Sunday, December 12, 2010

iPhone Power Tricks

There are many ways to switch your iPhone on and off. The following are the most important methods that every iPhone owner should know.


Unlocking Your iPhone
When your iPhone has been idle for a while, it automatically locks, and the screen goes dark. When this happens, press Home. To unlock your phone, swipe the slider from the left to the right. The lock screen clears, and the Home screen springs into place.

Screen locking is a form of power saving. If your iPhone never turned off its bright display, it would go through a battery charge much faster. Shutting down the screen and going into lock mode extends your battery life and optionally allows you to protect your iPhone by requiring a passcode to use the device after it has been locked.

If it seems like your iPhone is locking too frequently, you can adjust how long it should wait before locking. Tap your way to Settings ➤ General ➤ Auto-Lock, and select how many minutes you want your iPhone to wait before going dark. Sometimes you may want to just power the iPhone off by yourself and disable autolocking. There’s a choice for that in the autolock settings, when you set the duration to Never. Make sure you have a good power source available at all times if you disable autolocking, since autolocking is a power-saving feature. Disabling it means your iPhone will use up battery power more rapidly.


Putting Your iPhone to Sleep
For iPhones, sleep mode offers a power-saving way to use your device. Press the Sleep/Wake button once. The screen turns off, and your iPhone locks and enters its lowpower mode. You can still listen to music and receive phone calls. The volume control buttons on the left side of your iPhone work, and the switch on your iPhone headset continues to control music playback and allows you to answer calls. Under iOS 4.0 on devices newer than the iPhone 3G, some apps can continue to run in the background even when the device is asleep. As an example, some location-aware apps continuously update the location of the iPhone although it is asleep. To wake up your iPhone again, press Home, and swipe to unlock.


Securing Your iPhone with a Passcode Lock
For security, you can assign a passcode lock for your iPhone. There are two types of passcodes: a simple passcode, which consists of four easily remembered and typed numbers, and a regular passcode, which can include text. When locked, your iPhone cannot be used except for emergency calls. Go to Settings ➤ General, and tap Passcode Lock to establish a new passcode. There’s a button that turns on the passcode lock feature. If a four-digit simple passcode is all you’d like to enter, make sure that the Simple Passcode switch is set to the default value of on. If you’d rather enter a text passcode, flip that switch to the off position.

Once you’ve decided what kind of passcode you want, tap Turn Passcode On to enter it. If you have chosen simple passcode, you’re prompted to enter four digits twice— once to enter the numbers and again to verify that you entered it correctly the first time. For regular passcodes, you’re prompted to enter your passcode with text, symbols, and numbers. Once again, you’ll have to enter the passcode twice to make sure that it has been entered properly.

As soon as you’ve set a passcode, you can change some other settings that are related to the passcode lock. Tap the Require Passcode button to set the time interval before your iPhone requests the passcode. Shorter times are more secure, although you’ll need to enter your passcode more frequently as a result.

If you like to use Voice Control and your iPhone or Bluetooth headset to do voice dialing or control the iPod app, slide the Voice Dial switch to on to make sure that Voice Control is always enabled, even when the phone is locked. This makes it handy for you to use a Bluetooth headset to dial and control your phone, even when it’s sitting in your pocket or in a briefcase or purse.

The final button on the Passcode Lock screen ensures absolute security in case your iPhone is lost or stolen. Sliding the Erase Data button to on will erase the contents of the iPhone if someone incorrectly enters the passcode ten times. Before you engage this setting, be sure that you know your password.

How can you test your passcode? Press the Sleep/Wake button once to put your iPhone to sleep, wait for the time interval to pass, and then wake the iPhone by either pressing the Sleep/Wake button again or pressing the Home button. A passcode challenge screen appears. Enter your passcode correctly, and your iPhone unlocks.

To remove the passcode from your iPhone, go back to the Passcode Lock screen. Tap the Turn Passcode Off button, and then reenter the passcode one more time to confirm that the rightful owner of the iPhone is making the request.

What can you do if you forget your passcode or a mean-spirited colleague adds one to your iPhone without telling you? Unfortunately, you will have to connect the iPhone to your computer and use iTunes to restore the iPhone to factory defaults. Why? Well, for security reasons, there’s absolutely no way to reset the passcode since that would defeat the purpose of the passcode.


Multitasking and Quitting Applications
Prior to iOS 4, iPhones could not perform more than one task at a time. Well, they could play music from the iPod app while performing some other tasks, but that was about it. iOS now acts more like a modern multitasking operating system by allowing multiple apps to run simultaneously. One example that many people pointed at as proof of the need for iOS multitasking was being able to play tunes using the popular Pandora music-streaming app while performing other tasks, such as reading e-mail, at the same time.

When you’re using an app, pressing the Home button returns you to the Home screen, but the app is either suspended or may actually be running. In fact, if the app has been written to take advantage of back grounding, it will continue to run when you’re viewing the Home screen or running other apps. In other words, don’t assume that when an app is out of sight, it’s shut down.

To see what’s currently running on your iPhone under iOS 4, double-click the Home button. The current Home screen becomes transparent, and a side-scrolling list of active apps appears at the bottom of the screen.

Flicking the active apps to the right, you’ll eventually get to a control panel for whatever music app happens to be active at the time. This control panel is equipped with play, pause, fast-forward, and fast-reverse buttons, as well as a screen orientation lock button. The far-right icon on the control panel shows which music app you’re currently controlling.

On an iPhone 3G or 3GS running iOS4, having multiple apps still running in background can increase usage of the processor to the point that your iPhone heats up, the device uses much more power, and the response of the phone becomes sluggish. Even with the iPhone 4’s powerful and fast Apple A4 processor, too many apps running simultaneously can slow things down dramatically. Idle applications occupy your iPhone’s memory, which may eventually cause it to balk when you try to open another app.

So, how do you quit apps? Double-click the Home button, and at the bottom of the iPhone display you’ll see a side-scrolling list of all the apps that are currently running. To turn off an app, tap and hold an app icon in the list until it begins to jiggle. A small minus sign in a red circle appears at the top-left corner of the icon. Tap the minus sign to quit the application.


Powering Your iPhone Off and On
To power off your iPhone, press and hold the Sleep/Wake button for about five seconds. A slider appears prompting you to slide the red button that appears to the right in order to power off. To cancel, either tap Cancel or just wait about ten seconds. The iPhone automatically returns you to the Home screen if you don’t power down within that time. When your iPhone is powered off, it ceases to function. You cannot listen to music. You cannot receive phone calls. You must power your iPhone back on for it to do these things.

To power on your iPhone, press and hold Sleep/Wake for two to three seconds. Release the button when you see the white Apple icon. The iPhone starts up and returns you automatically to the unlock screen.


Rebooting Your iPhone
At times, you may need to reboot your iPhone. The most common reason for doing this is that you have installed a new app that recommends a reboot after installation. Although you can reboot just by powering down and then powering back up, Apple provides a much easier way do this. Press and hold both the Home and Sleep/Wake buttons for eight to ten seconds. Ignore the “slide to power off” message, and keep holding both buttons until the white Apple logo appears. Once it shows up, release both buttons, and let the iPhone finish its reboot. You will return automatically to the unlock screen.


Placing Your iPhone into Recovery Mode
On occasion, you might encounter one of these odd symptoms:
» Your iPhone continually restarts but never displays the Home screen.

» An update or restore did not complete, and the device is no longer recognized in iTunes.

» The iPhone stops responding, displaying the Apple logo with no progress bar or a stopped progress bar for more than ten minutes.

If this happens to you, you can place the iPhone into recovery mode and attempt to restore it. Here’s how to put your iPhone into recovery mode:

1. Disconnect the USB cable from your iPhone, but leave the other end connected to the USB port on your computer.

2. Turn off your iPhone. Press and hold the Sleep/Wake button until the red slider appears, and then slide it to the right. Wait for the iPhone to turn off. If you can’t turn off the iPhone using the slider, press and hold the Sleep/Wake and Home buttons at the same time. When the iPhone finally turns off, release the buttons.

3. While pressing and holding the Home button, reconnect the USB cable to your iPhone. When you reconnect the USB cable, the device should power on. If a depleted battery\ icon appears on the iPhone screen, let your iPhone charge for at least ten minutes and then start over again at step 2.

4. Hold the Home button down until you see the Connect to iTunes screen. It displays an iTunes icon (a music CD with musical notes in front of it) and a USB cable.

5. At this point, if iTunes isn’t running on your computer, launch it. You should see a “recovery mode” prompt in iTunes that says, “iTunes has detected an iPhone in recovery mode. You must restore this iPhone before it can be used with iTunes.” Click the OK button to begin using iTunes to restore the iPhone.

Source of Information :  Taking Your iPhone 4 to the Max
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