Rich Hall has written about Handheld and Pocket computers for the last 13 years. He is the Editor of Pocket PC magazine and former editor of The HP Palmtop Paper, the NEC Ultralite Connection and the HP Portable Paper. He began his career as a high school Math and English teacher. Rich lives in Fairfield, Iowa, with his wife, Lucinda, and their children, Robert and Ella. You can contact him at Rich@PocketPCMag.com.
By Rich Hall
The ability to make conference calls on your iPhone makes it easier to use your device in professional settings. All major US carriers support conference calls, but the number of participants and the ability to add, merge, or disconnect individual callers will depend on your carrier. Here's how to make a conference call through iPhone.
By Rich Hall
Tired of your iPad or iPhone screen going dim or dark while you're using your device? The auto-lock and screen dimming features can help you save battery, but can also be frustrating if you're trying to read an article! Below, we'll cover how to turn off auto-lock on your iPhone and how to stop your iPhone from dimming too quickly.
By Rich Hall
I rarely used the Shuffle feature in iTunes or on my iOS devices because I didn't think there was a way to exclude the songs I didn't want to hear. Then I discovered the "Skip When Shuffling" tag. Here's how you exclude songs from Shuffle:
By Rich Hall
Review it and change the genre associated with a specific album or song by following these steps. In this example, I'm changing the genre of the Bob Dylan album, "Christmas In the Heart" from "Holiday" to "Folk" (Fig. 4).
Fig. 4: Use the "Genre" drop-down to change genres for multiple albums.
If you need some privacy during a FaceTime call, you have two options. You can mute FaceTime audio or pause FaceTime video during a call on your iPhone or iPad. Here's how to mute the sound or stop the video feed during a call in the FaceTime app.
By Rich Hall
You can change the status of an existing Contact to FaceTime or Voice Call from within the Phone app. Open Phone, go to the Favorites tab, tap on the + (plus) button, and select a name from the Contacts list. A pop-up appears that will allow you to make the listing a FaceTime or Voice Call item.Note that you can do this with any contact listing, even those that do not have a phone number or a phone with FaceTime capabilities. Be sure to check about this before you try to add them. Also, if you're trying to FaceTime with an iPod touch user, you can only do this if they have a Wi-Fi connection to the Internet.
By Rich Hall
You can check the balance on your AT&T bill or the remaining number of minutes you have directly from your iPhone. From the Home screen, go to Settings >Phone >AT&T Services. Select Check Bill Balance or View My Minutes. AT&T will promptly send you a free SMS with the info.
By Rich Hall
A scientific calculator was added to the iPhone and iPod touch with versions 2.0 and later of the OS. Among its functions is a random number generator. Press the “Rand” key at the bottom of the screen and Calc displays a random number with 15 decimal places, between 0 and 1. Developers could use this feature to create registration numbers; regular users could use it to create truly random passcodes or passwords. For example, if you wanted to create a random eight digit password, you could hit the Rand button and use the last eight digits of the random number for your password.
By Rich Hall
Is the pop-up blocker for Safari stopping pop-ups you actually need? Conversely, if you've been having trouble with pop-ups on your iPhone whenever you try to browse online, you're probably hoping for a way to block pop-ups on Safari. In this tip, we'll show you how to do both. Let's go over how to use the pop-up blocker on iPhone.
There are two ways to set a custom image as the wallpaper of your opening “unlock” screen:
Either of these methods allows you to use any photo or image on the iPhone/iPod touch as wallpaper. Follow these steps to add a wallpaper folder, so you don't have to look through all your photos to find an image:
