All Articles in Tips and How-To

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.

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For some, even the newly expanded 11 Home Screen, 180 (including 4 fixed dock) app slots under iPhone 3.0 isn’t enough. It’s not about need — it’s about want. Luckily, iPhone 3.0 offers another handy, theoretically unlimited way to access apps: Spotlight. According to David Pogue:

You can install UNLIMITED APPS! Only 180 show up as icons—but Spotlight can find and open all of them! (And yes, we tried. Stopped at 250!)

So, check off every single one of your 56,000 (maybe?!) apps and sync them over. Then, instead of swiping right through 11 pages only to find the excess unaccessible, swipe LEFT to go to the Spotlight Search screen (or just press the home button again to get there super quick).

Next, start typing the name of the app, hidden or otherwise, you want to access, and as soon as it appears in the results, tap it to launch.

Boom. App pack rat bliss.

Note: Spotlight also shows WebClip icons you’ve bookmarked from MobileSafari to your Home Screen, so you can go crazy with quick access to your favorite websites as well.

And for those who prefer not to fill up their iPhone with apps, remember you can delete an app when not using it and download it again via the on-board App Store app, without any duplicate charges, any time. Cloud management is a reality, and a second option.

Dave wrote in asking TiPb how he could email full size, full quality photos from his iPhone 3GS. Sounds simple, right, but by default if you go into Camera Roll choose one or more photos, and then choose Share, the iPhone will crunch the image(s) down to 800×600.

If, however, you use the copy command, then exit, go to email, and use paste to insert the images, the iPhone will keep them at their full 2048×1526 size.

Of course, increased resolution means increased file size, in our test case 816KB vs. 104KB for a single photo, so keep that in mind before trying to attach 10 full res photos and then wondering why it takes forever for the email to send and your buddy’s tiny free-mail account bounces it back for exceeding maximum capacity…

But for people like Dave who just need to get a few, high quality shots off via email, this looks like a great work around.

[Geek.ThinkUnique.org via DaringFireball]

Disclaimer – Neither TiPb nor I take any responsibility for any problems/issues/bricking/etc. that may occur while using this software to modify your iPhone. Please be aware of what you are doing. This will NOT work with iPhone 3GS.

There has been a lot of buzz going on in the forums regarding jailbreaking the iPhone 3.0 software lately, and a lot of questions to go along with it!. Today we’re going to take a deeper look at the exact steps you have to take to get your iPhone 3G with the 3.0 software, jailbroken on your Windows PC machine.

Let’s get started, after the jump! Read the rest of this entry »

iPhone 3.0 features Calendar Subscriptions, where you can enter the URL for a shared calendar and near-instantly add it to your iPhone.

That’s all well and good to share a family or business calendar, but what about more wide-ranging ones? What about national holidays, religious events, movie release dates, sports team schedules? Luckily, Apple’s already made this simple for Mac OS X iCal users, and even more luckily it works just as simply for iPhone 3.0 users as well.

We’ll share how, after the break…

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Disclaimer – Neither TiPb nor I take any responsibility for any problems/issues/bricking/etc. that may occur while using this software to modify your iPhone. Please be aware of what you are doing. This will NOT work with iPhone 3GS.

There has been a lot of buzz going on in the forums regarding jailbreaking the iPhone 3.0 software lately, and a lot of questions to go along with it!. Today we’re going to take a deeper look at the exact steps you have to take to get your iPhone 3G with 3.0 jailbroken on your Mac.

Let’s get started, after the jump! Read the rest of this entry »

We’re figuring a lot of folks will default to the ubiquitous YouTube for iPhone 3G S video sharing, since Apple was user-minded enough to include it in the options. But for those who want pristine QuickTime quality, the Mobile Me news blog has you covered:

The new iPhone 3G S lets you shoot video in addition to photos, and sharing those videos on your MobileMe Gallery works exactly the same. From your camera roll choose what you want to share — video or photo — tap the arrow in the lower left corner, and choose Send to MobileMe. Enter a title, choose the album you want to publish to, and tap Publish. (If there are no albums in your Gallery, one called “New Album” will be automatically created.) Click here to learn more about Gallery.

If you’re sharing some iPhone 3G S video, let us know how you like the quality, and the MobileMe gallery uploads.

Apple’s MobileMe News shares how to view calendars published to MobileMe on iPhone:

MobileMe members who use iCal on a Mac can publish calendars to MobileMe to share with friends and family. To publish an iCal calendar, simply click the calendar and select Publish from the Calendar menu. You can then send an email inviting other iCal users to subscribe.

Your friends and family can now subscribe to your published calendars and view them on their iPhone or iPod touch running iPhone OS 3.0. They simply view the invitation email on their device and tap the link to set up the subscription to the calendar. For more details on how to publish calendars to MobileMe and subscribe to them, please read this support article.

Subscribing to calendars is a great new feature in iPhone 3.0, but is buried in the Settings. This, however, looks like a much friendlier way to set them up. Hopefully commonly shared calendars, like holidays, sports team schedules, etc. will set up some similarly easy add options for iPhone users.

With iPhone 1.x and 2.x, you could hold down the Home button to “force quit” an application (kill the process) and return to the Home Screen. With iPhone 3.0, however, holding down the Home button now activates Voice Control on the iPhone 3G S.

So, how do you Force Quit under iPhone 3.0? iPhonejunkie3 provides the answer (via EverythingiCafe):

To force quit an application in 3.0, press and hold the sleep/wake button until the slide to power off screen appears, then press and hold the home button until the application quits (about six seconds).

Yes, this does indeed mean holding down Home is now useless on iPhone 1.x and 2.x, but that most likely will only affect jailbreakers and others who have specific reason for not upgrading. Everyone else gets a slightly more complicated, but still functional, Force Quit.

Apple.com has posted up a large menu of help and how-to articles for the iPhone 3G S (and a few features aside, the iPhones 2G and 3G as well).

Reader Kagan, who sent in the tip, points out that if you dig through the contents, you find little gems like 11 home screens allowed with iPhone 3.0 — which we saw in the beta, but is nice to get official confirmation.

If you find any gems of your own, send them our way!

[Thanks Kagan!]