Top Ten iPhone Manual Busters

Forget Crackberries, the future is the JesusPhone. When you get yours on Friday, the last thing you're going to want to do is trawl through the instruction manual. Lucky for you, Apple are so confident that it's intuitive they don't ship it with anything more than a Getting Started guide.

However, there are some things you're going to want to know about. Like a group school project, I have done the groundwork, so that you can swoop in, copy my work, and reign triumphant as iPhone Owner to Rule Them All. Here are my top ten tips:

1. Skip tracks via your headphones
The iPhone ships with a handsfree kit. It looks like you bog standard iPod headphone, except that it's got a small wrap around one of the wires near your mouth. This not only works as a microphone for handsfree calling, but can control your tracks. Single clicks of it pauses and restarts your music, whilst double clicking skips through to the next track. Nice.

2. Typing punctuation
One of the annoying things about the iPhone keypad is that the QWERTY keypad and the 123!"£ keypad are on different screens. You have to hit '123' to switch between the two, and then hit it again to switch back. However, if you double tap the space bar, you get a full stop followed by a space. Even better, if you hold down the 123 button, drag your finger over the the punctuation you need such as , or ; and release, it will automatically switch back to the QWERTY keypad.

3. Don't worry about the signal interference
You'd be forgiven for thinking that if you connected your iPhone to speakers using the dock connector, you'd get that awful gu-gum-gu-gum-gu-gum noise, that happens when you put a mobile phone near speakers. Luckily the iPhone is an expert at recognising this, and automatically asks you if you'd like to switch to aeroplane mode where no signal is received.

4. Zooming
A quick double tap on the screen when a photo is displayed will instantly zoom in. Do it again, and it will zoom out. From here, you can drag it about, or pinch the screen to zoom in closer or drag your fingers away from each other for the opposite effect.

5. Correcting mistakes
The iPhone makes an effort to correct itself when you type something wrong. However, it's worth remembering that in most cases the software recognises when you take your finger off the screen, not on. Remember in chess, when you could change your play as long as you didn't release the playing piece? It's very much like that. So, if you see that you've hit the wrong button, just drag your finger to where it should be and you'll correct it automatically.

6. Instant access to favourite contacts
One of the benefits (otherwise known as the only benefit) of getting the iPhone so long after the US is that a lot of the issues have been worked out. For instance, there was apparently no way of quickly getting to your contacts list in the first version. However, the model I have is running v.1.1.2, which allows you to access your contacts by double clicking the home button at the bottom (this is the only hard button and it will take you back to the original screen no matter where you are). This works unless you've got music playing, in which case it will bring up a small floating menu for basic iPod functions.

7. Customise your iPod bar
There's only a certain amount of space for iPod controls, as most of the screen is taken up with album art. There are five spots at the bottom, which instantly take you to your playlists, songs, artists or videos (the fifth is a 'more' button). However, I don't watch many videos so wanted to change it. Luckily, if you go to More, then Edit (top left hand corner) you see all the options - podcasts, genres, compilations etc. You can then drag them down to the spot you want it to sit, and it will replace whatever was there before.

8. Visual voicemail
Visual voicemail displays who called, and lets you scroll through their message, as you'd skip back and forth on a video file on your computer. It also means you don't need to panic if you accidentally delete something, since there is the option 'Undelete'. Dreadful grammar, great function.

9. Get yourself an adaptor
One serious complaint would be that the headphone jack is 3.5mm, but set to deep into the casing to accept most headphones. Therefore if you want to use it with different headphones (losing the handsfree functionality, obviously) you'll have to get yourself an adaptor. We recommend Griffin's, which costs £9.99 and is available from Carphone Warehouse and O2 shops.

10. Get yourself a rugged skin

These things are going to be highly sought after, and by sought after I mean Mugger's Delight. It's instantly recognisable, and has the high status appeal to make it frightening to pull it out on the bus at night. I spotted one the other day in a ruggedized rubber monstrosity of a case, which made it look like the the kind of GPS that is given out as standard to UPS drivers. Works like a charm - you never see UPS GPS systems on eBay, now do you?