For those of you who already had an Apple ID that doesn’t necessarily be an email address you might be in surprise to see that activating your iCloud service needs an Apple ID that’s an email address. I was a victim of this.

So I went ahead and gave my @gmail.com email address and everything went well. I was even surprised to see that it took my old password that was associated with my non-email Apple ID. The bummer was that iCloud would need to verify your email address before you can start using it. This wouldn’t be an issue with other email providers I guess but with an @gmail.com email address there seem to be some delivery issues. The verification email essentially would never come in.

There is a workaround to get things moving so you can start to make use of iCloud using your @gmail.com email address. The trick is to add a dot to your email address if you don’t have one.

Visit id.apple.com and sign-in to your account with your existing Apple ID. Then on the “Name, ID, email addresses” tab on the left hit the “Edit” link on to the right and give your email a dot decoration (have a dot somewhere on your email address, for example, johnappleseed@gmail.com could be john.appleseed@gmail.com) and save. Hit the “Verify now” link and this time the verification email would come through.

The only compromise is that I now have to use my email with the dot but that’s no big deal given the fact that Gmail delivers all your emails to the original email address even if you decorate your email address with extra dots.

So, that solved my problem and I hope it helps someone who is facing the same issue. Give it a try and share what you find.

If you are willing to pay a little bit you can easily purchase some nice ringtones using iTunes on your iPhone.

Earlier we have mentioned about how to add your own ringtones to your iPhone. We even walked you through how to add multiple ringtones to your iPhone. To add to that mix we listed a list of useful applications to create your own custom ringtone. But there are so many comments that paint a picture that for some of you it’s not that easy to add your own custom ringtones to your iPhone. If you are one of those few and if you don’t want to go through the process of creating your own custom ringtones then iTunes on your iPhone can help you.

With iTunes on your iPhone you can easily purchase professional ringtones for your iPhone. The price is not that expensive, comparatively but it’s not free. If you are willing to spend a couple of dollars for your favorite ringtone then using iTunes on your iPhone to purchase ringtone is the easiest way to get custom ringtones to your iPhone.

If you are not familiar with iTunes on your iPhone just launch the iTunes app on your iPhone. Search for it if you couldn’t find it.

Once launched tap on the “Ringtones” tab at the bottom. You should be able to see all the featured ringtones for that day.

You can also view the Top 10 ringtones or you can see the ringtones based on genre.

Once you locate the appropriate ringtone that you like iTunes app on iPhone allows you to listen to the tone before you buy.

Just tap on the ringtone name to listen to the ringtone.

Once you decide to buy a ringtone tap on the price and it turns into “Buy Now” that allows you to buy the ringtone.

It is as simple as that, browse, listen and buy. If you don’t want to mess with adding a custom ringtone to your iPhone you can use the iTunes app on your iPhone to purchase ringtones easily. Enjoy your newly found ringtones!

Use this simple trick to add all your favorite PDF files to iBooks on your iPhone or iPad.

With iOS4 comes a handy little application called iBooks. With iBooks you can read all your favorite eBooks at the comfort of your iPhone or iPad. But you would be surprised to know that can also read all your favorite PDF files using iBooks on your iPhone or iPad.

Adding PDF files to iBooks is relatively simple and straight-forward.

First, make sure you click on the Books folder on iTunes so it is selected. You might see the sample eBook on your Books folder. Keep it or you can delete it, your choice.

Find the PDF file that you wanted to add to your iPhone. Drag and Drop the file into the Books folder on iTunes.

If you wish to add some metadata about the PDF file you can do so by using the “Get Info” option when you right-click on the PDF file in iTunes. It’s an optional step but would certainly help if you have a lot of books on iBooks and wanted to identify them quickly.

Now that’s been added to Books on iTunes you need to make sure that new PDF get synced into your iPhone or iPad. Go into your iPhone folder and click on the “Books” tab. Make sure “Sync Books” is checked. If “Selected Books” is checked then make sure to check the PDF file that you wanted to get into your iPhone. Once done, hit the Sync button.

Your new PDF should show up on your iPhone. You might be surprised to see that it’s not showing up by default. Once in iBooks you need to tap on the “PDFs” tab to see your PDFs.

Now that you know how to load all you favorite PDFs in to your iTunes you might need to make sure couple of things,

• Do not load PDFs that are huge in size.
• Do not load PDFs that are in violation to any copyrights.
• Do not load PDFs that would be hard to read on the tiny screen of your iPhone.

I hope this helps you make use of all the valuable PDF files that you have in your computer. I certainly started reading a bunch of my favorite PDFs otherwise would have never bothered to read.

iOS4 for iPhone 3GS doesn’t come with the increasingly popular iBooks app. Follow these simple steps to get iBooks on your iPhone 3GS running iOS4.

iOS4 for iPhone has quite a lot of feature enhancements that makes it worth upgrading. Even though the feature set becomes miniscule if you are not using it on iPhone 4 it still is worth upgrading.

Part of iOS4 is a new app for iPhones called iBooks. iBooks is your mobile bookshelf where you can stack all your favorite eBooks from iTunes book store and can read them wherever you are. Certainly a pretty handy app to have on your iPhone.

Even though it’s advertised that iOS4 comes with iBooks, it’s not really unless you have iPhone 4. For iPhone 3GS and 3G users you have to download the app on your own. Getting iBooks manually is not that hard.

All you need to do is search for iBooks on AppStore and install it the regular way (it is a top featured app as of now).

Once installed you can shop for eBooks on iTunes bookstore. Keep in mind that iBooks comes by default with only one sample eBook and so you might want to stack up your iBooks shelf with the books that you like. Just tap on the “Store” button at the top and that will take you to the iTunes bookstore.

Similar to apps, once you pick a book you’ll be presented with the details where you can get the eBook for whatever the price listed.

If you are not sure about the book you can try a sample of the book. Sample books are marked with the word “Sample” in your bookshelf.

The above is a screenshot of a sample book when opened to read. Initial observation is that the font and text and clear and comfortable enough to read on the small device.

If you are ever wondering where iBooks is after you’ve upgraded your iPhone 3GS to iOS4 I hope this guides you in the right direction. Feel free to leave your comments below.

Use this simple trick to restore Visual Voicemail on your iPhone.

If you are using the internet tethering hack on your iPhone or if you have tried to tether your iPhone you must have ended up with a broken Visual Voicemail on your iPhone. Since Visual Voicemail is one of coolest features of your iPhone, many times you don’t want to sacrifice that.

If you are willing to trade-in internet tethering for Visual Voicemail then follow these simple steps to recover Visual Voicemail on your iPhone.

Go into your iPhone Settings. Scroll down to locate the “General” settings item and tap into that.

Once on the General settings page scroll all the way down to locate the “Profiles” item. Tap on that to open up your iPhone network profiles.

If you’ve tried internet tethering or have been using it you should be able to see multiple profiles. The focus here is to remove any profiles other than the carrier profile, in this case “US AT&T“. Go ahead and tap into the “Enable Tethering” profile in this case, if you have the same profile listed.

When you see the detail about the profile you can hit the “Remove” button to remove the profile. You might be prompted to confirm the removal.

Once you remove all the hacked profiles from your iPhone, your Visual Voicemail should start to work again. Leave your iPhone for a couple of minutes for it to restore the Visual Voicemail capability. If it doesn’t restore automatically go ahead and restart your iPhone. Visual Voicemail capability on your iPhone should be working by now.

Learn how easy it is to add multiple custom ringtones to your iPhone.

Earlier we have walked you through how to add custom ringtones to your iPhone. On that post we demonstrated adding just one ringtone to your iPhone. It was not intentional but happened to show only one ringtone as an example. From the many comments on that post it’s clear that many of you have trouble adding multiple ringtones to your iPhone.

In this post I’ll walk you through how to add multiple ringtones to your iPhone. The process is quite simple and is pretty closer to the way you add single ringtone. There are couple of things that you might need to make sure (which I’ll mention later).

First, follow the instructions on the how to add a custom ringtone to your iPhone post to add the second ringtone to your iPhone. Do as many as you want but make sure you can see multiple ringtones on the Ringtones section of your iTunes application. Follow the steps on that post until it asks you to Sync. Before you sync your iPhone you need to make sure couple of things.

Click on the iPhone item on the left side of iTunes and make sure the “Manually mange music and videos” option is unchecked.

Then on the “Ringtones” tab, make sure the “Sync Ringtones” option is checked and then the “Selected ringtones” option is selected. Also, make sure to choose more than one ringtones that you would like to sync.

Also, one another thing to make sure might be to keep your ringtones music length to less than 30 seconds. Apple claims to allow up to 30 seconds but I would try to keep it as small as possible. The sample ringtones used for this demonstration are 9 seconds and 12 seconds.

At this point of time, you are good to sync your iPhone. Once sync completes you should be able to see multiple ringtones on your iPhone if you go into “Settings” > “Sounds” > “Ringtone”.

As you must have realized adding multiple ringtones to your iPhone is not that complicated. There are couple of things that you need to make sure and follow the above instructions. I’m sure some of you might run into issues doing this, if you do please let us know in comments.

Use this simple trick to find out more information about what is occupying your iPhone or iPod Touch.

I’m sure you might be familiar with the above iTunes section. When you use iTunes to sync your iPhone or iPod Touch we all know that iTunes reveals some really useful information about the space your media files are occupying on your iPhone or iPod Touch. By default iTunes displays this information in terms of size (MB/GB).

But if you find it hard to digest these sizes you can use this simple trick to get the same information visualized a bit different. All you have to do is to click anywhere on these blocks. With each click iTunes cycle through 2 other display formats, one revealing audio and video occupancy in terms of days and hours and the other revealing information in terms of the number of items.

This is a simple trick that help you visualize the stuff that occupies your iPhone or iPod Touch a little better.

Logitech’s Touch Mouse iPhone app can make your iPhone be utilized as a wireless mouse and keyboard for your computer.

Here is a new way of putting your iPhone to another good use. Given the form factor of iPhone it perfectly fits in as a mouse for your computer. Logitech jumped in to leverage the iPhone form factor so it can be used as a mouse and keyboard. All you have to do is, download the iPhone app to your iPhone and an equivalent server app to your computer. Let them establish a connection over Wi-fi and there you have a wireless mouse and a keyboard.

First, download and install the “Logitech Touch Mouse Server” app from Logitech’s website. It supports the Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows XP and Mac OSX platforms. Download and install the appropriate version. Launch the app on your computer and leave it open.

Then, download and install Logitech “Touch Mouse” app on your iPhone (iTunes link).

Launch Touch Mouse and wait for it to identify the devices on the network. If it doesn’t identify your computer (it didn’t identify my Windows laptop!) you can enter your computer’s IP address to let it connect. Tap on the computer name and wait for it to establish the connection. Once done, your iPhone can now be used as a keyboard and mouse.

Even though I like the idea of using iPhone as a mouse it really is a not a great idea to use it as a keyboard. But a common use case is that if you connect your computer to your TV then you don’t have to worry about keeping an external mouse and keyboard. You can just leverage your iPhone as an input device. Good idea!

(some images from Logitech)

Use any of these 8 applications to create custom iPhone ringtones.

Earlier we saw how you can easily add custom ringtones to your iPhone using iTunes. It would make more sense to see how you can create those custom ringtones so you can add them to your iPhone. Here are some 8 different apps that help you create free ringtones from various audio formats including MP3, WAV, WMA, MP4 etc.

Garage Band

Garage Band is part of the iLife software package that normally ships with Macs these days. If you are using an older Mac you can also buy it from Apple for $79 single user pack. It is a very powerful application with quite a lot of bells-and-whistles for a free application. It gives you fine control on how you want to slice and dice the audio file so you can get the best ringtone possible. Since it’s an Apple product it plays nice with other Mac applications, particularly iTunes.

Audacity

Audacity is one of the most famous free application to edit your audio files. It is an open-source, cross-platform application that makes it a lot easier to edit your audio files to create ringtones out of it. Essentially you will be creating a trimmed version of your audio clip which you can export into different formats using plugins. Once exported you can use iTunes to sync it to your iPhone.

iTunes

If you don’t want to mess with any third party software then you will be surprised to hear that the (Mac) native iTunes is capable of letting you extract a portion of an audio file as a ringtone and then use the same iTunes to sync that to your iPhone. I have written an earlier post that explains in detail on how to use iTunes to add custom iPhone ringtones.

Fission

Fission is a great application that makes life easier when you want to create custom ringtones. You can easily crop audio to the exact size you want and you can fade the ends of the audio clip if you like it that way. Once you are happy you can easily add the audio clip to any phone that accepts MP3 or AAC files for ringtones. You can also use Fission to edit AAC and MP3 files without any loss in clarity.

ImTOO

ImTOO provides a simplistic way of creating iPhone ringtones from video or music files and let you transfer it to iPhone directly instead of using iTunes. ImTOO can convert almost all video/audio formats and can trim the video/audio file precisely to help you make the most audible clip as your iPhone ringtone. It costs you $14.95

ToneShop

ToneShop is a very simple application that let you create free ringtones quite easily. Creating a ringtone using ToneShop is as simple as selecting the input file, defining the piece of audio you want as ringtone and selecting the desired output format. It even allows you to create ringtones in MP3, WAV and AAC formats. ToneShop Works on all flavors of Windows including the 64 bit versions.

iRinger

iRinger is a free application that runs on all the versions of Microsoft Windows including Windows 7. It requires iPhone firmware version 1.1.2 or newer, iTunes software 7.5 or newer. It allows you to use audio effects such as delay, flanger, boost, reverse etc. It’s a handy ringtone maker solution that doesn’t require you to jailbreak your iPhone.

Xilisoft

Another great ringtone maker for Mac. There is a Windows version also available. It supports quite a lot of input file formats including WMA, RA, WAV, M4A, MP3 etc. It even allows you to convert file formats like AVI, WMV, DivX, MP4, AVCHD, MKV, RM, MOV and MPEG to M4R if you wanted to use background music as your iPhone ringtone. That means you can create ringtones from any video/audio clips. Also, this software allows you to transfer ringtones to your iPhone directly. The good part is that Xilisoft comes in 4 different languages including English, German, Japanese and Chinese.

I’m sure this is not a comprehensive list of applications to create beautiful iPhone ringtones. If you know or use any other applications that you think are helping you create iPhone ringtones a lot better way please share with us on comments.

Use these 10 iPhone apps to discover interesting and cool iPhone apps.

Earlier we’ve mentioned about useful websites to discover cool iPhone apps. Now, it’s our turn to mention some of the iPhone apps that helps you find new and useful iPhone apps.

AppMiner

One of my personal favorite, AppMiner, helps you keep an eye on iPhone apps that are on sale. It tells you the iPhone apps that are on sale (which means their price has been reduced lately), showing them in various categories. It displays apps by paid and free. If you are willing to pay but wanted to see if the price would go down then there is a “Watch it” feature with which AppMiner keeps an eye on the price performance of the app in the AppStore and indicates to you if the price goes down.

AppConnect

AppConnect notifies you of any price change to the iPhone apps that you ask AppConnect to keep an eye on. AppConnect allows people to share and recommend the most popular and useful apps in the AppStore.

AppDiscover

AppDiscover makes it easy for you to get the AppStores hot-trends bandwagon by showing you what apps others are searching for with its “real time search stream” listing.

App Gems

App Gems gives you access to daily app recommendations. It also gives you lots of editorially-selected app collections and quick access to the top-rated apps in every AppStore category. It has an “App of the Day” concept where an app is chosen as the best for the day from MacWorld’s reviewers.

Top-Tens

As its name implies, Top-Ten helps you define interesting lists, like online shopping deals, product recalls, audio books etc., and it will show you the top 10 apps on each of the list. Imagine figuring out the top 10 apps to check the weather. Top-tens really makes it easy to figure that out.

PandoraBox

The cool thing about the PandoraBox app is that it helps you receive latest information about apps that are both paid and free, several times a day so you won’t miss the opportunity when the price goes down.

Apperific

Apperific helps you find the top 100 apps that were popular months ago, but are no longer visible in today’s top 100 list.

Top Rated Apps

As its name sounds, Top Rated Apps, shows only the top rated apps from the AppStore. Allows you to favorite the apps that you like.

AppMonkey

AppMonkey is a very simple app that helps you search for apps very quickly. It allows you to save your favorite apps to a favorite list.

AppVee

AppVee is not really an app discovery app but it video reviews iPhone apps in a lot better way and in the process could help you discover iPhone apps indirectly.

I hope some of these apps really help you find the app that you are looking for. If you know of any other app that’s not on the list but you find it helpful in discovering useful iPhone apps please share with us on comments.

These websites not only help you discover new iPhone apps but also review those apps so you can get a clear understanding of what to try and buy.

Apple – Apps for iPhone

Straight from the horse’s mouth, this website has a nice categorization of apps. Not the traditional categories that you see on the iTunes AppStore or on your iPhone but rather apps are neatly organized into more of contextual categories with links that takes you directly to the iTunes AppStore.

Apptism

Apptism is one of most famous iPhone app aggregator that helps you keep an eye on the apps that are getting approved to the AppStore. This website also categorizes apps so that you can get to what you are looking for quickly.

Appolicious

One of the neatly designed app aggregation website, Appolicious combines social networking, journalism and technology to help you discover the best of the tens of thousands of apps available today at the AppStore. It has got its own iPhone app if you prefer to keep an eye on what’s happening at Appolicious.

FreshApps

FreshApps combines iPhone app aggregation and the social voting methodology. The idea is that if you like an app that’s listed or if you use an app that you like then you can vote up (make fresh) to make that app listed as the freshest.

148Apps

One of the earliest app aggregator, 148Apps, helps you find the iPhone apps that you are looking for. It keeps track of what’s new, what’s selling and what prices are dropping in the AppStore. It also runs its own reviews of the apps.

Macworld AppGuide

One of the most authoritative app aggregator, Macworld’s AppGuide website reviews iPhone apps from the AppStore and helps you as well write a review of the app if you are a registered Macworld user. Since it’s coming from an authoritative source you can mostly trust the review of the app.

AppReview

As its name reflects, AppReview writes independent reviews of the iPhone apps that are available at the AppStore and are new to the market.

AppClassics

One of most simple looking app aggregator, AppClassics lists the most famous apps on iTunes in a nice shelf with very visible listing. As it claims, behind the scenes iTunes rating information is crunched, sifted, and percolated in a secret formula to find and grade the truly classic apps that make it to the front page.

AppSpace

AppSpace is an intelligent iPhone app recommendation engine that helps you find the apps relevant to you. By registering with the site you can share your favorite apps with your friends on the network and also can get app recommendations.

The Daily App Show

The Daily App Show is slightly a different take on the traditional screenshot based app review websites. It brings you podcasts and videos that review the iPhone apps and hints you on what’s useful and what’s not.

AppVee

AppVee brings you the best quality video reviews of the many iPhone apps available at AppStore. If pictures are words are too much for you to run through then these video reviews would depict a better picture of the iPhone app that are craving to buy.

I’m sure this is not the complete list and there might be more websites that might helps us find those apps that we were looking for. If you know of any please share with us on comments.

Follow these simple steps to upgrade your iPod Touch’s firmware to the latest version for free.

If you end up with an iPod Touch that’s on sale this holiday season you might most probably end up with an iPod Touch that has a really old firmware. You might think it would be easier to upgrade to the latest firmware. Even though the upgrade process is lot simpler and straight-forward you might be surprised to hear that Apple charges you $4.95 (the latest charge, as of this writing) to upgrade to the latest firmware version.

It’s not that $4.95 that matters to most of us but it’s the feel that why should we pay again to just upgrade the firmware of a brand new device. If you find $4.95 not convincing enough to upgrade then, of course naturally, you’ll look for an alternative. And the alternative is pretty simple to do and the best of all it’s free. Here are the steps involved at a high level,

• Figure out the Build Version of your iPod Touch
• Download the appropriate “.ipsw” file
• Use the “Restore” feature of your iPod Touch to install the downloaded latest firmware file
• Sit back and let the iPod Touch upgrade itself

Figure out the Build Version of your iPod Touch

Connect your iPod Touch and launch iTunes. On the iPod “Summary” tab you should be able to see the “Build Version” of your iPod OS (as you can see above). If you can’t see the “Build Version” label by default but if you see “Software Version” instead, don’t worry, just click on the “Software Version” label and you should be able to see the “Build Version” label. Note down the Build Version number, you’ll need it later.

Download the appropriate “.ipsw” file

Visit http://www.felixbruns.de/iPod/firmware/. Scroll down to the “iPhone/iPod Touch” dropdown and choose the appropriate firmware file. The Build Version number that you’ve noted before would come in handy here to figure out the correct file that you’d need to download.

The downloaded file might be of “.zip” format. If that’s the case, rename the file and just remove the “.zip” portion of the file name. You might be prompted to not do it. Just do it, there is no harm. Ultimately, you should end up with a “.ipsw” file.

Restore your iPod Touch with the latest firmware file

Come back to iTunes and use the “Restore” feature to restore your iPod Touch to the downloaded firmware. When you click on the “Restore” button just be careful to hold down the “SHIFT” key when you click on the “Restore” button. You’ll be prompted to choose a “.ipsw” file. Choose the file that you’ve downloaded before and wait for your iPod Touch to upgrade itself to the latest firmware.

If you don’t mind the $4.95 charge then go for it through the official Apple channel to upgrade your iPod Touch to the latest firmware. But, in case, if you don’t want to pay that charge then I hope you find the above steps simple enough to follow to upgrade your iPod Touch to the latest firmware for free.

Keep an eye on iPhone app price changes with AppShopper.

If you’ve been using your iPhone to look for new and good iPhone apps then I’m sure you must have realized that it’s not the most efficient way to sift through the more than 100,000 apps in the AppStore. iTunes is there, but it is very limited in terms of drilling down to the apps we are looking for. Of course, a web interface might give you better control over discovering apps.

Enter AppShopper. It’s a simple website that helps you discover new and the best iPhone apps in a lot simpler and efficient way. It just provides you with a bunch of filters for you to drill down to the apps that you might be interested.

When you hit the AppShopper home page you’ll see a run down of the recent app changes. This could include totally new apps, updated versions or a price change. If you keep up with AppShopper everyday then this would be your list to just quickly skim through.

The above list would include all categories of apps. You can narrow down to a specific category out from the list of above categories.

By default the apps are sorted based on their popularity. But there is a Control Center panel which gives you more control over how you want to drill down to the list of apps that you might be interested.

One of more interesting usage of AppShopper is to find out any prices changes to our favorite apps. Hit the “Price Changes” tab at the Control Panel and you should be able to see a list of apps that has their prices changed lately. Clicking on the “Buy Now” button will take you to the iTunes store where you can complete the purchase.

To find out about how an app is performing at the App Store you have to click on the app name to get to the details where you see on the right side a nice list of app activity with the exact dates. This would be a very useful information if you wanted to watch an app at the App Store.

There is also a Top 100 list where the apps are listed based on their position over at App Store. It even indicates you of the performance of the app.

If you are overwhelmed with the list of apps or if you don’t want to visit AppShopper.com every day to find out, check out their RSS collection. Subscribe to the list that’s of more interest to you.

Overall, I’ve discovered couple of useful apps using AppShopper. I used to use my iPhone Genius recommendation to find out about new apps but AppShopper showed me apps that I’d have never discovered otherwise. I hope you find AppShopper useful as well.

In this post let’s see how you can configure your iPhone to make use of Google Sync for iPhone to keep your iPhone Mail, Contacts and Calendar in-sync with your Google Account.

If you use Gmail, Google Contacts or Google Calendar from your iPhone you must have realized the pain of keeping things in sync. Until now you have to manually do the sync and take care of the rest. Not anymore!

Google introduced Sync capabilities for your iPhone with which you can keep your iPhone’s Mail, Contacts and Calendar applications in-sync with your Google version of Gmail, Contacts and Calendar.

Google Sync uses Microsoft® Exchange’s ActiveSync® protocol to keep things in-sync and what that means is that you have to make use of your iPhone’s Microsoft Exchange capabilities. Keep in mind that only one account can be set with the Exchange version on your iPhone and so you have to be careful on which of your mail accounts get preference if you make use of the Exchange capability already on your iPhone.

With the nature of the ActiveSync protocol it would be possible that your existing contacts and calendar information might be wiped out before syncing. So it would be a good idea to backup your iPhone contacts and calendar information before you move further with the configuration.

Well, pre-requisites and intro aside, let’s see how you can configure your iPhone to use Google Sync.

Tap into the “Settings” app.

Tap into the “Mail, Contacts, Calendars” option.

Tap on the “Add Account…” option to add a new account which would be used to sync with your Google account.

Tap on the “Microsoft Exchange” option.

You’ll be presented with a page where you have to enter your full email address on both the “Email” and “Username” entries and you have to enter your Google account password. It’s important that you enter your email address in full including the portion after the @ symbol. Once done tap on the “Next” button.

You’ll be prompted with a warning dialog where it would say “Unable to Verify Certificate“. Tap on the “Accept” button to move forward.

You’ll then be presented with the “Exchange account verified” page where you’d have to enter the “Server” information along with the information that you’ve already entered. On the “Server” box enter “m.google.com“.

That completes the major portion of the configuration. Now, on the “Configured sync for Exchange” page turn on/off what you want to be in-sync, Mail, Contacts or Calendar.

When you turn on the “Calendar” option you’ll be prompted with the screen where it would ask you what to do with the existing local calendars on your iPhone. Tap on the “Keep on my iPhone” button to preserve those calendar information that you already have.

As you must have guessed, you’ll be presented with another dialog warning you of the possible duplicate entries. Tap on the “Keep on My iPhone” button to preserve those information.

Once everything is done, you should be able to see 2 new entries for the mail and calendar added to the “Mail, Contacts, Calendars” account list.

You are almost done. Finally, you have to launch the in-built Mail app to start the sync process. Sit back and wait for the sync to finish.

Once your iPhone finish syncing you’ll have the capability to keep your Mail, Contacts and Calendars in-sync with your Google Account without you doing any manual work.

I liked the convenience that Google Sync brings-in and I’m sure you’d like it too. As I said before it would be a good idea to back up your Contacts and Calendar information before you start this process. If you have any questions regarding Google Sync for your iPhone please let us know in comments.

Technorati Tags:
iPhone, iPhone Email, iPhone How To, iPhone Tips, Google Sync, Gmail, How To

Add a custom signature to your iPhone emails and remove the standard “Sent from my iPhone” signature with this simple tweak.

If you haven’t set an email signature on your iPhone you must have seen it before that your iPhone Mail application will append a standard “Sent from my iPhone” signature to all the outgoing emails. Of course, you can remove the signature manually but that’s a manual process and if you happen to send a lot more emails then this would certainly become an overhead.

Instead, iPhone allows you to set custom email signatures which would in essence get rid of the standard “Sent from my iPhone” signature. So, how do we set a custom email signature on your iPhone? Very simple, follow these couple of taps and you’ll be all set.

Start by tapping into the “Settings” app on your iPhone.

Scroll down to locate the “Mail, Contacts, Calendars” item and tap into it.

On the “Mail, Contacts, Calendars” settings page tap into the “Signature” option.

You should be able to see the “Sent from my iPhone” message displayed. You can either use the “Clear” button to remove the standard message or you can type-in whatever you’d like to be the signature for your outgoing emails.

Once set, all your outgoing emails will bear the custom email signature without you doing anything extra. I hope you find this quick tip helpful to get rid of the “Sent from my iPhone” signature message.

Technorati Tags:
iPhone, iPhone How To, iPhone Tips, iPhone Email, iPhone Email Signature

Upgrading to iPhone OS 3.1 is simple and straight-forward.

When Apple released iPhone OS 3.0.1 we explained how to upgrade to iPhone OS 3.0.1. Well, it’s time for another upgrade, this time to iPhone OS 3.1. So is it worth an upgrade?

Here are some of the top features that rolls out with iPhone OS 3.1,

Genius Recommendations for Apps

iTunes store now gives you recommendations on the apps that you might like based on the apps that you’ve already downloaded.

Genius Mixes

iTunes now can automatically create song mixes based on your existing iTunes library

Download Ringtones Wirelessly

Now you can buy thousands of ringtones on the iTunes store.

Organize Apps in iTunes

You can now use the latest iTunes to organize your iPhone apps in a much convenient way if you’ve upgraded your iPhone to OS 3.1.

And here are the rest of the features that comes with the 3.1 update,

• Improved syncing for music, movies, TV shows, podcasts, and photos
• iTunes U content organization
• Redeem iTunes Gift Cards, codes, and certificates in the App Store
• Display available iTunes account credits in the App Store and iTunes Store
• Save video from Mail and MMS into Camera Roll
• Option to “Save as new clip” when trimming a video on iPhone 3GS
• Better iPhone 3G Wi-Fi performance when Bluetooth is turned on
• Remotely lock iPhone with a passcode via MobileMe
• Use Voice Control on iPhone 3GS with Bluetooth headsets
• Paste phone numbers into the keypad
• Option to use Home button to turn on accessibility features on iPhone 3GS
• Warn when visiting fraudulent websites in Safari (anti-phishing)
• Improved Exchange calendar syncing and invitation handling
• Fixes issue that cause some app icons to display incorrectly

Okay, so now you know it might be worth upgrading to iPhone OS 3.1 let’s see how you can easily upgrade your iPhone to the 3.1 version.

Plug your iPhone to your computer and launch iTunes.

Go into your iPhone Summary tab and click on the “Update” button.

A confirmation dialog will popup asking you to acknowledge the upgrade. Click on the “Update” button to continue the update.

You’ll be presented with a dialog that lists the features that comes with the 3.1 update. Click on the “Next” button.

Once confirmed you’ll be presented with dialogs to accept the license terms. Click on the “Agree” button.

You’ll then be presented with a flurry of dialogs that keep you updated with the update progress. While this happens your iPhone will restart and will hang in there for a while its firmware gets updated. DO NOT unplug or power off your iPhone while these updates happen.

As part of the update iTunes will inform you about the final restart.

Once everything settles down and your iPhone restarts you should be able to see the latest version of the iPhone OS on your iPhone Summary tab in iTunes.

It takes around 15 minutes to upgrade your iPhone to iPhone OS 3.1 but the upgrade process is simple and straight-forward. After you upgrade I hope you liked the convenience of arranging your iPhone apps using iTunes.

If you have any questions/comments regarding this upgrade please let us know in comments.

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How To, iPhone, iPhone How To, iPhone Tips, iTunes, iPhone Upgrade

Google Mobile Apps for iPhone makes it easy to use those favorite Google services on your iPhone.

If you use Google a lot in your life you might love Google Apps on your iPhone. It makes searching on the web a lot easier compared to using the traditional Safari in-built browser. It also comes with some extra features that makes Google Apps for iPhone an important application for your iPhone.

Download Google Apps for iPhone using the iTunes AppStore or via a web search on your iPhone.

Launch Google Apps.

Once launched you’ll be taken to the home screen where you can enter a term to search or you can use the microphone button to use your voice to enter the search term instead of the keyboard.

This would be particularly handy when you are occupied and can’t use your hand to type in that tiny keyboard (consider driving for example).

As you type-in or voice your search term Google Apps will do a local search and will list the items stored on your iPhone. You can tap into those items to see the details. If you’d rather do a Google Search for that term then click on the “Search” button on the soft-keyboard or tap the go button.

Google Apps for iPhone will display Google Web Search results by default. If your search is for a place then you can use the “Local” link to get local-specific search results. Google Apps for iPhone makes it handy to list you the phone number and the direction for the local place.

If you’d like to search on a different local place you can use the arrow button next to the local name to change the local place where you want the search to be based on.

If you must have noticed that there is another tab down the bottom of the screen, “Apps”. The Apps tab lists some of the famous Google Apps that you can access with a single tap.

If you don’t like the default behavior of Google Mobile Apps for your iPhone you can, of course, customize the behavior to fit your needs.

Tap into the “Settings” tab to customize the Google Mobile Apps behavior. There are a bunch of settings you can customize.

You can change the Start Screen to use the last used app, list of apps, search or search with the keyboard displayed by default.

You can customize the items Google Search uses. You can restrict search to just search on Contacts, Previous Searches or Suggestions.

You can also set the SafeSearch filter to be either moderate, strict or just turn it off. This would be particularly helpful when your kids use the iPhone to search the web. Many of the other settings are pretty much self explanatory.

Google Mobile Apps for iPhone makes it a lot easier to access those useful Google Services while on the go. I hope you find it useful. If you have any questions/comments regarding this please let us know on comments below.

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Google, Google Apps, How To, iPhone, iPhone How To, iPhone Tips, Google Mobile Apps

Movement app helps you rearrange iPhone apps a lot easier.

Now you know how to arrange your iPhone apps using the hard way. That way of moving your iPhone apps around using your fingertip would be handy if you just have to move couple of apps around.

But if you’d like to completely rearrange those 7 or more pages of apps moving it using your fingertip won’t be a simple thing to do. Movement, a Mac application, that helps you rearrange your iPhone apps using your Mac can get the job done a lot easier. Since you’d be using your Mac to rearrange your iPhone apps it would certainly make it a lot easier.

Before you get too excited there is a catch, it works only with the Jailbroken iPhones. If you don’t want to jailbreak your iPhone (my vote) then you might want to wait till iTunes 9 comes out which is rumored to have the app rearranging capability built-in.

The video below will give you an idea of what Movement can do before you decide to jailbreak your iPhone.

Download Movement app to easily rearrange your iPhone apps.

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iPhone, iPhone How To, iPhone Tips, Jailbroken iPhone

Some of the best 10 iPhone wallpapers revealed and learn how easy it is to set custom wallpapers on your iPhone.

Some of the wallpapers that comes with your iPhone are pretty cool. But after a period of time you get bored of seeing them all the time and if that’s the case it might be time for a change. Why stick with those default wallpapers when you can have your own wallpapers on your iPhone?

Here are some of the 10 best iPhone wallpapers that you might like,

Vector Therapy

Stars Grass

l’Amour

Frozen Pine Trees

Wild Flowers

Forest Track

Sunflower

End of Summer

Whatchamacallit

Creative Triangle

So, you liked one of the above iPhone Wallpapers. And you have downloaded your favorite wallpaper image to your computer. How do you get that to your iPhone and set it as your iPhone Wallpaper? In fact, it is very simple.

If you haven’t yet, download any of the above wallpaper image that you like to your computer, in this case a Mac.

Launch iPhoto and move that picture to an album, in this case “iPhone” album, that you normally sync to your iPhone. If you use Windows PC then make sure to get the picture to the correct location where you can use iTunes to sync to your iPhone.

Now move to iTunes and set your iPhone Sync preferences to make sure you sync the album that you’ve moved the wallpaper picture into, in this case the “iPhone” album. If you use a Windows based computer then make sure to choose the correct program to sync photos on the “Sync photos from:” option.

Go ahead and Sync your iPhone.

Once the sync is done go into your iPhone and launch the “Photos” application. Once launched go into the album that you’ve just synced, in this case the “iPhone” album.

Locate the wallpaper picture that you’ve just synced and open it up. Once opened, tap on the button on the far left bottom of the screen to open up the action pane.

Tap on the “Use as Wallpaper” button.

iPhone will give you a screen where, if you want, you can move the picture to fit correctly into the screen size. You can use your finger-pawn feature to zoom-in or zoom-out of the picture to make it a better fit. Once you are happy with the way it looks, tap on the “Set Wallpaper” button.

There you have it! Now your iPhone will have your favorite image as the wallpaper.

Setting a custom wallpaper on your iPhone is very simple and straight-foward if you follow the correct steps. I hope you liked the above 10 iPhone Wallpapers and I hope you find it easy to set your favorite picture as your iPhone Wallpaper. If you have any questions or comments regarding this please share with us on comments.

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How To, iPhone, iPhone How To, iPhone OS 3.0, iPhone Tips, iPhone Tricks, iPhone Custom Wallpaper

From securing your iPhone to customizing it to fit your need these 10 tips can get you started the right way with your new iPhone.

So you finally took the plunge to get to the Apple Store (AT&T Store or online or what not, for that matter) to get you that shiny new iPhone 3GS (3G, may be). You are so excited to experience the whole new mobile experience. Given the fact that it might become one of the key gadget in your life it is important to get it right, right from the beginning.

Here are some of the top 10 things that you could do once you get your iPhone. By no means these are THE only things you should do, but take it as these are some of the important things that you should do.

Charge the battery

Your new iPhone will come with a partially charged battery. Even though it might not be fully charged it can get you going at least for some time. But as soon as you drain the battery make sure to put it through a full recharge.

Couple of important things to keep in mind to make the most out of your iPhone battery is, not to do partial charges, make sure to drain the battery completely once in a while and make sure to unplug the charger once it’s charged. Too many frequent, partial charges can drain the juice of your iPhone battery pretty quick.

Setup iTunes Store account

Without those Applications your iPhone is only a tiny bit better than the many smartphones out there in the market. iPhone Apps make your iPhone the better device that it is.

You need an iTunes Store account to download apps to your iPhone. Learn how to create an iTunes Store account. It is a free account but will keep your credit card on file to charge $$ if you download any paid apps.

It is important that you choose a username and password that’s hard to guess by others. I’m sure you don’t want to deal with Apple about apps that you didn’t purchase.

Upgrade to iPhone OS 3.0.1

The latest iPhones might have the updated iPhone OS 3.0.1 installed but in case if not (or if you have bought the device before the iPhone OS 3.0.1 release) make sure to upgrade your iPhone OS to version 3.0.1. The latest version fixes a SMS vulnerability with your iPhone wherein a simple SMS message can make your iPhone remotely controllable by a hacker. So make sure to do this important upgrade.

Download Apps that you like

AppStore is full of useful and not-so-useful apps. That’s what you can expect when there are more than 65,000 apps on AppStore as of now. Having said that there are still quite an array of apps that you’ll certainly find it useful and fun.

Browse through the AppStore by category to find the apps that are right for you. You might need a boat load of patience to sift through those many apps available on each category.

Make sure to try out a Lite version (most of the apps have one) if you are not sure before buying it.

Organize Apps to your preference

It can quickly become a nightmare to locate the app that you want once you download that many apps to your iPhone. It is important that you keep your most important apps (or the apps that you use most frequently) at your fingertip. It would certainly help to keep those apps on the first few pages of your iPhone. Learn in detail on how to organize your iPhone apps.

Customize iPhone Settings to fit your need

iPhone comes with some default settings that I’m sure you might not like it. There are far too many changes that you can make to customize your iPhone to fit your need. A few of them could be, customize the iPhone Home button, display iPhone battery percentage, turn-on Caps Lock, use foreign language keyboards, set volume limit on your iPhone etc.

Checkout DemoGeek.com to learn more on how to customize your iPhone to fit your preference.

Secure your iPhone

As precious the device your iPhone might be to you, given the form factor it is possible that it could get lost or get stolen. When those adverse things happen you need to be prepared to make sure the data that you have on your iPhone is not something that can be exploited. Follow this detailed article at DemoGeek.com to learn more about how to safely secure your iPhone.

Buy an iPhone cover

Given the larger screen and the overall aspect nature of your iPhone it could easily get scratched. Worse, when it get dropped to the floor. There are 2 things you can do to get some life out of your iPhone. Protect it from getting scratched and cover it with a hard cover.

You don’t have to look any further to protect your iPhone from getting scratched than Zagg. They have a product called “invisibleSHIELD” that can protect your iPhone from getting scratched. It uses a US Military technology and that’s pretty damn good at protecting from soft and hard scratches. It comes in 2 flavors, a screen-protector and a full-body protector. Choose the one that’s right for you.

InvisibleShield can only protect your iPhone from scratches. It won’t protect if you happen to drop your iPhone. Make sure to get a hard cover than can protect your iPhone from those hard accidental hits and bumps. I think it’s worth investing in some decent covers, hey, your paid for the phone and you have to live with it for 2 years, remember.

Customize Ringtones

This is not an important thing to do with your new iPhone but certainly something that can make your iPhone experience a bit better right from the beginning.

The ringtones that comes with your iPhone are pretty blank and very common. Spruce it up with your own custom ringtones to kick-it-up-a-notch. You might be surprised to hear that it’s very easy to add custom ringtones to your iPhone.

Learn some iPhone tricks

And finally, make sure to learn some iPhone tips and tricks to get the most out of your iPhone. You don’t have to be an iPhone expert to make full use of your iPhone, you just have to know how to do things the right way to use it better. There are so many websites out there that have so many iPhone tips. Feel free to explore those. It would surely help.

Of course, you can certainly keep an eye on here at DemoGeek.com for more and more useful iPhone tips, tricks and how-to’s.

I hope you find these tips useful and interesting. I’m sure there might be more to add to this. If you know of any other tips that can be useful to a new iPhone owner please share your tips, comments and thoughts at the comment section below.

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How To, iPhone, iPhone Custom Ringtone, iPhone How To, iPhone OS, iPhone OS 3.0, iPhone OS 3.0.1, iPhone OS Upgrade, iPhone Tips, iPhone Tricks, New iPhone

Get push notifications from Facebook on your iPhone with TextFree.

The current version of the Facebook iPhone app is pretty basic in terms of features and functionality. There is an upgrade Facebook for iPhone 3.0 is coming up soon that has quite a lot of feature sets but missing the Push Notifications that would allow you to receive message notifications on your iPhone when someone writes on your Facebook Wall or some significant activity happened on your Facebook account. So, you might think that until a later update comes out you are stuck with receiving Facebook updates on your regular email.

Well, not really! If you are willing tweak things then there is a simple workaround to get your Facebook updates directly onto your iPhone leveraging a messaging application, TextFree.

TextFree (iTunes direct link) is a simple messaging app that allows you to send and receive text messages using your 3G network than your cellular network. So you don’t have to enroll for those money-sucking SMS plans of AT&T even though it would cost next to nothing for them to deal with these SMS messages.

Let’s see how we can leverage Textfree app to receive Facebook notifications on our iPhone without spending a dime (if you go the Lite version of Textfree).

Start by downloading Textfree from AppStore. There are 2 versions available, one is a paid version (for $5.99) that has unlimited text capability with no advertisements and the free version that has a message ceil of 15 per day with advertisements shown in between. Choose the one that’s right for you, it doesn’t matter which version you use.

Once installed, launch Textfree on your iPhone and create an account with Textfree. Keep in mind that the username you end up with Textfree is your email as well (like username@textfree.us) where you would receive Facebook updates. So choose any name that you prefer.

Once your name is available and you create your account you can go to Textfree’s Options page to give your phone number to receive messages on your phone number (to me that deceits the purpose anyway).

Keep your iPhone aside and use your computer to get to your Facebook profile. Click on the “Settings” link at the top right side of the page. Make sure you are on the “Settings” tab of the page and then click on the “change” link under “Email“.

Facebook allows you to add a new email to your account. Make sure to type-in the @textfree.us email account that you’ve just created with Textfree and hit the “Add New Email” button.

Facebook might ask you to confirm the change by asking for your password. Key-in your Facebook password and hit “Confirm“.

Facebook will send a message to the @textfree.us account that you’ve just made primary. If you are reading the message on your iPhone things might take a turn as the link on that message is not a hot link (which means, you won’t be able to click on it) and you won’t be able to copy as well. Weird! Don’t worry, go ahead and write it down and key-in that URL on to your browser on your computer.

You’ll be taken to a page where you should be able to change the “Contact Email” to the @textfree.us account that you’ve just added to Facebook. Hit the “Change Contact Email” button to confirm the change. Facebook might ask you to enter the password again.

Once you make the change you should be able to see that your primary email is your @textfree.us email. What that tells you is that now you are all set to receive notifications on your iPhone using the Textfree email account. In other words, Facebook will send updates to your @textfree.us email account and Textfree will take care of sending a message alert to your iPhone to notify you of the message.

Pretty cool! Isn’t it? Keep in mind that this could be an easy workaround to receive Facebook updates on your iPhone until Facebook implements this functionality on its own app.

If you have any questions or comments regarding this please let us know in comments.

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iPhone, iPhone How To, iPhone OS 3.0, iPhone Tips, iPhone Tricks, Facebook

Upgrade your iPhone Operating System to Version 3.0.1.

If you are still running iPhone OS 3.0 your iPhone could be hacked with a simple SMS message. That was the news yesterday.

Apple quickly rushed to fix this issue and released a patch OS upgrade version 3.0.1 which does nothing but fixes the SMS Vulnerability.

It would be a good idea, just to be on the safer side, to upgrade your iPhone OS from version 3.0 to version 3.0.1. It’s not complicated, just follow these simple steps.

Connect your iPhone to your computer and launch iTunes. Once on iTunes choose your iPhone device to get to the Summary page where you can see some details about your iPhone. You should be able to see the software version being 3.0.

Scroll down to locate the “Check for Update” button. Click on it to start the iPhone OS upgrade process.

iTunes will prompt you to “Download and Install” or “Download Only” choice. Choose the one that’s right for you to move forward.

iTunes will indicate you that the download process has started. How do you make sure the download progress?

Go into the “Downloads” section on iTunes. You should be able to see the “iPhone Software Update” item progressing to download.

Depending on your internet connection this process might take a while since the download is ~298 MB.

Once downloaded iTunes will extract the downloaded software.

You’ll be prompted with couple of dialogs to agree to install the update. Click on the “Next” and “Agree” button to install the update. Make sure to read the License Agreement before you click on the Agree button.

Once you agree to the terms, again you’ll see a flurry of notifications that indicates that the installation is going smooth.

Once everything settles down you’ll be prompted with an iPhone restart notification dialog and your iPhone will automatically restart. Let is restart.

Once your iPhone restarts, if you go into the iTunes iPhone Summary tab again you should be able to see the Software Version number 3.0.1.

It’s just that simple to upgrade your iPhone OS from version 3.0 to 3.0.1. In fact this would almost be the case if you upgrade to any other version as well.

I hope you find this information useful. If you have any questions or comments please let me know in comments.

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How To, iPhone, iPhone Tips, iPhone Tricks, iPhone OS, iPhone OS 3.0, iPhone OS 3.0.1, iPhone OS Upgrade, iPhone How To

Easily add custom ringtones to your iPhone using iTunes.

The default ringtones that comes with the iPhone are pretty basic and blank. You can, instead, use your own piece of music as a ringtone on your iPhone. All you need to get this done is an iPhone, Connector Cable and iTunes.

Follow these (simple) steps to add a custom ringtone to your iPhone,

Start by choosing the .mp3 file that you’d like to have a piece of it as your ringtone. Remember that you cannot keep the full mp3 file as your ringtone, instead you can trim a portion of it to be used as a ringtone. The maximum allowed length of the ringtone can be less than 30 seconds.

Open the .mp3 file in iTunes. Right-click the .mp3 file and choose “Get Info“.

Once the Get Info dialog comes-up navigate to the Options tab. If you are using a short .mp3 file as your source then you might not want to touch any of the settings on this tab. But if you trying to extract a portion of the .mp3 file then you wanted to key-in values for the “Start Time” and “End Time” items. Keep in mind that the total length of the ringtone can only be less than 30 seconds.

How do you know the start and end times? Well, if you have Audacity installed then you should be able to grab the start and end time of your clip using Audacity’s trim feature.

Now we are ready to convert the file to a more friendly format that .mp3. Right-click on the same file again and choose the “Convert AAC Version” option.

If you don’t see the option on your right-click menu then go to iTunes > Preferences > General Tab and click on the “Import Settings…” button. Change the “Import Using” dropdown menu to “AAC Encoder“.

Once the file is converted to AAC version it generates a .m4a file. Drag the file to your Desktop (or any other location that you prefer).

Rename the .m4a file to .m4r file. If you have any questions on how to do it the safest way to do is to right-click the .m4a file and choosing the “Get Info” option.

On the dialog that comes up change the extension of the file to .m4r and confirm the rename.

Before you proceed any further you should remove the AAC version of the file that’s on your iTunes.

Now, move the .m4r file that’s on the desktop to the Ringtones folder on iTunes.

Now it’s all pretty much set for you to make use of the custom ringtone. Connect your iPhone and do a Sync.

Once successfully synced, tap on your iPhone Settings app.

Tap on the “Sounds” option.

Then tap on the “Ringtone” option.

iPhone will now display the list of available ringtones and you should be able to see the newly added ringtone at the top of the page under the “Custom” section. Tap on the ringtone name to choose the ringtone as your default iPhone ringtone.

That’s all to it to get a custom ringtone on your iPhone. It may look like a lot of steps involved but basically it’s pretty simple and if you focus a little bit you can get it right on your first attempt and then you’ll love having the ability to make your own custom ringtone for your iPhone.

I hope you find it useful. If you have any questions/comments regarding this please let me know in comments.

Technorati Tags:
How To, iPhone, iPhone Tips, iPhone Tricks, iPhone Custom Ringtone

MyAllTop on your iPhone can help you manage your RSS feeds better.

According to AllTop,

Alltop is an “online magazine rack” of popular topics.

It’s true that AllTop has tremendous potential to help us keep up with the flood of online information that we breath, swallow and digest. AllTop organizes the RSS Feeds by Topics and that is insanely helpful to find the right RSS feed otherwise you might not even know that it exists.

Given the fact that AllTop tracks more than 650 topics it becomes quite cumbersome to manage all those topics, particularly if you are interested to read on many topics. MyAllTop can help you in this regard.

One of the most useful features of AllTop is MyAllTop, which gives you the ability to customize and keep track of the topics that you are primarily interested in. Even when filtering the topics down to your favorite list becomes daunting MyAllTop helps you arrange the topics based on your personal preference which is pretty cool.

If you have access to a computer then you’d be able to fully utilize the power of AllTop but what if you want to take that experience off-desktop and wanted to bring it to your mobile devices. AllTop can help you in this regard as well.

Let’s take a look at how we can bring MyAllTop to an iPhone so that you can read all your favorite RSS feeds from the comfort of your iPhone.

First visit AllTop.com and click on the “Create an Account” link and key-in the needed information to sign-up for an AllTop account.

Once you get the confirmation email follow the link on the email to get you account confirmed.

Once confirmed you can go to the AllTop.com home page and start exploring your favorite topics. The topics are arranged alphabetically given the fact that AllTop tracks more than 650 topics as of today.

Choose the topic of your interest, for example “Macintosh”. AllTop will show you all the feeds available for the chosen topic.

You should be able to see a “+” icon on the right side of each feed. Click on that “+” icon if you are interested to subscribe to that particular feed and have it accessible on your MyAllTop. Once you click on the “+” button it turns itself into a “tick” mark to indicate that it’s been added to MyAllTop. Similarly browse for more topics and add those feeds that interests you. Don’t worry about the order in which you choose topic or feeds, those can be customized to your need later.

Once you are done with your favorite topics and feeds click on the “Go to MyAllTop” link at the top right side of the page.

You’ll be presented with a page filled with all your favorite feeds across the topics you’ve chosen.

I’m sure you’ll gather quite a lot of your favorite feeds and things will become harder to see the right information. For example, your favorite feed might down below a bunch of feeds and you might think you have to scroll down every time to get to it.

Well, not really! MyAllTop allows you to move feeds around to your preference. Just click on the “Manage” link at the top right of your MyAllTop page and start organizing the feeds.

In the Manage mode you can move feeds around and you can also remove a feed from your MyAllTop list.

You can move feeds around by just dragging and moving the feed’s title to your preferred location. Make sure to save the changes before you move out of the Manage mode.

Once you are happy with the way your MyAllTop feeds look head over to your iPhone and navigate to “http://my.alltop.com/username“. Replace the “username” with your AllTop username, in this case it would be “http://my.alltop.com/demogeek“.

You’d see a mobile version of MyAllTop load on your iPhone with all your favorite feeds listed as per how you arranged on your MyAllTop page. The fonts look little big for readability but it serves the purpose of easily skimming through your favorite RSS feeds.

If you are interested on a feed item when you click on it the link will open in a new browser window on your iPhone so you can always get back to the MyAllTop page without navigating back and forth.

By default, MyAllTop on iPhone (on the web as well) displays only 5 items from each RSS feed. If you’d like to see more of it you use append “/RSS” to the URL, like “http://my.alltop.com/demogeek/rss” to see the top 100 feed items on a particular RSS feed.

If you’d like to share your MyAllTop items with your friends at Facebook or Twitter you can use the “Share this” button on the top of the page.

I’m sure you might be thinking you can do the same with Google Reader as well. The problem with Google Reader is that it doesn’t help you organize your RSS feeds based on the topic and there is no way to move feeds around so you can see your most preferred feeds at the top. AllTop nicely brings you the feeds based on the topics of your interest and can help you move feeds around to your personal preference.

I hope you find AllTop, particularly MyAllTop, more useful to sort through your pile of RSS feeds. If you find any other ways of making use of AllTop please share your thoughts in comments.

PS: Guy Kawasaki, the AllTop Guy, hinted this and I just elaborated on it.

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AllTop, MyAllTop, iPhone, iPhone Tips, iPhone Tricks, How To, RSS Feeds

Search for text within a web page on mobile Safari on your iPhone.

It’s great that iPhone OS 3.0 has this neat Spotlight kind-of-a search feature that makes it a lot more convenient to search for anything on your iPhone. Let me take that word “anything” back, in fact you cannot search for a text within a web page on the Safari browser that comes with the iPhone.

No worries, there is a simple bookmarklet that you can add to your Safari browser on you iPhone to bring the “search within a web page” capability to your iPhone. The steps to get this up-and-running are pretty straight-forward.

Somehow get this Javascript code to your iPhone,

javascript:void%28s%3Dprompt%28%27Find%20text%3A%27%2C%27
%27%29%29%3Bs%3D%27%28%27+s+%27%29%27%3Bx%3Dnew%20RegExp%28s%2C
%27gi%27%29%3Brn%3DMath.floor%28Math.random%28%29*100
%29%3Brid
%3D%27z%27%20+%20rn%3Bb%20%3D%20document.body.innerHTML%3Bb%3Db.replace
%28x%2C%27%3Cspan%20name%3D%27%20+%20rid%20+%20%27%20id%3D%27%20+
%20rid%20+%20%27%20style%3D%5C%27color%3A%23000
%3Bbackground-color%3Ayellow%3B%20font-weight%3Abold%3B%5C%27%3E
%241%3C/span%3E%27%29%3Bvoid%28document.body.innerHTML%3Db%29
%3Balert%28%27Found%20%27%20+%20document.getElementsByName%28rid
%29.length%20+%20%27%20matches.%27%29%3Bwindow.scrollTo%280
%2Cdocument.getElementsByName%28rid%29%5B0%5D.offsetTop%29%3B

I just simply emailed it to me and so I can access the same from my iPhone.

Make sure to copy the entire script and DO NOT miss out any.

Once copied, launch the Safari browser on your iPhone and get to any website, like DemoGeek.com (it doesn’t matter which one).

Once there, tap on the “+” button at the bottom of the screen to start bookmarking the page. Tap on the “Add Bookmark” button to bookmark the page.

On the Edit Bookmark page type-in a name, like “Find In Page” for example, for the bookmark and the paste the Javascript code that you copied earlier. Save the bookmark.

That’s pretty much all set. Now, if you want to find a text within a web page, first get to that website and once there tap on the “bookmark” button at the bottom of the Safari browser. Locate the bookmark you’ve created earlier, in this case “Find In Page”, and tap on it.

Mobile Safari will now open-up a dialog that asks you to enter a text or keyword to search for within the web page you have open.

Once you hit the OK button, you’ll be presented with another dialog that tells you how many matches were found for the search term. That’s just a visual information before you get to the detail.

When you hit the OK button iPhone Safari will highlight the text that you’ve searched for within the web page.

That’s all to it! From now on whenever you need to search for a text within a web page just call up the “Find In Page” bookmark and start finding the text you want to find within a web page.

I hope you find this bookmarklet useful. If you see any other uses of this bookmarklet or if you’ve faced any issues with it please share you thoughts/comments.

[via]

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Make use of Twitter favorites to read about your favorite tweets later.

I’m sure Twitter is a lot more useful tool to find useful information. But if you make use of Twitter on your iPhone then its usability gets constrained by the fact that you can only read (comfortably) to a certain level using your iPhone, given the form factor of your iPhone.

So, how do you efficiently make use of your iPhone to utilize the flow of information on Twitter, particularly when you don’t have much time during the day to get to the details of all those tweets? Simple, favorite your favorite tweets and then read those tweets at a later time on your PC or Mac where you can read pretty comfortably.

I’m going to walk you through a simple example of how I use TweetDeck (my favorite Twitter app for iPhone, I’m sure you have your own favorite) to bookmark my favorite tweets.

Don’t kill me for this simple tip but I just want to get the point out there on how you can use these simple tips to make efficient use of your iPhone device when it comes to being on Twitter and to keep up with the never ending stream of tweets.

Launch TweetDeck on your iPhone and open up the tweet that you think you don’t have the time to read now but rather would prefer to read it at later some time.

Tap on the little “+favorite” button on the bottom right side of the TweetDeck page.

Wait for it to update your Twitter account.

Once done you’ll see a “-favorite” button and that tells you that this tweet has been favorited.

Now when you get back to you computer you can either use the same TweetDeck client (or any other Twitter client that you run on your computer, for that matter) or your can simply login to your Twitter account using your favorite web browser (Apple Safari is my favorite) and can delve deeper into the tweet.

Over a period of time your favorite tweets list will grow and will make it miserable to find the correct one. What I do is I click on the link on the tweet and then once I bookmark it (aka, delicious) I normally get back to that favorite tweet and remove it from my favorite list.

That’s how I use my iPhone device to quickly skim through Twitter as and when I get some time and then read it to the detail later. I’m sure you’ll have your own way of making use of your iPhone device to deal with the Twitter overload. I would love to hear those. Please share those in comments.

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iPhone’s Voice Control feature can recognize some of your own words.

These days many phones (smartphones, in particular) support the Voice Control feature with which you can mostly dial a call instead of using the keypad. iPhone, a superior device as it is, can do more than just place a call.

To activate Voice Control press and hold the “Home” key on your iPhone for couple of seconds until you hear a beep. If you use a headset (handsfree) you can press and hold the call button for couple of seconds until you hear the beep sound to activate Voice Control. Once you hear the beep sound you are good to speak to your iPhone.

Once activated you can use Voice Control to call a phone contact, dial a number, control music etc. Here are some of the most frequent uses of iPhone’s Voice Control,

Make a Phone Call

Say “call” or “dial” followed by the person’s name as entered on your iPhone Address Book.

If the contact has more than one phone number on the Address Book you can specify which number to call by saying “home“, “work” or “mobile“.

If you just want to dial a number, you can say “call” or “dial” followed by the number.

Sample usage: “Call John Appleseed Work”, “Dial 7175556666″ etc.

Play Music

Say “play” or “play music”.

Play an Album, Artist or Playlist

Say “play” then say “album”, “artist” or “playlist” and the corresponding name. If you said “play artist” then say the name of the artist.

Sample Usage: “Play Playlist Recently Played”, “Play Artist Michael Jackson”, “Play Album Thriller”

Pause Music

Say “pause” or “pause music”.

Song Navigation

Say “next song” or “previous song”.

Shuffle Current Playlist

Say “shuffle”.

More about the currently playing song

Say “what’s playing”, “what song is this”, “who sings this song” or “who is this song by”.

Use Genius

Say “Genius”, “play more like this” or “play more songs like this”.

To Cancel Voice Control

Say “cancel” or press the Home button again.

Get Help about Voice Control

Say “Help“.

iPhone’s Voice Control can come in real handy when both your hands are tied or when you drive or…(fill-in with any reason). Make sure to pronounce the sentence clear and loud.

Just for your information, apart from supporting English you can Voice Control your iPhone on these languages as well,

Chinese (Cantonese)
Chinese (China)
Chinese (Taiwan)
Dutch
English (UK)
English (U.S.)
Finnish
French (Canada)
French (France)
German
Italian
Japanese
Korean
Norwegian
Polish
Portuguese (Brazil)
Portuguese (Portugal)
Russian
Spanish (Mexico)
Spanish (Spain)
Swedish

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Once in a while it is better to clear the browsing history and cookies on your iPhone Safari browser.

iPhone’s Safari browser does a pretty decent job of letting your browse the web pages in its true form and allowing you to zoom-in and zoom-out of web pages for viewing clarity.

As small a device iPhone is, it would be a good idea to clear the traces of your web browsing and the residue by clearing out the browsing history, cookies and cache. Here is how,

Launch “Settings” app.

Tap on the “Safari” option on the General settings pages.

Once on the Safari settings page tap on the “Clear History“, “Clear Cookies” and “Clear Cache” buttons to clear off your browsing history, cookies and the web cache.

Clearing off the browsing history, cookies and the cache would help clear some of the issues that you might face with iPhone Safari if you’ve been visiting sites that could cause trouble and it can certainly help improve the performance of the browser.

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Use these 5 tips to diagnose sound issues on your iPhone or iPod Touch.

It happened to me the very first day I had my iPhone with me for the full day. There was no sign of any sound coming out of my iPhone. The first thing that hits you is panic. But don’t, there are simple ways to make sure it’s not a hardware failure.

Volume Button

The first thing to try (obviously!) is to see if the Volume Button isn’t turned down all the way. Particularly if you have a habit of slipping your iPhone into your pockets it’s quite possible that you must have accidentally hit the volume low button all the way down. So make sure the volume level is appropriately set.

Unplugged Headset

The second thing to try is to see if the headset (if you are using one) is unplugged. It might sound silly to try this but in many cases it might look connected but in fact it is not fully connected and that’s possible that you don’t hear sound on your headset.

Paused Music

Of course, with the touch niceness of iPhone it’s quite possible that the music you are playing has been accidentally paused. Make sure music is not paused.

Volume Limit Too Low

iPhone’s Volume Limit option can help save your ears but could be a potential cause for the sound issue if it must have been set too low. Make sure the Volume Limit is not set too low. This one can get you quite easily and without knowing how to set the maximum volume limit on your iPhone it would be tough to figure this out.

Restart

The obvious thing! Being an operating system in itself the iPhone OS might need a restart once in a while to get things cleared away. So as a last resort before making a visit to the Apple Store or dialing Apple Support try and restart the iPhone to see if you can get the sound back.

Unplugged headset might sound silly but that’s what happened to me when all the other looked fine and the headset looked like plugged-in. In any case unplug and plug it back again, just in case.

These are some tips that I normally make sure when I run into sound issues with my iPhone. Do you know of any other tips that can be useful to others when they are faced with sound issues on their iPhone? Please share your tips in comments.

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iPhone Maps can display traffic conditions which would be really handy.

On our last trip to Washington DC our GPS re-routed us thru the local roads making it not a pleasant experience to drive around. We wondered why it re-routed, just for the sake of curiosity?

iPhone Maps came to the rescue and with the help of displaying traffic conditions over the map we were able to know why and took the pain of navigating thru the local roads (with those 400 traffic lights!)

Here is how you can also get the traffic conditions on your iPhone Map.

Launch the iPhone Maps app.

Once you see the map on your iPhone tap on the button that looks like it’s going to peel off, at the bottom right of the screen. It essentially shows the action pane for the Maps app.

Make sure your map is not displayed as a List and then tap on the “Show Traffic” button. If traffic information is not available for the area that you are viewing the button will be grayed out and will say “Traffic Unavailable In This Area”.

Now your iPhone Map would be redrawn with lines representing traffic conditions.

A Green line indicates that you should be able to travel at speeds more than 50 miles per hour.

An Orange line indicates that you should be able to travel at speeds between 25 to 50 miles per hour.

A Red line indicates trouble and tells you that you should be able to travel at speeds only less than 25 miles per hour.

It’s my personal experience that traffic conditions on iPhone came really handy when in need (to know, at least!) I hope you find it useful as well.

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Configure your iPhone or iPod Touch to stop playing music after some time.

When you use your iPhone to listen to music when you hit the bed you might appreciate the fact that you can set your iPhone or iPod Touch to stop playing music after a specific interval.

You can make use of the timer feature on your iPhone to sleep the iPod feature of your iPhone when the timer expires. Here is how,

Launch the “Clock” app.

Tap on the “Timer” tab. Adjust the time you want your iPod to go to sleep and then tap on the “When timer ends” button.

On the “When Timer Ends” page tap on the “Sleep iPod” option to make your iPod (or the iPod feature on your iPhone) sleep when the timer ends.

When you come back to the Timer page you should be able to see the “Sleep iPod” displayed on the ‘When Timer Ends” button.

You are all set to make use of the timer to sleep your iPod (feature on your iPhone) automatically. Now, when you hit the bed and you know you’ll fall asleep in the next 30 minutes, get to the “Timer” tab and adjust the time to, say, 35 minutes and tap the “Start” button.

Once the timer starts you should be able to see the countdown timer running on your iPhone from the time you set before you started the timer and and when that hits the all-zero mark your iPod will automatically sleep.

I hope you make use of the timer feature on your iPhone to automatically stop playing music on your iPhone when you go to sleep.

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Watch the cool technology of Augmented Reality on iPhone.

Given the video capabilities of iPhone it is expected that it could be utilized to do something more than just capturing video. And that’s what “Augmented Reality” does. It allows you to overlay and mix graphics with what you see on thru the video lens. So what you end up is a video that has some cool graphic capabilities overlaid. Watch from the above video to see what’s possible with Augmented Reality.

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Secure your iPhone in case if it gets lost or stolen.

Given the form factor of the iPhone device as such it’s quite possible that it can get lost or stolen pretty easily. Apart from the frustration of losing such a valuable device/companion it might come down hard on you if you have pretty sensitive data.

iPhone allows you to do two things (preliminarily), you can set a passcode to use your iPhone and also you can erase the data if there are multiple failed attempts to get into your iPhone.

Let’s first see, how to secure your iPhone by locking it up with a passcode.

Tap into the “Settings” icon.

Tap into the “General” option.

Tap into the “Passcode Lock” option.

You’ll be prompted to set a passcode now. Enter a 4-digit number that you can remember. It’s important that you choose a number that you can remember as it might be a pain to get your phone accessible without a passcode.

You’ll be prompted again for the passcode. Enter the same 4-digit passcode to confirm.

Once you setup the passcode you’ll be taken to the “Passcode Lock” page. Of all the choices that you see the 3 most important are, Turn Passcode Off, Change Passcode and Require Passcode option.

Tap into the “Turn Passcode Off” button to turn the Passcode off. You’ll be prompted to enter the current passcode to turn it off. Remember, without a passcode a child can easily unlock your iPhone (my 1 year old does unlock without any problem!).

If you’d rather prefer to have a different passcode, then tap into the “Change Passcode” button.

You’ll be prompted to enter the current passcode.

Then you’ll allowed to choose a new passcode. Keep in mind that you cannot enter the same passcode, if you do you’ll be warned appropriately.

Again, just to make sure you’ll be prompted to enter the new passcode one more time.

You can also adjust the way the iPhone user should be prompted for passcodes. You can tap into the “Require Passcode” button to change this setting. You can let the iPhone prompt for a passcode Immediately, after 1 minute, 5 minutes, 15 minutes, 1 hour and 4 hours. Choose the one that you feel comfortable with.

Now you have your iPhone safe guarded with a passcode lock. However, if you have sensitive data on your iPhone and when you lose your iPhone (I wish this never happens) you’d rather prefer to have some way to erase the data when there are multiple invalid passcode attempts. iPhone can help you sleep in peace.

Navigate to the “Passcode Lock” page as mentioned above and tap into the “Erase Data” button.

You’ll be prompted to enable the feature of erasing the data after 10 failed passcode attempts. Tap on the “Enable” button.

From now on, when someone makes multiple failed attempts to key-in the passcode then the data on your iPhone would be erased after 10 failed passcode attempts.

iPhone’s passcode feature and erase data feature would be good enough to safe guard your privacy when you happen to lose your iPhone. Use it with caution and you’ll certainly appreciate the handiness. Let us know in comments if you find any other ways of securing your iPhone.

Of all the advantages of locking your iPhone and erasing the data after 10 unsuccessful attempts there is one issue that you might want to be careful while deciding to enable the Erase Data feature. When you have the Erase Data feature enabled your friends (or whomever uses the iPhone other than you) can intentionally make 10 failed attempts and you might lose all the data on your iPhone. Of course, you’ll have your data backed up on your iTunes but it can be a hassle if misused. So, be diligent when enabling the Erase Data feature.

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Volume limit on your iPhone can help save your ears.

If you use headphones with your iPhone and keep listening to music then you must have felt at some time that the volume level must have been very uncomfortable to your ears if you have accidentally hit the volume button.

You can simply take control of the maximum volume level your iPhone can get to.

Tap into the “Settings” icon.

Then tap into the “iPod” option.

Once on the “iPod” settings page tap onto the “Volume Limit” option.

On the “Volume Limit” page you should be able to see a volume slider and a “Lock Volume Limit” button. First, adjust the slider to a volume level which would be comfortable to you and then tap the “Lock Volume Limit” button.

You’ll be asked to enter passcode to make sure you are doing it out of your sense. Enter a 4 digit number that you can remember.

You’ll be prompted again to enter the same passcode.

Once you validate the passcode by re-entering it again, the iPhone Volume Limit will be engaged.

From now on, instead of the default maximum volume you can only reach the volume level that you’ve set. iPhone Volume Limit option is a neat feature that can save your ears if you happen to accidentally hit the volume button to too high. Of course, to undo the volume limit lock tap into the “Unlock Volume Limit” button and enter the same passcode that you’ve set before to undo the volume limit lock.

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iPhone’s Airplane Mode can be used to prevent your child from making accidental phone calls.

If you have small kids in your household I’m sure they want to be on your iPhone more than you want them to be. As a parent you’d want them to use it to play games and such but not make any phone calls.

How would you prevent your child from making any accidental phone calls while using your iPhone? Well, it’s pretty simple.

iPhone comes with an Airplane Mode that shuts the phone feature off when turned on. It is intended to be used on an airplane where your iPhone might be interfering with the cockpit controls and you still want to use your iPhone for other purposes (read “iPod”). But that trick can be employed to prevent your child from accidentally making phone calls as well.

Tap into “Settings” and then on the Settings page the very first item you see would be “Airplane Mode“. Turn it ON to engage the airplane mode.

Now, when you try to make a phone call while the Airplane Mode is engaged you’ll get a popup that prevents you from making phone calls unless you disable Airplane Mode.

The bad part about this implementation is that you can disable the Airplane Mode right from the popup itself (which is a pretty bad usability scenario). It’s prone to accidental disabling but consider that as a thin shield that prevents your iPhone from making phone calls right away.

Once you disable it on the dialog your iPhone will search for the service and once available it makes the phone call as usual.

It might not be the fool-proof way of preventing your child from accidentally making phone calls on your iPhone but it surely can help to a certain level. Of course, there are other iPhone parental controls that you can use to prevent your child from misusing your iPhone but those are a bit more involved process.

If you want a quick turn on/off setting to prevent your phone from making accidental calls you can make use of the Airplane Mode in iPhone.

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Use foreign language keyboards on your iPhone to type messages in a language other than English.

With its global nature iPhone does support multiple languages and so does its keyboard. It has support for 42 languages (as of this writing). By default it uses English for its keyboard layout. But you can change or add more languages to its keyboard.

Start by tapping into “Settings“. Tap into “General” item.

Scroll down to locate “Keyboard” and tap into that.

Once on the Keyboard settings page tap on the “International Keyboards” item.

You should be able to see a list of foreign languages supported by iPhone so you can type on these languages. Turn ON the languages you want your iPhone Keyboard to support. Then navigate out of the Settings pages.

To use other foreign languages on your iPhone keyboard just tap on the new “World” key that you see now on the keyboard. This key would only show up when the iPhone Keyboard has to support multiple languages.

Once you tap on the key the keyboard will switch to the other language that you’ve turned on. If you have more than 2 languages turned on then it will switch the keyboard language for every tap on the “World” key.

I found this multilingual keyboard support on iPhone a very useful feature, particularly when you use your iPhone to chat with friends who speak foreign languages or to type-in notes on your preferred language than English. My only complaint is that it should support more languages than the 42 it currently supports.

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Scroll to the top of any lengthy page on iPhone with one tap.

You must have noticed that when you use your iPhone to browse/read any lengthy pages and wanted to get back to the top of the page you might be scrolling page by page to get to the top.

Not anymore, you can just tap at the iPhone Title Bar to scroll all the way to the top of the page.

The scrolling is really quick and is a pretty handy thing to remember around if you normally read lengthy pages on your iPhone.

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Easily enable Caps Lock on your iPhone for easy typing.

With that touch keyboard some people would certainly find it difficult to type things up on their iPhone. There is nothing much we can do other than to suggest to switch to the landscape mode as much as it’s available.

But, irrespective of the keyboard (or screen) layout one thing that annoys people the most is the usage of the Caps Lock. iPhone does a pretty good job of turning on the Caps Lock for the first character of a sentence. But if you have to type a lengthy sentence on capital letters you would rather prefer to turn the Caps Lock on and type without holding on the Caps Lock key for each character.

Start by tapping on the Settings icon.

Tap on the “General” option.

Once in the “General” settings page tap on the “Keyboard” option.

Make sure to turn ON “Enable Caps Lock” option.

Once enabled, now when you get the soft keyboard for typing DOUBLE-TAP the Shift key (upward arrow) and it will turn to blue color once enabled. With the blue colored Shift key you can now start typing in capital letters. When you don’t need the Caps Lock anymore just tap the Shift key once more and it will go back to its original state.

I personally find enabling the Caps Lock key useful when it comes to typing lengthy sentences on capital letters and when keying in passwords with capital letters. I hope you find this tip useful too.

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Use this simple trick to move the application icons around on your iPhone.

You must be familiar with this screen on your iPhone. With those many app icons and with a potential of 11 pages of icons (maximum 9 pages on pre-OS 3.0 phones) you’ll certainly prefer to move icons around to fit your needs.

It’s very simple to customize the icons on each pages. Just press and hold any icon on your iPhone for couple of seconds. All those icons will start shivering (not out-of-fear but by design).

Move (press and drag) the icons around to where ever you want. You can even move those app icons to other pages also. Exercise extra caution as things might be very sensitive when you move icons and so it might take couple of attempts to get it right.

You must have noticed that there is an “x” mark placed on to the top left of those icons when they are shivering. You must have also noticed that those “x” marks are not on all icons but rather on icons for the apps that you’ve downloaded (custom installed). It doesn’t show those “x” marks on the icons (apps) that comes with the iPhone.

So what does that mean? You must have guessed by now, those “x” marks are meant to delete or uninstall an application from your iPhone.

I’m sure you’ll find customizing your iPhone’s icon layout a very handy feature. Exercise a bit of caution when moving things (icons) around and you’ll be customizing your iPhone icon layout more and more as you download and use as many apps.

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Show the percentage of battery used on your iPhone’s Title Bar.

It used to be the case, prior to iPhone OS 3.0, that you can only see the strength of your iPhone battery charge by staring/guessing at the battery green fluid.

Not anymore, iPhone OS 3.0 has the capability to display the battery percentage on its Title Bar, adjacent to the battery icon. Certainly having the percentage displayed would give us a better understanding of how long the battery will last and help us make better decisions when it comes to how soon we have to recharge.

Unfortunately, iPhone doesn’t come with the battery percentage display enabled. Turning it on is no big deal either.

Start by tapping into the “Settings” icon and then into “General“.

Once in the General settings page, tap the “Usage” item.

On the Usage options page you should be able to see “Battery Percentage” option displayed at the top of the page. Turn it ON to have the battery percentage displayed next to the battery icon on your iPhone’s Title Bar.

It’s pretty simple to display the battery percentage next to the battery icon on your iPhone but I’m sure you’d find its usage to be far more.

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Change the behavior of the iPhone Home button to fit your needs.

One of the very few buttons available on the iPhone is the “uber” Home button. It’s used to end applications, get to the Home screen, wake-up the iPhone, bring up the search interface and many more.

Other behaviors of the iPhone Home button include (on 3.0) includes pressing and holding it for a few seconds to get the Voice Control interface.

You can double-click the Home button to get to your Phone Favorites. What if you’d like to see the Home button do something else when you double-click it?

Of course, iPhone allows you to customize the double-click behavior of the Home button. Tap into “Settings” and then tap into “General” and then into “Home”.

On the “Home” settings page you can customize the double-click behavior of the Home button to get to the (of course) Home screen, Search interface, Phone Favorites (list of your favorite contacts), Camera or iPod.

The options are predefined so if you would have been expecting to launch a third party app by double clicking the Home button then you might have to wait for future iPhone OS releases but with the 3.0 release you have some predefined options to customize the Home button’s double-click behavior.

So, if you are an avid Camera guy you can let iPhone launch the Camera app by choosing Camera from the above options page. Or if you listen to music a lot on your iPhone then you can quickly get to the iPod feature of iPhone by choosing iPod on the above options page.

Use it at your convenience and you’ll certainly find the double-click feature of the iPhone Home button really useful.

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iPhone Restrictions allows you to customize how the iPhone can be used.

If you live in a household with more than you and you’ve got an iPhone then it’s obvious that you’ll be spending less time with the phone but everyone else would be spending more time with it. If you have kids in your household you’d obviously be interested to restrict what the kids can do with the iPhone.

Or, if you have bought iPhone to your kids and not sure what they’ll be doing with their iPhone or don’t wanted to get a huge bill from the iTunes AppStore for all your kids’ app-shopping-spree then, of course, you’d want to restrict them from buying apps from AppStore.

iPhone OS 3.0 have you covered. iPhone Restrictions mimics more of a parental control to your iPhone device. It’s a bit involved compared to other customizations but it’s not rocket science. Just follow the steps below and you would be on your way to parental controlling your iPhone and restricting who can use what.

Start by tapping into the “Settings” icon and then to the “General” option.

Locate “Restrictions” at the bottom of the screen and tap into it. By default it would be turned off.

Tap on the “Enable Restrictions” button.

If it’s the first time you are setting the restrictions then iPhone will prompt you to enter a 4-digit Restrictions Passcode. Think of a number that you can remember better and type it in.

Once the 4th digit it typed-in iPhone will ask you to enter the same Restrictions Passcode one more time to make sure.

Once you type-in the same passcode you’ll taken back to the same page where you enabled restrictions. This time, of course, it would read “Disable Restrictions”.

Apple has pre-selected a list of standard applications that would be candidates for restrictions and that includes, Safari, YouTube, iTunes, AppStore, Camera and Location. And all those applications would be turned ON to indicate that they are all allowed to launch these apps.

Slide the control to turn OFF the applications that you don’t want your kids or others to be using. Exercise caution, as turning all these to OFF will turn off some of the users of the phone

If you scroll down you should be able to set restrictions based on the content than type.

Even if you’ve restricted others from launching into AppStore and going on a shopping-spree, the intended user can still stack up your iTunes bill by doing in-app purchases. You can turn that capability off on this page if you want to play it safe.

You can restrict playing back music, music videos and podcasts that contain explicit content.

You can restrict playing back movies completely or by the rating.

You can restrict watching TV Shows completely or based on the rating.

You can also restrict launching iPhone Apps that are rated 4+, 9+, 12+ or 17+. Or you can completely restrict the user from launching third party Apps.

As you must have sensed by now, these ratings are based on United States. If you live in a different country then you can change the ratings to be based on that country by using “Ratings For” option.

Restrictions on iPhone is a fantastic feature that might make you feel comfortable handing over your iPhone to someone else and leave it with them for an extended time. Of course, the restrictions can be improved a lot by going in the User Profiles direction and allowing restrictions on custom third-party applications, but I’m sure we’ll see those on the future iterations of iPhone OS.

If you use it with diligence and keep the passcode safe then I’m sure you’ll find iPhone Restrictions a helpful feature.

Let us know in comments if you find other ways of restricting the usage of iPhone by others.

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