Useful iPhone Configuration Techniques
You have seen quite a few handy iPhone customization tricks so far, but you are not done yet not by a long shot. The next few sections take you through a few more heart-warmingly useful iPhone customization techniques.
Changing the name of your iPhone
When you first configure your iPhone, one of the chores you perform is giving it a custom name. This might sound frivolous, but there is a good reason to give your iPhone a unique name. First, when you sync your iPhone, iTunes automatically creates a backup of the iPhone data. Each backup is identified by the name of the iPhone and the date the backup was performed. If you are in an environment where the same copy of iTunes is used to sync multiple iPhones, giving each iPhone its own name enables you to differentiate between multiple iPhone backups.
Of course, feel free to rename your iPhone for the sake of giving it a cool or snappy name if the mood strikes. Here is how:
- In the iPhone Home screen, tap Settings. The Settings screen appears.
- Tap General. The General settings appear.
- Tap About. The About page appears.
- Tap Name. The Settings app displays a text box with the current name of your iPhone inside.
- Edit the name as you see fit.
Turning sounds on and off
Your iPhone is often a noisy little thing that makes all manner of rings, beeps, and boops, seemingly at the slightest provocation. Consider a short list of the events that can give the iPhone's lungs a workout:
- Incoming calls
- Incoming and outgoing e-mail messages
- Incoming text messages
- New voicemail messages
- Outgoing tweets and Facebook posts
- Calendar and reminder alerts
- Locking and unlocking the phone
- Tapping the keys on the on-screen keyboard
None of this may bother you when you are on your own, but if you are in a meeting, at a movie, or anywhere else where extraneous sounds are unwelcome, you might want to turn off some (or all) of the iPhone sound effects.
First, you should know that when a call comes in and you press the Sleep/Wake button once, your iPhone silences the ringer. That is a sweet and useful feature, but the problem is that it may take you one or two rings before you can dig out your iPhone and press Sleep/Wake. By that time, folks nearby are already glaring at you.
To prevent this faux pas, you can switch your iPhone into silent mode, which means it does not ring and it does not play any alerts or sound effects. When the sound is turned off, the only alarms that are audible are the ones you have set using the Clock app. The phone still vibrates unless you also turn this feature off. If silent mode is a bit too drastic, you can control exactly which sounds your iPhone utters by following these steps:
- On the Home screen, tap Settings. The Settings app appears.
- Tap Sounds. The Sounds screen appears.
- In the Silent section, the Vibrate setting determines whether iPhone vibrates when the phone is in silent mode. Vibrating is a good idea in silent mode, so On is a good choice here.
- In the Ringer and Alerts section, drag the volume slider to set the volume of the ringtone that plays when a call comes in.
Locking the ringer volume is a good idea because it prevents one of the major iPhone frustrations: missing a call because the ringer volume has been muted accidentally (for example, by your iPhone getting jostled in a purse or pocket).
- To lock the ringer volume, tap the Change with Buttons switch to Off. This means that pressing the volume buttons on the side of the iPhone will have no effect on the ringer volume.
- Use the Vibrate setting to determine whether iPhone vibrates when the phone is in ring mode. Vibrating probably is not all that important in ring mode, so feel free to change this setting to Off. The exception is if you reduce and/or lock the ringer volume (see Steps 4 and 5), in which case setting Vibrate to On might help you notice an incoming call.
- To set a different default ringtone, tap Ringtone to open the Ringtone screen. Tap the ringtone you want to use (iPhone plays a preview), and then tap Sounds to return to the Sounds screen.
- To set a different incoming text message sound, tap Text Tone to open the Text Tone screen. Tap the sound effect you want to use (iPhone plays a preview), and then tap Sounds to return to the Sounds screen.
- For each of the events in the list (from Text Tone to Reminder Alerts), tap the event and then tap the sound you want to hear. You can also tap None to turn off the event sound.
- To turn off the sound that your iPhone makes when you lock and unlock it, tap the Lock Sounds switch to Off.
- To turn off the sound that your iPhone makes each time you tap a key on the virtual keyboard, tap the Keyboard Clicks switch to Off.
One of the truly annoying iPhone sound effects is the clicking sound made by each key when using the on-screen keyboard. If it does not make you batty after 5 minutes, it will certainly drive anyone within earshot to thoughts of violence. So I strongly recommend tapping the Keyboard Clicks setting to Off. There, that is better.
Customizing the keyboard
Although you can type on your iPhone, don't expect to pound out the prose as easily as you can on your computer. The on-screen keyboard is a bit too small for rapid and accurate typing, but it is still a far sight better than any other phone out there, mostly because the keyboard was thoughtfully designed by the folks at Apple. It even changes depending on the app you use. For example, the regular keyboard features a spacebar at the bottom. However, if you are surfing the web with the Safari browser, the keyboard that appears when you type in the address bar does away with the spacebar. In its place you find a period (.), a slash (/), and a button that enters the characters .com. Web addresses don't use spaces, so Apple replaced the spacebar with three things that commonly appear in a web address. Nice!
Another nice innovation you get with the iPhone keyboard is Auto-Capitalization. If you type a punctuation mark that indicates the end of a sentence "for example, a period (.), a question mark (?), or an exclamation mark (!)" or if you press Return to start a new paragraph, the iPhone automatically activates the Shift key, because it assumes you are starting a new sentence.
On a related note, double-tapping the spacebar activates a keyboard shortcut: Instead of entering two spaces, the iPhone automatically enters a period (.) followed by a space. This is a welcome bit of efficiency because otherwise you'd have to tap the Number key (123) to display the numbers and punctuation marks, tap the period (.), and then tap the spacebar.
For many people, one of the keys to quick iPhone typing is to clear the mind and just tap away without worrying about accuracy. In many cases, you will actually be rather amazed at how accurate this willy-nilly approach can be. Why does it work? The secret is the Auto-Correction feature on your iPhone, which eyeballs what you are typing and automatically corrects any errors. For example, if you tap hte, your iPhone automatically corrects this to the. Your iPhone displays the suggested correction before you complete the word (say, by tapping a space or a comma), and you can reject the suggestion by tapping it.
If you do end up with spelling errors (for example, by rejecting a proper correction), your iPhone lets you know by displaying the miscreant words underlined with red dots. Tap an underlined term to see a list of suggested corrections, and then tap the correction that works for you.
Typing a number or punctuation mark normally requires three taps: tapping Number (123), tapping the number or symbol, and then tapping ABC. Here is a faster way: Press and hold the Number key to open the numeric keyboard, slide the same finger to the number or punctuation symbol you want, and then release the key. This types the number or symbol and returns to the regular keyboard all in one touch.
One thing the iPhone keyboard does not seem to have is a Caps Lock feature that, when activated, enables you to type all-uppercase letters. To do this, you need to tap and hold the Shift key, and then use a different finger to tap the uppercase letters. However, the iPhone actually does have a Caps Lock feature; it is just that it is turned off by default.
To turn on Caps Lock, or change the settings for the Auto-Capitalization, spell-checking, spacebar double-tap shortcut, or Auto-Correction features, follow these steps:
- On the Home screen, tap Settings. The Settings app appears.
- Tap General. The General screen appears.
- Tap Keyboard. The Keyboard screen appears.
- If you no longer want your iPhone to automatically activate the Shift key at the beginning of sentences, tap the Auto-Capitalization setting to Off.
- If you no longer want your iPhone to suggest spelling corrections as you type, tap Auto-Correction to Off.
- If you no longer want your iPhone to underline misspelled words in your notes and messages, tap Check Spelling to Off.
- If you want to use the Caps Lock feature, tap the Enable Caps Lock switch to On.
- If you want to use the spacebar double-tap shortcut, tap the "." Shortcut setting to On.
- To add an international keyboard layout, tap International Keyboards to open the Keyboards screen, and then set the keyboard layout you want to add to On.
