iPhone Life - Best Apps, Top Tips, Great Gear

When you’re browsing through Apple Music songs and playlists, you’ll likely find music you want to download. If you want to make sure your songs are accessible across your devices, you’re going to want to add it to your iCloud Music Library. Luckily this is easy to do; here’s how.

For everyday uses, the iPhone has a decent built-in microphone. But if you want to get any level of professional sound, whether it be to film a movie, record a song, or conduct an interview, you’re going to need an external mic for quality sound. There’s a wide variety of options, but it’s definitely the type of product where you get what you pay for.

There are iPhone cases for every type of personality, from the rugged, life-proof beasts to the professional, leather covers. Collections of cases are made fairly streamlined though; what if you want to show off your personality or love of art with your iPhone case? There is an array of websites offering graphic design covers but, recently, I came across Redbubble, a company that features independent art on all kinds of gear. Here are seven of my favorites amongst the 8000 options the website offers.

There are likely occasions when you're listening to a playlist or to shuffled music, or listening to Apple Music, and you hear an artist you like — and you want more. At that very moment you want to listen to more from the album or to hear more from that particular artist. Siri is here to help.

The iBooks app for iPhone is a great way to collect and read your favorite books or pdfs. The iBooks store has the latest in e-reading across all genres. However, if you’re an avid user of iBooks, it’s easy to lose track of which books you’ve read and how many you haven’t. iBooks doesn’t let you filter by read and unread, but you can create collections to organize your reading list.

There are a lot of different iPhone settings, and with each new version of iOS, the list grows. Luckily, there's a way to search your iPhone settings with a conveniently located search bar. I’ve found this particularly useful when I don’t know exactly what I’m looking for, but I know what it pertains to. 

When Apple announced iOS 9, I got really excited about the forthcoming News app. And now that I'm using it regularly, I feel my excitement was warranted. Plus, I like the snappy and seamless manner in which one can toggle between the overview of the news and a specific story. And I recently learned there's an even easier way to return to the overview, as well as to read the next story without going to the overview.