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10 Incredibly Handy iPhone Tips

Do you really know everything about your iPhone? Probably not. Here are 10 tips even the most tech savvy users don’t know.

1. The Hidden Backspace

Have you ever been idly tapping away on your phones built in calculator with the intention of adding 56 to your sum but in your clumsy haste end up dividing by 566 and the lack of a backspace on the calculator means you need to start all over again?
Fear no more, just swipe! Just as you would on Tinder, swiping left (or right) will delete the previous digit allowing you to ‘fix’ your sum without the need to clear it completely!

2. Supercharge Your Battery

For a quick energy boost put your phone in airplane mode – by blocking any cellular or Wi-Fi signals coming to your phone it has nothing else to concentrate on other than charging. While the difference is only minutes faster – I’d say it’s still pretty beneficial when you have only minutes to spare!

3. Customised Controls

We all have our most used stock iPhone apps. I for one will never need to alter the text size on my phone, but for some having the ability to change this quickly and easily is super important. This is where customising your control centre comes in handy – don’t use it? Remove it! If you head to your settings cog, down to control centre and select customise controls – this will show you what controls are enabled and disabled for use via the control centre, personalise as you wish.

4. Video Screenshot

So it isn’t a screenshot as such, its actually a recording but you never know when it will come in handy. Follow tip 3 (above) and there you will find the screen recording control, add this to the control centre. Open the control centre and deep hold on your new added control, select if you want/don’t want sound recording and begin! (Remember to stop the recording too when you’ve finished) Any videos you make will automatically save to your camera roll.

5. Snap and Shoot

One of the most annoying issues I encounter when recording a video is when I see the perfect shot for a photograph but I’m already filming the video! Argh! Your iPhone help’s you with this issue by allowing you to take a photo mid video – the button is to the left of the record button! The photo is then saved directly to the camera roll. It saves you going through the video multiple times to try and get a screenshot of the moment you missed.

6. One Handed Keyboard

With the evolution of HU-GE handsets it’s actually becoming more difficult to type on your phone single handedly. To accommodate this Apple have included the function for a one-handed keyboard, it hides neatly with your emojis and can be activated or deactivated when required. You can even set it as your default keyboard if you really want to.

7. Contact Extra’s

If you’re anything like me, your contacts are a mess! No one is saved under their real name and there are a dozen emoji’s following it which makes asking Siri to call my boyfriend a tad awkward for those who hear me ask my phone to call ‘The Greatest red heart red heart red heart.’

With a Nickname available on your contacts you can simply ask Siri to call ‘Mom’ and will respond by calling ‘Best Mom Ever red heart purple heart yellow heart’. All you have to do is add the Nickname field on the contact and put in their public name, leaving the NSFW name as their ordinary name hidden deep in your messages.

8. Pan Left, Pan Right

When you’re taking a panoramic photograph, the scene you’re shooting doesn’t always suit the left to right panoramic cue that your iPhone gives you little did you know you can change it! Simply by tapping the arrow itself you can change from left to right to right to left, perfectly suiting your photography needs.

9. Manage Text Replacement

The best and simplest way to describe the text replacement function on your iPhone is ‘the lazy man’s texting tool’. For example, as an unofficial rule I always send six x’s to my partner and one x to everybody else and throughout the day I text him a lot so to type xxxxxx at the end of every message is rather time consuming. So, I have set up a text replacement which allows me to type just two x’s which will automatically be replaced with six! All you have to do is head to settings, general, keyboard and text replacement and begin creating your lazy man’s tool.

10. Ask Siri to….

We are all aware that Siri does things for you like setting your morning alarm, making an event in the calendar, even showing you the directions to your destination. But there are some cool things you can do with the AI, Siri does maths for you. You can ask it to sing you a song, tell you a joke, even flip a coin. Weirdly, you can also flirt with Siri!

Check out this article from PocketLint for more:

65 things to ask Siri for a good giggle