If the iPhone is your first smartphone, then you won’t fully appreciate the lack of a means to send contacts or files via Bluetooth or IR (infra-red). What if you want to send your Google map to a friend to show him or her the way? What about sending a website link of your winning team to your buddy to rub it in? The iPhone is lacking in some of the more conventional methods of sending data to someone else, but the built-in screenshot capability can do wonders! Read on for more!

If you haven’t tried it already, just hold down the power button and home button at the same time and presto, your iPhone will capture a screenshot and send the image to Photos. Just about every other smartphone I can think of requires a third-party app to pull off this neat little trick, but fortunately the iPhone makes it easy as pie. There’s a lot of things you can do with this feature, and here’s just a few.

Send Contact Information

If you haven’t noticed, there’s no button or tab to send contact information to someone else via email or otherwise. Therefore, you have to be creative. Use the screenshot feature to snap a photo of the contact you want to send, go find it in Photos, and email that sucker to the one you want to have it. Easy peasy!

Send SMS Conversation

Maybe you have some important information in a text message that you need to send to one or more people, like movie times, an address, directions, etc. Since the iPhone has no copy/paste and no means of forwarding a text message, take a screenshot and email it. Starting to get the picture? Pun. Ugh.

Send Your Stock Quotes

Yeah, I know, why would you want to send the bad news to anyone? But hey, if there’s a reason to send stock quotes, it’s easy to do with screenshot and email. Maybe you want to send some stock ideas to a family member or friend. Maybe someone you know doesn’t have an iPhone (gasp!) with it’s easy access to stock quotes, so you can be helpful and send the bad news via email!

Send A Web Site Screenshot

Did your Celtics take your friend’s favorite team to the woodshed? Now you can do a little taunting of your own by taking a screenshot with your iPhone and emailing it to your friend to rub it in a little. Yes, it’s gloating. But hey, you have an iPhone – license to gloat, baby!

There are lots of possibilities – take screenshots of Google Maps, your new high score on a favorite iPhone game (again, send to a friend for some gloat-ness), and just about anything else that you can display on your iPhone. Be creative!

If you have a tip or how-to that you would like to share, drop by the forums and/or email us atbrian.hart@tipb.com.

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

Tips and How-To’s: Screenshot Savvy

While this might be iPhone 101 to some, Apple pretty much snuck this feature into their 2.0 firmware, and while we’re now at 2.1, not everyone may yet know that they can capture their iPhone screen contents with just the touch of a button — well, two buttons actually.

To take a screenshot with your iPhone or iPod Touch, just press the Home and Sleep buttons at the same time. On 2.0, the screen will flash white, while with 2.1, you’ll also get the camera shutter sound, and your screen will be captured.

To access your screenshots go to Photos and on the iPhone, look in Camera Roll, while on the iPod Touch, check out Saved Photos. (see, poetically, screenshots after the jump!)

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

How To: Take a Screenshot With the iPhone