iPhone Help & Troubleshooting

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Tutorial Overview

Topics covered in this tutorial (click link to jump to topic):

1.	iPhone Intro
Not ringing? Trouble with Contacts Reading PDFs Don't be Spanked by Data Roaming Charges Email & Spam on the iPhone Finding a Contact
3.	Camera Shutter
4.	Cool Apps
5.	Special Mobile Web Sites

iPhone Intro

This tutorial targets a few small problems and common questions you may have about your new iPhone. It tries to give you a solution for each. It ends with some cool apps you can download and add to your iPhone.

Not ringing?
Oops, you have set the iPhone to silent mode! And no, if you dig in the software Settings > Sounds, that doesn’t help. What you have done is accidentally turned on the silent mode with a little switch top left (on the side). This is easy to do as you slip you iPhone in your pocket or whatever. More discussion here: http://www.macworld.com/article/58826/2007/07/iphonegmail.html

Trouble with Contacts
Having trouble getting you contacts across from Office 2000 into your shiny new iPhone? Want the short story? It simply isn’t possible – iTunes will synch with Office 2003 and 2007, but not earlier versions (crap eh?).

Also, dragging and dropping vcards doesn’t work in the iPhone. Unlike iPods, Windows computers do not treat the iPhone as a drive. You will see this if you connect you iPhone and look in my computer. No drive letter assignment. You will only be able to get your iPhone’s photos in My Computer.

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Reading PDFs
Unlike the iPod, the iPhone does not appear as a drive in My Computer on the Windows PC. In other words you cannot browser it like any other USB drive. The iPhone can only receive and send files from within iTunes (except images). So if you want to read an ebook on your iPhone you will have to either:

email it to yourself as an attachment. This is ok if you have changed Settings>Mail>Show to 100 or more message headers.
browse it off the web. You could upload the file you your web site or blog and download it from there as required. This way it is always available, and you can book mark it.

Don’t be Spanked by Data Roaming Charges
Like most mobile phones the iPhone roams, sms and phone that is, but be very wary of “data roaming”. That is any application that uses data: Safari and Mail particularly.

While you may find making calls and sending sms from your phone when overseas is not prohibitively expensive, you will find data roaming too expensive to use (unless you also own a Leah Jet, in which case it probably wont bother you too much).

There really is only one work around to this, and that is finding a wifi network to join. Turn off data roaming in Settings>General>Network.

Email & Spam on the iPhone
Email on the iPhone is well thought out. It even supports multiple pop accounts. What it doesn’t have, which is critical today, is spam control. There is a work around. If you can direct your email to a Gmail account you can set the iPhone only to check your Gmail account for all your mail. Your webmaster can set up the necessary forwarding for you or you may have some sort of control panel (Cpanel or Plesk) with your hosting account.

Finding a Contact
Is there a way to search for a single contact? Yes. But it is not all that obvious. If you have already synched with an Outlook or Windows address book you probably have a very long list of contacts.

You may have missed the tiny little magnifying glass top right above the “A” that will give you a search box. You only would have seen this previously if you scrolled to the top of the list, so the top of the “A”s were displayed. More likely though is you had to the alphabet lining the right hand margin.

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Camera Shutter

Here is a quick tip… the camera shutter released when you take you finger off the shutter button bottom centre of the screen. Don’t tap the shutter button; hold your finger on it, and only release with the picture is properly composed and focused. This is very useful to know if you are trying to catch someone of something in action.

And no, there is no video, no illumination (flash or LED) and no panorama function.

Cool Apps

Through either the iPhone and in iTunes, it is possible to download little helper programs called “apps”. These programs are small in byte size and usually have a single or specific function.

Some cool iPhone apps to get you started are listed below:

Smule’s Ocarina – that is a pot flute or whistle flute for the uninitiated. This amazing iPhone application turns your iPhone into a musical instrument with pitch and vibrato http://ocarina.smule.com/
Facebook – get a cut down version of Facebook just for iPhone. http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=6628568379
WikiTap – wikitap gives you wikipedia in your hand. Instead of using the iPhone’s Safari browser you can get this free dedicated application? Why is this useful? It means that no sundry html or images are loaded to get you what you what, the definition or information, just the information is loaded.

Here are some New Zealand specific apps: tvGuide, WeatherNZ and TrafficAKL. Both Qantas and Air New Zealand have iPhone apps.

Special Mobile Web Sites

Just as Facebook and Wikipedia have specialize apps for the iPhone that offer less functionality and therefore less data requirement, so to are there web sites designed specially for iPhone. Look at the addresses below. Note the “m.” or “mobile.” In front of the ordinary web address? This denotes a smaller cut down version of the site specifically for mobile devices.

http://m.abc.net.au
http://m.nzherald.co.nz
http://mobile.smh.com.au
http://m.google.com

Interestingly, “WML” or wireless mark up language, then the “.mobi” domain name space (again with its own mark up language) were supposed to be used for mobile devices. Neither really got legs as individual companies used subdomains and there own mark up.

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