After using the iPhone 3GS for a week, here’s five of my favorite, non-obvious tricks I’ve picked up.
Show Battery Percentage
The iPhone battery meter is so imprecise as to be useless. But in iPhone 3, you can show the percentage charge. To show the battery percentage, go to Settings>General>Usage and turn on Battery Percentage.
Variable Speed Scrubbing
I listen to a lot of radio shows on the iPhone from my hometown, London. These shows can be a couple of hours long so I often “scrub” through to the best parts. On the iPod with a scroll wheel, this was easy. But on the iPhone, it became an ordeal — the song bar was notoriously fiddly and the track would often jump when you pulled your finger off. But with the 3.0 software, scrubbing can now done be at different speeds. When you hit the song bar it starts glowing, allowing you to scrub through the track from left to right. But the further you drag your finger vertically *down*, toward the “Home” button, the finer you can control the scrolling speed: it goes from “high speed” to “half speed,” “quarter speed,” and finally “fine scrubbing.” No more jumping tracks.
Double Tap “Home” To Launch Camera
I’m using the camera a lot on the new iPhone 3GS. Instead of going to the Home Screen and hunting for the Camera icon, the camera can be launched with a double tap of the Home button. Go to Settings>General>Home and select “Camera.”
(Alternatively, you can map the Home button double-tap to iPod, Phone Favorites, Search or Home).
Easy Email Suffixes
When typing out an email address in the “To” field, there’s a shortcut for adding .net .edu .org .com suffixes. Press and hold the “.” key (the period key) and the suffix options pop up.
Sound Check
This is really an Easter Egg, not a hidden feature, but delightful nonetheless. The new Voice Memos app shows the image of a microphone. Tap the image of the mic, and the VU meter jumps as if you were tapping a real microphone.
Leander Kahney is the editor and publisher of Cult of Mac.
Leander is a longtime technology reporter and the author of six acclaimed books about Apple, including two New York Times bestsellers: Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple’s Greatest Products and Inside Steve’s Brain, a biography of Steve Jobs.
He’s also written a top-selling biography of Apple CEO Tim Cook and authored Cult of Mac and Cult of iPod, which both won prestigious design awards. Most recently, he was co-author of Cult of Mac, 2nd Edition.
Leander has been reporting about Apple and technology for nearly 30 years.
Before founding Cult of Mac as an independent publication, Leander was news editor at Wired.com, where he was responsible for the day-to-day running of the Wired.com website. He headed up a team of six section editors, a dozen reporters and a large pool of freelancers. Together the team produced a daily digest of stories about the impact of science and technology, and won several awards, including several Webby Awards, 2X Knight-Batten Awards for Innovation in Journalism and the 2010 MIN (Magazine Industry Newsletter) award for best blog, among others.
Before being promoted to news editor, Leander was Wired.com’s senior reporter, primarily covering Apple. During that time, Leander published a ton of scoops, including the first in-depth report about the development of the iPod. Leander attended almost every keynote speech and special product launch presented by Steve Jobs, including the historic launches of the iPhone and iPad. He also reported from almost every Macworld Expo in the late ’90s and early ‘2000s, including, sadly, the last shows in Boston, San Francisco and Tokyo. His reporting for Wired.com formed the basis of the first Cult of Mac book, and subsequently this website.
Before joining Wired, Leander was a senior reporter at the legendary MacWeek, the storied and long-running weekly that documented Apple and its community in the 1980s and ’90s.
Leander has written for Wired magazine (including the Issue 16.04 cover story about Steve Jobs’ leadership at Apple, entitled Evil/Genius), Scientific American, The Guardian, The Observer, The San Francisco Chronicle and many other publications.
Leander has a postgrad diploma in artificial intelligence from the University of Aberdeen, and a BSc (Hons) in experimental psychology from the University of Sussex.
He has a diploma in journalism from the UK’s National Council for the Training of Journalists.
Leander lives in San Francisco, California, and is married with four children. He’s an avid biker and has ridden in many long-distance bike events, including California’s legendary Death Ride.
You can find out more about Leander on LinkedIn and Facebook. You can follow him on X at @lkahney or Instagram.
15 responses to “Five Favorite Hidden Features of iPhone 3”
Awesome blog! Thanks
for sharing this info. I will visit your blog again to check your new articles.