iPhone Life - Best Apps, Top Tips, Great Gear

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.

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.

In this article, I explain the recently-released "Safari Download Manager", which (particularly with the external iFiles application) adds a convenient way of adding a download manager to Safari – on jailbroken phones. I also provide a very thorough comparison to iCab Mobile and VanillaSurf, the two (highly recommended) third-party Web browsers that also have a download manager – without having to jailbreak your phone. Finally, I also explain how you can save and, later (even without direct Internet connection!) read Web pages in the latter two Web browsers. (You, unfortunately, can’t do the same in the new plug-in.)

Spyglass ($0.99) is yet another creative use of your iPhone's camera. You can view your environment via the iPhone camera and digitally zoom in in up to 5x. In addition, the app uses augmented reality to superimpose compass and GPS information as well as horizon tilt right over the live camera feed. You can also enable the maps feature and have the same information superimposed on a map.You'll need an iPhone 3Gs plus an Internet connection to use the maps feature.

The Notes app is great for jotting done ingredients or creating a to-do list, but did you know that you can create and add recordings to a note using the Voice Memos app? That's just one of the many things you can do with the Voice Memos app. In this article, we'll cover how to create, edit, share, and save recordings made using the iOS Voice Memos app. Whether you're brainstorming an idea, recording a lengthy lecture, or sharing ideas with a friend, we'll teach you how to conquer every aspect of the Voice Memos app. Read on to learn all about how to record your thoughts using Apple's Voice Memos app.

Back in January, I’ve very thoroughly elaborated on the problems of Safari with some pages like THIS and THIS partly caused by the lack of any kind of character size increasing (and, with the Thinkpad thread, the lack of correctly reflowing / breaking long words / URL’s).

Thanks to apple.com forum user ‘ihadmeavision2’, I’ve found a for


The iPhone is an ideal platform for listening to online radio stations. In this article, I explain everything you’ll ever need to know about all this. You’ll learn how radio stations can be listened to on even non-jailbroken iPhones, without any hacks to play stations in the background; I also present a very thorough comparison of currently available third-party radio software.

First and foremost, let’s take a closer look at the built-in, out-of-the-box radio support.

1. Built-in capabilities: QuickTime

All versions of the iPhone (and, of course, the iPod Touch – from now on, I refer to all these as “iPhone”), under OS3, already have support for playing back some (not all!) possible radio stream types.

Activate multiple keyboards

By Anonymous (not verified)

 You can have more than one keyboard layout active on your device at any time. So, for example, an international executive who did business in the U.K. and Russia could keep an English and Russian (Cyrillic) keyboard active and switch between them when composing notes and e-mail messages.

To activate different keyboards:

Here's a tip that you might not use too often, but that's useful to have if you have to get through an audiobook quickly, say, for a class or work assignment. Did you know that you can speed up the playback tempo in your Audible app on iPhone? You can also slow down the narration speed, although I've never needed to use that feature. Read on to learn how to speed up or slow down the narration speed in the Audible app on your iPhone. 

I’ve long been complaining about the lack of any “find in page” functionality in most mobile Web browsers. Now that I’ve played a bit with JavaScript scriptlets, I can proudly present a working solution to this problem.

All you need to do is, independent of the Web browser you use, add the following favorite:

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