Your iPhone is a pretty remarkable piece of technology, and it’s going to get even more
remarkable in a couple of months when iOS16 launches. But, while we wait for that, there’s
loads of things that your iPhone can do, that I reckon the average user will have no idea about.
So that’s what we’re going to talk about in this video, 10 amazing things that your iPhone can do,
that most people won’t be aware of. Stick with me until the end of the video,
I reckon there’s at least a couple of tips in here that will catch most people by surprise.
OK, let’s get into it.
You can use your iPhone to identify things like plants, thanks to the iPhone’s exceptional machine
learning capabilities. To do this, open the camera app and take a photo of whatever it is you’d like
to identify. So you can see here that I’ve taken a photo of some flowers in a vase in our kitchen.
Now, if the photo that you’ve taken is something that your phone recognises, the ‘I’ or information
button shown here will look different. For context, here’s a photo that the iPhone doesn’t
recognise, and you can see how the ‘I’ button looks. But here on the photo of the flowers,
notice the kind of sparkle around the I icon. Tap there, and then you’ve got this ‘lookup’
section. The iPhone has already identified that this is a plant, and there’s an icon on the image
to show you what the iPhone is referring to. Tap on lookup, and your iPhone will run a
search to both identify the plant, and to give you additional information. So here, the iPhone
has correctly identified this as a peony, and I can click on any of these Siri knowledge tabs
to learn more. Then down at the bottom, we’ve got some images from the web. Clever right?
Now look, I’m expecting people to comment saying that they’ve tried this and that Siri got the
identification wrong, and yes that’s probably to be expected sometimes, it’s not always going
to get every identification correct, but I was doing this around our home and garden yesterday
and it seemed to be pretty accurate. It works for other things also. Here’s
a photo of a scenic view over LA that I captured while we were on holiday recently,
and the iPhone recognises this, and can give me the exact location where this photo was taken.
Here’s a photo of a dog, and whilst it gets the breed of the dog wrong,
it does offer photos of the correct breed of dog. It’s a cool feature with lots of potential uses,
and if you find an interesting use case for this, do drop me a comment and let me know about it.
I’ve talked about live text in previous videos, but I’m going to mention it here again as I think
it’s a feature many people aren’t really aware of. Simply hold your phone up with
the camera app enabled, and point it at some text out there in the real world. Your phone
will identify the text, and you know this has happened when you see this icon on the camera
screen. Simply tap it to select the text. With the text selected, you can copy it and
then paste it as computer text, so you could drop this into a note, or a word document
or anything like that. And in my experience, this is pretty versatile, and will work
with all manner of text, even including handwriting, so long as it’s fairly legible.
Following on from the previous tip, live text works with text in a wide number of languages,
so I can capture text in a different language and use my iPhone to immediately translate it for me.
So here for example, on the back of this contact lens box, we’ve got some non-english text, and if
I hold my phone up and open the camera app, you can see that we can capture this text, just like
we did previously, and I could copy this text, like before. But then, if I tap the ‘translate’
button, my phone will translate this text for me. Obviously, if you’re travelling, or if you just
find yourself quite often in a situation where you need to be able to work with text that’s not
in your native language, this is an extremely useful tool.
If you ever need to give your iPhone to a child, say you want to let them play a game
on your phone, you’d probably also like to ensure that they’re not able to press the Home button,
and start randomly opening other apps. Well, your iPhone has the ability to lock
it to just the one app, and switching the functionality on is actually really easy.
Open Settings, then accessibility, then Guided Access, and ensure that you switch it on.
Then, open an app. I’m going to do this with YouTube. Then, on an iPhone like this with a
full-screen, tap the power button on the right 3 times. On an iPhone like this, with the Home
button at the bottom, tap the Home button 3 times. If you tap on Options in the bottom left, you can
choose which functions you’d like the user to have, or not have access to. Switching off Touch
for example would mean that anything that the user presses on the screen wouldn’t register,
so if you were letting your child view a video for example, this would stop them from being able to
skip ahead or rewind or pause, as well as locking itself to the app. Disabling the volume button
would stop them from being able to change the volume. Time limit is pretty useful,
it lets you set a time limit, and at the end of that time limit, the phone will display a message
letting you know that the device is locked out, so if you were letting your kid play a game for
30 minutes for example, this is a sure-fire way of ensuring that they can’t go over.
Once you press start, you’ll input a passcode. This is what allows you to lock your phone out,
and importantly, unlock it when you’re done. The app will function as normal,
but you’ll notice that if I swipe up on my iPhone 13, or if I press the Home button here on my
iPhone SE, neither of them work, I’m stuck in the app. I also can’t lock the phone screen,
the phone is literally locked to the app that I’ve currently got open.
When you want to return to normal, triple-click the same button that you used to begin guided
access, and so long as you input the correct passcode, the phone will return to normal.
It’s a really handy feature, and not just for giving your phone to kids. I recently was at
a function where I wanted the venue to be able to play a music playlist from my phone, and whilst I
was happy giving them the phone for the afternoon, I wanted to lock them into the Spotify app,
so that someone couldn’t come in and access any of my other apps. This tip made that possible.
Did you know, that you can add captions to your photos? To do this, simply open a photo
in the Photos app, and swipe up to bring up the additional information related to that photo.
Notice here that you’ve got a text box that says “Add a Caption”.
Tap in there, and you can add a caption, or multiple captions, or even hashtags if you wish.
Now, why would you want to do this, you may ask? Because your IPhone will include
captions in searches, so anything that you input here is searchable when you’re
looking through your photos later on. Now your iPhone is pretty smart,
and can already figure out a lot about your photos without you getting involved. The
app can tell if there’s a car in the photo, or if you’re on holiday, or if it thinks it’s a picture
of a party or a wedding for example, if you don’t believe me just try searching for words like that
and see what comes up. But your phone is using machine learning to do that, and it’s not going
to be 100% accurate. Captions and tags allow you a greater control of how you manage your photos,
so if you’re someone with a lot of photos, it’s definitely worth trying this particular tip out.
iPhones have been getting bigger and bigger in recent years, especially if you opt for the
Pro Max variety, but even a phone like this, my iPhone 13 Pro, is pretty large if you’re like me,
and have pretty small hands. It’s not really an issue when you’re using your phone with
both hands, but what about when you’re using your phone one-handed, and you’re trying to use
your thumb to tap things up at the top of the phone screen? Well, good news, you can use an
accessibility feature to make this much easier. Head into Settings, then choose accessibility,
then choose Touch, and ensure that Reachability is toggled on.
Then, when you’re using your phone, swipe down in the bottom part of your screen.
I’d say that you need to be swiping around the bottom 1/8th of the screen in order for this
to work, and it does take a bit of practice to get this right, but you can see here that once
you’ve got this, you’ll be able to swipe down and bring the top of the display down enough,
so that you can then tap on something at the top of the screen without having
to awkwardly reposition your hand. This should also work on smaller phones with a Home button,
where I believe a double-tap of the home button works instead of the swiping gesture.
Your iPhone has software built-in to allow it to identify music that’s playing,
whether that’s music that’s on TV, or even music that’s playing in the background,
like at a bar or a restaurant. Now, your phone is using it’s built-in microphone to do this,
so the clearer the audio the better, but it really does work.
To access this function, head into Settings, then Control Centre, and ensure that Music recognition
is added to your control centre. Then, whenever you hear some music that you’d like to identify,
open Control Centre, and tap the Music Recognition icon. Then hold your phone’s microphone as close
to the music source as you can. It takes around 5 to 10 seconds for your phone to do it’s thing,
but hopefully your phone will come back with an answer for you,
giving you the name of the artist and the song. What’s also really helpful, is if you hold
the icon down for a second, you can view your history. So, if you identified something while
you were out, but forgot to make a note of it, don’t worry, you can come back to it later on.
Oh, and one last thing to show you here that’s kind of related. Your iPhone doesn’t
just have music detection, it also has noise detection, which is also in the control centre.
With this enabled, your phone will continuously listen out for certain sounds,
and alert you if it hears them. Things like fire, a siren or smoke alarms, or a door knocking,
or a dog barking, or a baby crying, there’s lots of options that you can choose from. Great
if you’re hard of hearing, and would appreciate having your iPhone lend a listening ear for you.
This feature doesn’t work on every iPhone, you need either an iPhone SE or an iPhone 6S or newer,
and it works better on the more modern iphones that have LIDAR, like the latest iPhone 13 Pros,
but your phone can be used to measure things in the real world. So for example,
if I wanted to measure this acoustic treatment tile that I’ve got on my wall,
I would open the Measure app on my iPhone, and then point it at the tile. You can see
that the phone recognises this as an object, and if I tap the plus icon whilst this is selected,
it will automatically give me all relevant measurements for it.
Alternatively, I can tap somewhere on a wall for example, to create a starting point,
and then move across and tap again to create an end point, and the phone will measure the
distance between the two points. You can add multiple measurements all in one session.
I can also tap this little camera shutter button at any time, to take a photo of whatever I’m
looking at, complete with the measurements I’ve taken, which is obviously super handy.
And, it’s really very accurate too. When measuring this wall, it got it pretty much bang-on.
It’s impressive stuff, and you can imagine that when you’re out and about,
and a tape measure perhaps isn’t available, this is going to be an extremely helpful tip to know.
A quick followup tip from the previous one, once you’re in the Measure app, you’ve got this Level
button down at the bottom right. Tap on that, and you can use your iPhone as a spirit level.
Now, a bit like the measure tool, if I were a tradesperson, I wouldn’t use
this in place of a professional tool like a proper spirit level,
but if you’re in a bind and need to quickly check the level of something and all you’ve got
is your iPhone, this is a super handy little tip to know about.
You can track your iPhone, thanks to the Find My app. You probably already knew that, it’s the
same app that lets you track things like AirTags, or your AirPods or your MacBook, helping you to
retrieve items if they get lost or stolen. But, an issue with this is that by default, if your
phone gets switched off, it’s no longer able to be tracked. However, you can amend this in Settings.
Open Settings, and click on your Apple ID up here at the top. Then choose Find My,
and where it says Find my iPhone, tap there. Ensure that all the options here are toggled on.
It’s this middle one that’s going to help you out, you can see that the phone will continue
to be visible on the Find My network for a while, even when the power is switched off.
To check that this has worked, begin initiating a power shut down,
and you’ll see here where it says ‘iPhone findable after power off’. If you’ve got that message,
you’ll be able to locate your iPhone on the Find My network, even if the power is turned off.
So there you go, 10 amazing things that your iPhone can do,
that I reckon most people won’t have known about. What about you,
any other amazing things that you use your iPhone for that I’ve not covered in this video?
Drop me a comment, and let’s talk about it. 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.