iPhone and iPad tips

This time we have a list of 40 best unknown iPhone and iPad tips and trick for you to impress your friends, family or go up from newb level to being the real pro.

1. See Numeric Value Of Your Cell Reception

Now, this trick is fantastic if you want to impress your friends or family. These steps will allow you to access your cellular data that normally you would not be able to access. Things like closes cell towers near you, numeric value of cell reception, information about your SIM car etc.

How-To: To do this, go to Phone.app. Copy this combination of characters and numbers: “*3001#12345#*”, without quotes. Paste it in your Phone.app and dial up. This will launch special secret application, Field Test. Apple definitely does not want you to know about this.

2. Highlighting Typed Text With One Tap

If you find yourself in need to quickly delete the text you just typed up for some reason, here is a useful to trick to this this with just two taps.

How-To: All you have to do is touch the text with two fingers at the same time. The text will become highlighted like on the image above, and you will be able to do all sort of formatting to it, including the ability to quickly delete it.

3. Automatically Turn Off Your Music When Falling Asleep

This tip will be useful to just about every person who likes to listen to music.

If you love falling asleep while listening to your favourite tunes, here is what to do to have it turned off automatically when you fall asleep.

How-To: To activate this, simply turn on your music and go to the clock app. Set up timer and tap “When Timer End”. Scroll down to the very bottom and chose “Stop Playing”. That will turn of your music once the timer goes off. There will be no alarm to wake you up, but the music will subtly turn off for your convenience.

4. Quickly Enter a Number Without Switching Keyboards

Do you ever get frustrated with switching between your keyboards, numbers and alternative characters? Well, here is a quick fix for you.

How-To: Hold down the “123” button and move your finger across your keyboard to the character or number that you want.

5. Quickly Access Your Email Drafts With One Tap

This simple, yet inifitely useful trick allows you to quickly continue typing your email drafts on the go. Even if you start typing an email on your computer in Gmail or Mail.app on OS X, you will be able to continue typing it up when you leave home or work.

How-To: Simply hold down “Compose Email” icon and you will see your list pop up just like on the image.

6. Use an Unbreakable PIN On Your iPhone

Ever had your friends guess your iPhone PIN and claim they “hacked” you? Here is a solution to prevent that from happening.

How-To: Go to Settings -> Touch ID & Passcode -> Turn off Simple Passcode. This will allow you to set up a real password on your iPhone, just like on your computer.

7. Keep Your Music Playing With Safari and YouTube

Who wants to pay for Spotify or Rdio subscriptions, when you can stream music free from YouTube and have it play in background? I bet you never knew about this.

This will allow you to turn on any video/music video on YouTube in Safari and close the it, without having to have your music turned off. Here is the trick.

How-To: go to m.youtube.com (mobile version of YouTube). Chose a video you want to play. Click “Home” button to exit to your Homescreen and slide your finger up from the bottom of the screen to get the activity centre shown above. Press “Play” button and your video will continue playing in the background! How neat is that.

8. Have Your UPS Parcels Tracked Automatically

This one is rather simple. If you have your UPS tracking number with you, you can simply paste it in your Notes.app and it will automatically find a link. This will let you track your parcel directly from your Notes.app.

9. Force Close Applications And Clean Your RAM

This one trick is rather controversial, but definitely works and gets its job done.The idea of this trick is it to let you do is force close of an application like you do on Mac OS in Activity Monitor. This clears up the device’s RAM (Random Access Memory) and forces the application to restart. Once more thing we wish it did was clear the cache.

How-To: Open any application you want. Hold down sleep button until you see “Slide To Turn Off” pop over. Release the Sleep button and Press and Hold Home button until you see the application force close.

10. Zoom Out In Maps With a Single Tap

This little tip will be a life saver for drivers who use Google Maps or Apple Maps.

How-To: When you are driving and are using a navigation, simply touch the screen with two fingers, like in Tip 2. It will smoothly zoom out and increase the scope of the map you are viewing.

11. Shake To Undo (CMD+Z Alternative)

This one is pretty well known, however there are some people who are unaware of this useful little feature.

How-To: Well this is by far the easiest thing to do on your iPhone. Simply type or delete something on your iPhone or iPad and then Shake it like there is no tomorrow. That will result in a small pop up window asking you whether you want to undo, redo or cancel your last action.

12. Switch Between Your Keyboards With One Tap

For those who have multiple keyboards on their iPhones or iPads, this neat feature will save a lot of time.

How-To: To use this, hold down the “Globe” icon on your keyboard. Keep your finger on your screen and slide up to chose the desired keyboard. Note: for those who only have one keyboard, there will be no Globe icon.

13. Quickly Turn On CAPS LOCK

Need to get angry at someone because they did something stupid? CAPSLOCK will have you covered.

How-To: Simply click the up pointing arrow twice until you see it have a highlighted colour or a dash underneath it. This means CAPSLOCK is now on and is ready to get angry at someone.

14. Switch Songs With Headphones

Another trick for music lovers. This will help you save your time on the way to the gym or work. If you have standard Apple earbuds or any other head/earphones with a microphone or volume buttons, you are good to go ahead and double click the middle button to jump to the next song in your playlist! Triple click jump one song back. Fast and easy.

15. Never Forget Where Your Car is Parked – Drop a Pin

How many times have you spent an hour wondering around a car park looking for you car or trying to meet your friend in a new place? My guess is a few.

So here is a tip that will save you your priceless time.

How-To: tap and hold on a point in a Map (works in any maps application) to drop a pin.Once the pin is dropped, simply tap on a pop up box with the exact coordinates of the place and either save them in your notes or send it via text/whatsapp/iMessage to your friend. You will never have to spend more than 1 minute looking for your car anymore.

16. This Contact Is Out Of Reach Life Hack

If you are in a conversation you don’t want to be and want to get rid of, do this trick to subtly escape that nightmare. Though, this is more of a life hack than an iPhone trick.

How-To: While talking to the person on the other end, press and hold the Sleep button on your phone and power it off. If that person tries to call you back, they will be sent right to voicemail. OR you can simply put your phone straight into airplane mode, which does exactly the same trick, but without the need to power of your phone. Neat!

17. Get Out Of Unwanted Conversation With a Fake Call

Few people know about this, but there is a number of applications that can simulate a call to your iPhone. A nice little trick to subtly escape from a group of people you don’t want to be around with, or to end an awkward conversation or to get away from unwanted questions.

Although there are a lot of apps that do this, this is the only updated app to match the look and feel of iOS7 and iOS8.

18. Mute Your Call Without Hanging Up

This is simple. If you are getting a call during an interview, a meeting or somewhere you need to be quite or uninterrupted, here is a trick for you.

How-To: While getting a call, simply press the Sleep button on your phone. The phone will stop ringing and vibrating, however the call will still be on. This is especially useful when you are not able to get your phone out of your pocket and tap on your screen. Simply press the button and go on.

19. Access Your Safari History with One Tap

Need to go back more than one page in your web browser? This works just as it does on your desktop computer or laptop.

How-To: to access your recent history with one tap, simply tap and hold the back button in Safari. This little trick will show the whole list of previously visited website in less than 2 seconds flat.

20. Program Emojis and Sentences As Keyboard Shortcuts

The most annoying action I have to do is switch between my normal keyboards and emoji keyboards when I want to make the conversation a bit more alive. Trick #1 in this article resolves the issue with numbers and special characters, but not emojis. Well, we have a trick for emojis too.

How-To: Navigate to Settings -> General -> Keyboard -> Shortcuts and create a short cut for the emojis you wish to have as shortcuts. Simple as that!

21. Use Siri to the Max

While Siri is mostly used for amusement purposes, it can actually be very useful at times. Since it is called a “Personal Assistant”, it should be able to serve as a Personal Assistant. And we will show you how to use it properly.

How-To: Simpy hold down the home button your iPhone or iPad and say:

“Who called me last?”

“Read last text message”

“Read last email”

and Siri will gladly read your last text or email out loud for you. Furthermore, you can ask it to reply to the email or a text, or even call the person back.

This is especially useful while driving, without endangering yourself or the others around.

22. Wrong way? Change the Direction of Your Panorama

I often find myself standing at the wrong side or angle when taking a panorama shot, which results in a poor quality or bad idea execution of my panorama. Luckily, this little trick will help with just that.

How-To: Open up your Camera.app and swipe to Panorama mode. Then, simply tap the arrow to change the direction of your panorama. Done!

23. Crack Your Screen For iPhone “Spider-Man” Edition

No need for explanation.

24. Finish Typing Website URL with a Single Tap

Do you ever get annoyed with having to finish typing the domain extension for a website? Here is a little tip for you.

How-To: no doubt, this neat trick will save you loads of time of internet browsing. Simply tap and hold on “.” and you will see a number of domain name extensions. Slide you finger to the one you want to use and Go!

25. Frozen iPhone? Hard Reset Will Fix it

Everyone knows how passionate Apple is in regards to quality of its products. Even though iOS and most of the other Apple software is very smooth, it does have some issues. These issues can be in forms of a freeze, application crashes, bad cell signal reception or choppy animations. There is one main fix for all those problems. Hard reset.

How-To: Press Hold down Sleep and Home buttons together for 10 seconds (or until you see your iPhone, iPod or iPad screen go black) and release after it.

26. CMD+F For iOS: Search a Webpage with Safari

Most people don’t even know that your browsers can do this, but if your press CMD+F on a webpage, you will be able to search its contents. This applies to Safari on iOS and Chrome.

How-To: tap the URL bar in your browser and start typing a word you wish to find on a webpage. Then, scroll to the very bottom if the suggested list and you will see “On This Page” section. Tap Find “your word” and if the words are found, they will be highlighted.

27. Set Up Fixed Focus and Exposure With One Tap

You don’t have to be a photographer to take great photos with your iPhone. You just have to know a few tricks professional photographers use and apply them. And here is one of them.

How-To: launch your Camera.app on your iPhone or iPad. Once you found a good angle and position for your photo to be taken. Now, take care of the focus and exposure by tapping and holding on the area of the screen where you want the focus and exposure be locked to. Simple!

28. The Coolest Asian Emojis

Ever seen the cool simple emojis that don’t look like normal ones? Here is where they are and how to use them.

How-To: Go to Settings -> General -> Keyboards -> Add new Keyboards and Choose Chinese Simplified Pinyin – QWERTY. Then, go to any text editing application and go through steps shown in the picture. Couldn’t be easier.

29. Limit Your iPhone Access for Kids and Friends

Those moments when someone asks to take a look at your phone. A second after giving them your phone, you realise you’ve got some intimate content that you don’t want to be seen by others. Here is a simple trick for you to give your phone to others and not worry about your important content being seen.

This is not as easy as some other tricks we have in this list, and will require a little bit of fiddling around with it, due to its functionality.

How-To: Go to Settings -> General -> Accessibility -> Guided Access -> Turn On Guide Access. Scroll down, and turn on “Accessibility Shortcut” to enable Triple Home button click. After you turned it on, navigate to any application to test it out. Triple press your Home button and select the area you want to be disabled for others, when they use your phone. You will also have to set up a password so that you can turn the Guided Access off once you have your phone back. Once that is all set up, all you will have to do is triple press the Home button and the rest will be done automatically. Pro level right there.

30. Take Super Steady Photos

Another photography trick that many are not aware of. A few know that you can take pictures with your iPhone using the volume buttons. Even less people know that you can do the same with headphones that have volume controls!

How-To: position your iPhone, iPod or iPad with the right angle for your photo, and press any headphones or your iPhone volume control button to take a picture.

31. Check IMEI Faster Than Anyone Else

Need to check your iPhone’s IMEI to see if its locked, unlocked, or stolen? Here is a trick to avoid going in settings and looking for that number.

How-To: Simply dial up this in your Phone.app: *#06# and press call. That’s it.

32. New Notification LED Flash

Hate missing Calls and Text and discovering them 2 hours later? This little trick will help you fix that. 

How-To: Go to Settings -> General -> Accessibility -> Scroll down and find “LED Flash for Alerts”. Turn it on and viola! You are all set.

33. Hide Your Photos From Others

This is an easier, although probably less convenient version of Guided Access Trick #29. This allows you to hide your photos from Moments, Collections and Years, only leaving them in albums.

How-To: Go to Photos.app, pick a photo. Tap and hold your finger on that photo until you see a little black pop up. Press hide and Hide Photo and you are done. Easy as!

34. Mute Text Messages

iOS 8 introduced a new feature to mute text messages from certain people.

How-To: Open a chat you want to be muted in Messages.app. On the right upper corner tap “Details” and flick “Do Not Disturb” switcher on.

35. More Text Messages Control

This will allow you to chose messages one by one, delete them one by one and forward them one by one.

How-To: Go to Messages.app, open a conversation with someone. Tap and hold on a message of your choice and that will open up extra functionality as you can see on the picture above.

36. See Who is Tracking Your Current Location

Usually, when you see a triangle at the top right corner of your screen, that means some applications are using your current location. It is fine when it happens if you are using Maps, or taking a photo or chatting in Facebook Messenger. However, sometimes it can randomly appear there without you even noticing. If you want to know what apps have used your location in the past 5 minutes or 24 hours, follow these steps.

How-To: Go to Settings -> Privacy -> Location Services. You will see a list of apps that have different colour icons next to them. Scroll down for the legend of what they mean. You will also find System services that are using your location for things like Network Search, Spotlight suggestions and Location Based iAds! Yep, even ads.

37. Time Your Selfies with the Family

For selfie lovers, this neat little feature will be a saver! No need to take hundreds of photos to just get a good one. Time it and get the right one with the first shot, like a pro!

How-To: to access this functionality, open Camera.app, and at the top you will see a clock icon. Tap it and you will be given a choice of 3 seconds or 10 seconds timer. Chose the right one!

38. Email Multitasking Like a Boss

Type a lot of emails on your phone? Want to multitask and move contents from one email to another? The latest iOS 8 update let’s you do just that.

How-To: Tap “Compose” email icon and you will see a new email composing window slide up. Tap and hold on the top of that new window and drag it down. You will see your email composing windows slide down for you to interact with others behind it! Increase productivity by 100%.

39. See All Media in iMessage Back to 1 Year

If you are like me, you probably have thousands photos in your iMessage conversations with some people. If you ever need to find a photo that you the person sent you weeks or months ago, here is a quick trick for you to do it faster.

How-To: Open a chat that you want to view all photos and videos in. Click on the person’s name right at the top of the screen and you will be shown a window will all those photos.

40. Quick Reply with Notifications

Originally, this was a popular Jailbreak tweak for BiteSMS. iOS developers at Apple realised that and implemented this feature in iOS 8, which many people appreciated, but a few heard of.

How-To: When you get a notification, simply tap and hold your finger on it and drag the finger down. That will open up a small area for you to type your response. However, this does not work with most of the applications, but some like WhatsApp and Facebook have not implemented the new feature, yet.

Did we skip anything? Share your tricks, tips, hacks and shortcuts if we don’t have them! Let’s see how good we did.