When the iPhone arrives this evening, there’s sure to be the usual influx of tips, tricks, and all sorts of nifty functionality that Apple hasn’t showed off yet. But for the moment, only Apple knows what all of that is. And they’re doling it out teaspoon by teaspoon to a salivating audience.
Today they’ve put up ten new videos that they call “Finger Tips.” Oh ho, Apple, you make me laugh (you would have scored serious extra points for using the They Might Be Giants song of the same name). Each video is only a few seconds long or so, showing you how to do things like set up your Favorites, or your mail, etc. Here’s the full list:
#1. Silence the ring - Push the sleep/wake button once to silence the ring of an incoming call, push it twice to send the call to voicemail. Or silence everything with the silent ringer switch.
#2. Delete a message - We’ve seen this delete swipe gesture before.
#3. Favorites - We’ve seen pretty much all of this before.
#4. Assign a ringtone - Yes, Virginia, you can give all of your friends individual ringtones. As long as you don’t have more than 25 friends.
#5. More song controls - Tapping the album art while a song is playing shows you individual controls, like repeat, shuffle, or the scrubber.
#6. Cover Flow - Nothing to see here, move along.
#7. Magnify to edit - The magnifying loupe that we first saw in the keyboard video can be used on in emails, etc. One interesting point: if dragging your finger moves the insertion point, that seems to imply that there’s no way to select text.
#8. Mail preferences - The defaults for adding a new account include Yahoo!, Gmail, .Mac, AOL, and “Other.” You can set your email to check automatically every fifteen, thirty, or sixty minutes (or manually). “Checking less frequently will improve your battery life.” Of course, you can also control the number of messages displayed, number of lines in a preview, and the minimum font size. And to answer another question, you can customize your email signature so it doesn’t say “Sent from my iPhone.”
#9. Set a passcode - You can set a four digit passcode that your iPhone will prompt you for when you wake it (you can still make emergency calls without it). If you forget the code, you just need to dock it with the computer you used to activate it (I wonder if that activation status is transferable—what if you get rid of that computer?).
#10. Reset your iPhone - Face it, the iPhone’s going to freeze sooner or later. I’m just glad Apple’s being upfront about it, like with the iPod. Looks like holding the home button for a few seconds will force quit a hanging application, while holding the home and sleep/wake buttons will reset the iPhone. Good to know.
