Intro I make a LOT of iPhone tips and tricks content,
and obviously, I don’t use all of the tips that I talk about myself, I just want to share everything
I discover with you. But it dawned on me recently that I should probably make a video where I talk
about the tips and features of the iPhone that I do actually use. So that’s what I’m going to do in
this video, these are my 20 favourite iPhone tips and features. Stick with me until the end of the
video, as I genuinely believe the one thing they have in common is that they’re all really useful.
OK, let’s get into it.
Swipe to select multiple items ​​You’re no doubt familiar with these checkboxes
that appear at different points throughout iOS, you use them to select multiple items. So here in
Mail for example, I’ve tapped the Edit button in the upper right of the screen first, and that then
allows me to select emails to either delete, or mark or move in bulk. But if you need to do this
for multiple items all at once, you’d simply take your finger, and swipe down the list of items,
just like this. You can see that all of the items are selected at once, making this a really quick
and easy way to deal with lots of items, and this works across loads of different parts of iOS.
Haptic keyboard for typing Typing on an iPhone, as an experience,
simply isn’t the same as typing on a full sized computer keyboard, but there is a feature in your
iPhone that makes it that little bit closer, and it’s called Haptic Keyboard. You would head into
Settings, then Sounds and Haptics, then Keyboard Feedback, and ensure that this function here,
called ‘haptic’, is toggled on. With this on, each time you hit a key on your iPhone’s keyboard,
you’ll get a tiny bit of feedback through the screen, which does feel a little
bit more like typing on something like a Blackberry keyboard. It’s a great feature,
it does drain your battery faster than not having it on, so consider this if you’re going to use it.
Reachability The majority of complaints that
I get on my videos about typing on the iPhone is in relation to people having large hands,
and finding everything a bit too fiddly, but if you’re like me and you’ve got small hands,
you might find that modern smartphones are large to the point where it can be difficult
to operate them one-handed. If that’s the case for you, try using Reachability. Go to Settings,
then Accessibility, then Touch, and enable Reachability. With this toggled on,
you would simply use your thumb or finger to give a little flick down at the bottom part
of your screen if you’re using a phone with Face ID, or if you’re on a phone with a Home button,
lightly double-tap the home button. Almost 50% of the screen will drop down,
allowing you to reach the things at the top more easily. Fun fact, notice that on an iPhone with
a dynamic island, your phone even replicates the dynamic island as the screen drops down.
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Continuity Camera If you have an iPhone
running iOS16, and a Mac running MacOS Ventura or newer, you can make use of something called
Continuity camera. This is where, when using video conferencing on your Mac,
you can use your phone’s camera and microphone, instead of the absolute potato that’s built into
your laptop. So here for example, even on my M2 Max MacBook Pro, this is how the built-in
camera looks. And this is how it looks if I use the camera on my iPhone 14 Pro instead.
To enable this, ensure that you’re signed into the same iCloud account on both devices,
and that you have bluetooth and wifi enabled, and that you’re connected via the same wifi network,
and then go to Settings, then General, then AirPlay and Handoff, and ensure Continuity
Camera is toggled on. Then on your Mac, you can choose the camera and microphone that you
want to use. Oh and this tiny little device lets you prop your iPhone on your Macbook’s display.
Canceling an email send A feature that arrived in iOS16 was
the ability to cancel an email send. We’re going to go to Settings, then Mail, then scroll right
down to the bottom of this screen and tap into where it says Undo Send Delay. You can choose
to have this feature off, or have a 10, 20 or 30 second delay on any emails that you send. The way
that this works is that when you hit send on an email, your phone will actually hold off sending
that email for the allotted time, and during that time, you can hit Undo Send, which will bring the
email right back to the edit screen for you. If you’re like me, and you often think of something
you should have mentioned in an email right after you hit send, this can be an invaluable feature.
Text replacement for email address Typing out your email address all the time is
a pain, and that’s why I don’t do it, I use text replacement instead. Go to Settings, then General,
then Keyboard and then Text Replacement. Tap the little plus button here in the upper right of the
screen. In phrase, type out your email address. Then in shortcut, I use the @ key twice, but you
can use whatever you like. Hit Save when you’re done. Now every time you’re using your phone and
you type the @ key twice and then the space bar, your phone will input your email address for you.
iPhone as Apple TV remote The Apple TV boxes are, in my opinion,
one of the most underrated pieces of Apple tech on the market, offering amazing functionality at
a crazy cheap price when compared with other Apple products. One of the nicest features of Apple TV
is that if you’ve got an iPhone connected on the same wifi network, and logged into the
same iCloud account, you can use your iPhone as a remote control. First, go into Settings,
then Control Centre, and ensure that you’ve got Apple TV Remote included in your Control Centre.
You do that by tapping the green plus next to it, and ensuring it’s up here in the Included Controls
section. Then, when you want to use the remote, simply access the Control Centre, and tap the
remote button. You’ve now got full remote controls via your iPhone, just like if you were using the
Siri remote that comes with Apple TV, but without having to leave your seat to go and pick it up.
Drag and drop Drag and drop is
really useful on iPhone, but most people don’t know how to do it. I use it mostly for email.
So if I receive an email that I want to be reminded about at a different date or time,
I want to get that email into my reminders app, and you can do that using drag and drop. So here’s
an email, I’m going to use my finger or thumb to press down on the email just slightly and
then immediately move it, to kind of lift it off the screen, like you can see here.
Then, still holding that finger or thumb down, I’m going to use my other hand to swipe up on
the screen to get back to the home screen, then open Reminders. I’m then going to drop
that email into reminders, and you can see that this creates a reminder that links right back to
that email. This does take a bit of practice, but once you get the hang of it, it’s really useful.
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Jump to first photo (and back) Your photo library is probably pretty large,
and it’s only going to get larger over time as you add more photos and videos to it,
and sometimes you want to get right back to where it all started, and view your first photos and
videos. If you’ve got thousands of images, swiping to get to that point can take a long time, so just
do this instead. Tap at the top of the screen, I usually tap where the time is showing, and your
phone will immediately jump you all the way to your earliest photos and videos. And to get back,
simply tap on Library down at the bottom left of the screen, and your phone will jump you back.
Haptic Touch Your iPhone has a
feature called Haptic Touch, where touching and holding the screen for a moment will bring up
additional options. It works all over iOS, but it’s most useful on App Tiles. So for example,
if I tap and hold for a moment on Safari, you can see that I can immediately open up my bookmarks
or reading list, or a private tab or a new regular tab. On mail, I can immediately begin a new email,
or access search, or view specific inboxes. It works on the 2nd Gen iPhone SE, the iPhone XR
or iPhone 11 and newer. On the iPhone 6, 7 and 8 range, as well as the iPhone XS and XS Max,
the feature is called 3D touch, and is essentially the same, but involves
you having to physically push down harder on the screen, rather than tapping and holding.
Block numbers and email addresses If you get phone calls or texts
from numbers that you’d rather not receive, or emails from email addresses,
you can block them. If I go to the phone app, and find a number that I want to block,
I can just tap this little info button to the right of it, and then choose Block this caller.
For messages, you would find the message, tap on the number up at the top, then tap on Info,
then choose Block this caller. And for email, you would tap on the email address in an email
that you’ve been sent, and on this page you can choose Block this Contact. One thing to
point out here, go to Settings, then Mail, and scroll down to Blocked Sender Options,
and change this to Move to Bin, because Leave in Inbox is a bit pointless in my opinion.
Convert things with Siri Regardless of your opinion on Siri, one
thing it’s really good for is quickly converting things. Whether you want to convert currency,
or measurements for a recipe, or distances, Siri can most likely do it. So I might say something
like, “Convert 124 miles to kilometres” for example, and Siri would come back with a result.
Or I might say, “how much is 200 Euros in Turkish Lira?”
Regardless of the kind of conversion you need to do,
it’s almost always easier to get Siri to do it for you, and remember that if
you use an Apple Watch, your Watch can perform these conversions for you too.
Remove vocals in Music One for the Music app here,
but something I like to do is listen to music, but without the lyrics, while I’m working,
and you can do that in the Music app. This doesn’t work on every song, but when you’re listening to a
track in Apple Music, tap the lyrics button in the lower left of the screen to bring up the lyrics.
If you see this microphone button, you can tap on that, and then lower the volume of the lyrics of
the track that you’re listening to, creating an instrumental. It doesn’t completely remove the
lyrics, but it’s good enough if you just want to listen to some music while you’re working.
Spotlight Search for everything Spotlight search is one of the
best features on Mac, and Apple have been quietly making the feature almost as useful on iPhone over
the past few years. To access it, you can either swipe down from the middle of the home screen,
or if you’ve got a search box on your home screen, you can tap on that. From here,
you can honestly search for pretty much anything. So if I want to open an app,
I’ll often just type the first couple of letters of it, and that makes it easy to
open. But you can also search for photos from your photo library, you can search
for messages or emails without having to open those apps up. You can perform quick
actions like setting a timer by simply typing ‘timer’, or you can perform a conversion. You
can search for an address or a place, and a maps result will show. It’s really clever, and I’ll
probably make a dedicated video about it in the future, but for now, check it out for yourself.
Measure things Your phone probably
has the measure app, it’s available on the iPhone SE 1st gen and iPhone 6s or newer,
and it uses the camera of your phone, plus things like the Lidar scanner if your phone has one,
to allow you to just point your phone at something and measure it.
I’ve used this in shops to measure furniture if my wife and I are thinking of buying it, I’ve
used it to quickly measure spaces in the house or the garden, and all you have to do is open it up,
point it at whatever you’d like to measure, and use the plus button to add waypoints. It
can even be used to take single measurements of things, like paintings or doors or windows.
Identify things in images If you have a compatible phone,
pretty much anything from the 2nd gen iPhone or iPhone XS onwards, your iPhone
can perform something called visual lookup. This is where you take a photo of something,
and your phone will tell you what you’re looking at. It currently works for landmarks, statues,
art, plants, pets and insects, and the range of things it can identify is increasing all the time.
Trigger warning, if you don’t want to see a picture of a spider, close your eyes for a moment,
but this is what we tend to use it for in our house - we get a lot of spiders,
especially in our garage, and if they’re house spiders, I leave them be, but if they’re false
widows, I tend to catch them and put them outside. This feature helps me identify them.
Identify a song with Siri If you’re ever listening to
a song or a piece of music, and you want to know what it is, just ask your phone.
Activate your voice assistant, and ask “what song is this”, and then hold your phone as
close to the music as you can. After a moment, your phone should come back with an answer,
and you can then usually choose to add that song to your Apple Music library.
Flag emails to work on later A basic function of the mail app here
but one that I often find people don’t know about, if you get an email that you know you want to take
action on a bit later, you can simply flag it. Swipe right to left, and tap on the flag button.
You can then go back to your mailboxes, and you have a mailbox called Flagged, which if it’s not
visible by the way, tap the Edit button up at the top right, and choose it to add it in. I tend to
think of the flagged inbox as my ‘to do’ list, but for Mail, and each time I action an email in here,
I swipe from right to left once more, and unflag it, which removes it from this list.
Scan documents If you open the Files app, and navigate to
a folder, then press and hold in the folder for a moment, you can see that you have an option called
Scan Documents. You can then hold your phone over a paper document, and capture it, and it will be
uploaded to iCloud. Once here, it’s accessible via all your other devices like your iPad or your Mac,
but if you tap into the document that you just created, and tap the little pen icon in
the lower right of the screen, then tap the plus button, you can add a signature. This is obviously
great if you ever get asked to sign something and don’t have a printer, as you can handle literally
the entire process of scanning, signing and sending a document, right from your iPhone.
Sharing Notes and Lists I really like the Notes and Reminders apps on
iPhone, I think they’re effective and lightweight enough for most people to get what they want from
them, but one of the features that I think makes them better than most third party apps, is how
easy it is to quickly share things with a friend or family member or colleague who also has an
iPhone. So here’s a reminders list for a project that I’m working on, I would just tap the Share
button at the top of the screen, and then choose how I want to send the share request, I find that
iMessage works very well for this. I’ll send the request to my friend, who can then open the link
on their phone and accept the invitation, and just like that, we’re now collaborating on a list. This
could be a project list, or a packing list for a trip, or a grocery list, whatever you like, and it
works exactly the same way on Notes too, making it very easy to collaborate, right from your phone.
End So there you go,
those are my 20 favourite iPhone tips and features, right now as of mid 2023. I’m hoping
I can add a few more to this list when iOS17 is released later this year, but what do you think,
anything that you would have liked to see included here? Drop me a comment and let me know.
And as ever, if you found this video useful, do please consider leaving me a like,
and subscribing to my channel for more content like this in the future.
See you on the next video.