It’s scorched earth. But to be frank, we at TiPb almost always default to this step because it almost always “just works”. We do this every time we get a new firmware and every time we notice something just isn’t right, and we have excellent battery life to prove it.

To restore your iPhone as new and get a fresh, clean start, attach it to your Windows or Mac via the USB cable and launch iTunes. A Restore button should be front and center on the screen. Hit it, then wait as iTunes goes through the laborious process of wiping your iPhone and installing the firmware again from scratch.

IMPORTANT: When iTunes asks if you want to restore your data from backup or set up as a new iPhone, choose NEW iPHONE.

Yes, you will lose your settings and any data saved in apps that don’t provide some sort of sync functionality, but it’s possible (even likely) some corruption in those settings or data is contributing to your poor battery life, and with an appliance like the iPhone, this is the only way to get rid of it.

This will also kill your Jailbreak, if you’re jailbroken. But if something in your Jailbreak was killing your battery life, like backgrounder gone awry, trying out your iPhone without the Jailbreak is a good way to establish that.

Once your iPhone is set up as new, you can sync your info and media back over using the iTunes tabs as normal, and/or setup accounts and download apps on the iPhone itself.

Conclusion

iPhone 3.0 and iPhone 3GS should have roughly the same battery life for you as iPhone 2.2.1 and the iPhone 3G. If you’re getting something substantially less than that, there could be something wrong with your iPhone 3.0 install or your iPhone 3GS’ system.

Rebooting the iPhone, redoing Push-enabled applications, and restoring your iPhone as new are three escalating steps you can try to fix your battery problems.

Let us know how they work for you.

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

How To: Troubleshoot iPhone 3.0 Battery Life Problems

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]

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This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

iPhone Pro Tips: Find Text in Safari with Javascript Bookmarklet

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.

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

How to: Search Old MobileMe Mail on the Server

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.

If you don’t have a 3G connection, whether your area doesn’t support it or you’re just indoors or behind an obstruction that’s preventing it, your iPhone might default down to a 2G connection, known as EDGE, (Enhanced Data rates for GSM Evolution – Wikipedia link). That’s the little E symbol, and If we keep the same analogy, this is older, slower technology — dial-up to 3G’s broadband.

If you’re getting an E and you really think you should be getting 3G, try going to the Settings Icon and toggling Airplane Mode on and off. That should force your iPhone to re-connect with the network and give you the fastest speed available. Sometimes even moving to a different, less obstructed spot can make a big difference.

If even EDGE isn’t available, the iPhone will still try to connect via GPRS (General Packet Radio System – Wikipedia link) an even older, slower 2G protocol shown with an O symbol (for outside chance?). To stretch our analogy as thin as this signal, GRPS would be the ancient 24K modems.

Of course, if you have Wi-Fi enabled and connected, you’ll get the Wi-Fi fan symbol instead.

If you’ve turned all the radios off and gone into “Airplane Mode”, you’ll get the little airplane symbol and absolutely no connection to the internet whatsoever. (Turn Airplane Mode off — and your connections back on — via the Settings icon on your home screen.)

And yes, you can turn on Airplane Mode and still re-enable Wi-Fi if you really want to.

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

iPhone 101: iPhone Connection Speed Symbols from O to E to 3G (or an Airplane)