How do you make the point that the iPhone has changed the world? The easy answer is “use statistics”—400 million sold, 1 billion downloadable programs on the iPhone App Store, 50 billion downloads…. Trouble is, those statistics get stale almost before you’ve finished typing them.
Maybe it’s better to talk about the aftermath. How since the iPhone came along, cell carriers (AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, and so on) have opened up the calcified, conservative way they used to consider new cellphone designs. How every phone and its brother now have a touchscreen. How Google (Android) phones, Windows, and BlackBerry phones all have their own app stores. How, in essence, everybody wants to be the iPhone.
The thing is, it will be tough for them to catch up technologically, because Apple is always moving, too. In September 2013, for example, it introduced the seventh iPhone model, the iPhone 5s—faster and better in dozens of ways. And a seventh-and-a-halfth mode, the iPhone 5c, which is basically an iPhone 5 (the previous year’s model) in a glossy plastic body.
More importantly, there’s a new, free version of the iPhone’s software, called iOS 7. (Why not “iPhone OS” anymore? Because the same operating system runs on the iPad and the iPod Touch. It’s not just for iPhones anymore, and saying, “the iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch OS” takes too long.)
Why is it so important? Because you can run iOS 7 on older iPhone models (the 4, 4s, and 5) without having to buy a new phone. This book covers all phones that can run the iOS 7 software: the iPhone 4, iPhone 4s, iPhone 5, iPhone 5c, and iPhone 5s.
So what’s the iPhone?
Really, the better question is What isn’t the iPhone?
It’s a cellphone, obviously. But it’s also a full-blown iPod, complete with a dazzling screen for watching videos. And it’s a sensational pocket Internet viewer. It shows fully formatted email (with attachments, thank you) and displays entire Web pages with fonts and design intact. It’s tricked out with a tilt sensor, a proximity sensor, a light sensor, WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS, a gyroscope, and that amazing multitouch screen.
For many people, the iPhone is primarily a camera and a camcorder—one that’s getting better with every year’s new model.
Furthermore, it’s a calendar, an address book, a calculator, an alarm clock, a stopwatch, a stock tracker, a traffic reporter, an RSS reader, and a weather forecaster. It even stands in for a flashlight and, with the screen off, a pocket mirror.
But don’t forget the App Store. Thanks to the hundreds of thousands of add-on programs that await there, the iPhone is also a fast, wicked-fun pocket computer. All those free or cheap programs can turn it into a medical reference, a musical keyboard, a time tracker, a remote control, a sleep monitor, a tip calculator, an ebook reader, and so on. And whoa, those games! Thousands of them, with smooth 3-D graphics and tilt control.
All of this sends the iPhone’s utility and power through the roof. Calling it a phone is practically an insult.
(Apple probably should have called it an “iPod,” but that name was taken.)
By way of a printed guide to the iPhone, Apple provides only a fold-out leaflet. It’s got a clever name—“Finger Tips”—but to learn your way around, you’re expected to use an electronic PDF document. That PDF covers the basics well, but it’s largely free of details, hacks, workarounds, tutorials, humor, and any acknowledgment of the iPhone’s flaws. You can’t mark your place, underline, or read it in the bathroom.
The purpose of this book, then, is to serve as the manual that should have accompanied the iPhone. (If you have an original iPhone, iPhone 3G, or iPhone 3GS, you really need one of this book’s earlier editions. If you have an iPhone 4, 4s, or 5, this book assumes that you’ve installed iOS 7; see Appendix A.)
Writing computer books can be an annoying job. You commit something to print, and then—bam—the software gets updated or revised, and suddenly your book is out of date.
That will certainly happen to this book. The iPhone is a platform. It’s a computer, so Apple routinely updates and improves it by sending it new software bits. To picture where the iPhone will be a few years from now, just look at how much better, sleeker, and more powerful today’s iPod is than the original 2001 black-and-white brick.
Therefore, you should think of this book the way you think of the first iPhone: as a darned good start. To keep in touch with updates we make to it as developments unfold, drop in to the book’s Errata/Changes page. (Go to www.missingmanuals.com, click this book’s name, and then click View/Submit Errata.)
Tip
Writing a book about the iPhone is a study in exasperation, because the darned thing is a moving target. Apple updates the iPhone’s software fairly often, piping in new features, bug fixes, speed-ups, and so on.
This book covers the iPhone’s 7.0.3 software. There may be a 7.0.4, and a 7.1, and so on. Check this book’s page at www.missingmanuals.com to read about those updates when they occur.
iPhone: The Missing Manual is divided into five parts, each containing several chapters:
Part 1, covers everything related to phone calls: dialing, answering, voice control, voicemail, conference calling, text messaging, iMessages, MMS, and the Contacts (address book) program. It’s also where you can read about FaceTime, the iPhone’s video-calling feature, and Siri, the “virtual assistant” in the iPhone 4s and later models.
Part 2, is dedicated to the iPhone’s built-in software programs, with a special emphasis on its multimedia abilities: playing music, podcasts, movies, TV shows, and photos; capturing photos and videos; the Maps app; reading ebooks; and so on. These chapters also cover some of the standard techniques that most apps share: installing, organizing, and quitting them; switching among them; and sharing material from within them using the Share sheet.
Part 3, is a detailed exploration of the iPhone’s third talent: its ability to get you onto the Internet, either over a WiFi hotspot connection or via the cellular network. It’s all here: email, Web browsing, and tethering (that is, letting your phone serve as a sort of Internet antenna for your laptop).
Part 4, describes the world beyond the iPhone itself—like the copy of iTunes on your Mac or PC that can fill up the iPhone with music, videos, and photos, and syncing the calendar, address book, and mail settings. These chapters also cover the iPhone’s control panel, the Settings program; and how the iPhone syncs wirelessly with corporate networks using Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync—or with your own computers using Apple’s iCloud service.
Part 5, contains two reference chapters. Appendix A walks you through the setup process; Appendix B is a master compendium of troubleshooting, maintenance, and battery information.
Throughout this book, and throughout the Missing Manual series, you’ll find sentences like this one: Tap Settings→Airplane Mode→On. That’s shorthand for a much longer instruction that directs you to open three nested screens in sequence, like this: “Tap the Settings button. On the next screen, tap Airplane Mode. On the screen after that, tap On.” (In this book, tappable things on the screen are printed in orange to make them stand out.)
Similarly, this kind of arrow shorthand helps to simplify the business of choosing commands in menus on your Mac or PC, like File→Print.
To get the most out of this book, visit www.missingmanuals.com. Click the Missing CDs link, and then click this book’s title to reveal a neat, organized list of the shareware, freeware, and bonus articles mentioned in this book.
The Web site also offers corrections and updates to the book; to see them, click the book’s title, and then click View/Submit Errata. In fact, please submit corrections yourself! Each time we print more copies of this book, we’ll make any confirmed corrections you’ve suggested. We’ll also note such changes on the Web site, so you can mark important corrections into your own copy of the book, if you like. And we’ll keep the book current as Apple releases more iPhone updates.
Apple’s usual routine is to introduce a new iPhone shape every other year (iPhone 3G, iPhone 4, iPhone 5)—and then release a follow-up “s” model with upgraded components in alternate years (iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4s, iPhone 5s). The 2013–14 model, the 5s, fits right in. Here’s what’s new:
A new chip. The new A7 chip is, Apple says, twice as fast as before. That speed makes possible new features like the camera’s 10-frames-per-second burst mode. And since it’s a 64-bit chip, the first in a cellphone, the graphics in 3-D video games look especially smooth.
Another new chip. The iPhone 5s contains a coprocessor—sort of a sister chip—called the M7. Its job is to monitor motion data from the phone’s compass, gyroscope and accelerometer (tilt sensor). Now, apps that rely on this data (mainly fitness tracking apps) won’t drain nearly as much battery, because the primary A7 processor can go to sleep and hand off monitoring duties to the M7—which requires one-sixth as much battery power.
A much better camera sensor. It’s 15 percent bigger; its light-detecting pixels are bigger. Low-light pictures are far better now—clearer, brighter, better color.
A much better flash. The 5s has two LED flashes: one white, one amber. They fire together, mixed to match the color temperature of the scene. Your flash pictures look infinitely better—especially skin tones.
Wow-worthy camera features. The 5s’s camera also has a burst mode (10 frames a second); 3x zooming during video capture; and truly stunning slow-motion (120-frames-per-second) video.
A fingerprint sensor. The 5s’s most famous feature is the fingerprint sensor, which is cleverly built right into the Home button. After pushing the Home button to wake the phone, you leave your finger there another half second, and boom: You’ve unlocked a phone that nobody else can unlock, without the hassle of inputting the password. The fingerprint is stored only on your phone, encrypted within the A7 chip, and never transmitted or stored online.
Note
With several hours, several thousand dollars of lab equipment, and a perfect, unsmudged copy of a fingerprint, a hacker online famously proved that he could fool the 5s’s finger scanner. But using your fingerprint as your password is still a smart, convenient, secure (and optional) idea. Long before an iPhone thief could manage to hack your fingerprint, you’ll have popped over to iCloud.com and “bricked” the phone so that it can’t even be turned on (details start on Activation Lock).
Wow. iOS 7, dude. It’s ambitious, it’s radical, it’s polarizing. You love it or you hate it (or you get used to it).
This software looks nothing like the old iOS. It’s clean, white, almost barren. It uses a razor-thin font (Helvetica Neue) and bright, light colors. And it completely rejects skeuomorphism, the old iOS design principle, in which onscreen things depict real-world materials. In iOS 7, you will not find lined yellow paper in the Notes app, a leather binding in Calendar, wooden shelves for Newsstand, or green felt in Game Center. Everything is now “flat”—no attempts at fake 3-D—and digital.
Tip
If the fonts are too thin for your taste, you can fatten them up just enough by turning on Settings→General→Accessibility→Bold Text. While you’re there, also turn on Increase Contrast; that makes some of the translucent panels opaque, for easier reading. You can make text larger in most apps, too, in Settings→General→Accessibility→Larger Type.
Although iOS 7 looks radically different, it’s much more efficient to navigate. There’s no eye candy to distract you; everything on the screen is a useful button.
And the features themselves have been redone with a huge emphasis on removing annoyances, moving things into more logical places, and polishing up the built-in apps.
Apple says iOS 7 contains over 200 new features, but here are the big-ticket items:
Better Siri. Siri, the voice-controlled assistant, is much faster, she’s much more capable, and her voice is much more realistic. (Or his voice; you can now choose Siri’s gender.) For example, you no longer have to burrow into Settings to adjust your control panels. You can just say “Open camera settings,” for example, or “Make the screen brighter.”
Control Center. You’ll love this from Day One. Swipe upward from the bottom of the screen to open the Control Center: a compact, visual palette of controls for brightness, volume, Bluetooth, WiFi, Airplane mode, music playback, calculator, camera, and—so great!—Flashlight. Swipe down (or press the Home button) to make it disappear.
An almost-universal “back” gesture. You can swipe in from the left margin of the phone to go back one screen. It works in Mail, Settings, Notes, Messages, Safari, Facebook, Photos, and many other apps.
Real multitasking. All apps can run in the background now—and a new, much more visual app switcher makes it easy to jump among them (or force quit them).
iTunes Radio. Exactly like Pandora: free Internet “radio stations” based on bands or types of music you like.
Internet phone calls. Free high-quality voice calls (to other Apple phones, tablets, and Macs). Apple calls it Audio-Only FaceTime.
AirDrop. Totally, totally great. You can now shoot whatever’s on the screen—a photo, a map, a Web page, a video, some contact info—to another iOS 7 phone or tablet with one tap. Even to strangers. No setup, no hassle.
A new Photos app. This app used to be an endless scroll of tiny thumbnails. Now it self-organizes into clusters by year, by month, and by occasion (based on time and location data). Photos are much easier to find.
A new Camera app. The redesigned app offers Instagram-style color filters and an easy way to switch among its modes: Video, Photos, Panorama, Square Photos, and (on the iPhone 5s) Slo-Mo Video.
Activation Lock. Incredibly, 40 percent of reported thefts in New York City are stolen iPhones—but that’s about to change. Now, if somebody steals your phone, he can’t erase it, or even turn off Find My iPhone, without your Apple account password. Thieves will have to stop stealing iPhones, because, without your password, they’re useless and can’t be resold.
Carpenter’s Level. The Compass app now has a three-dimensional level in it!
Global Type Size control. A new slider controls the font size in all your apps—or at least those that have been rewritten to hook into this feature. Most of Apple’s apps have.
Auto app updates. Updated versions of your apps can install themselves automatically, in the background, so you don’t have to spend your life responding to update notifications.
Today screen. Now a single screen lists everything that’s happening today, written in plain English: your next appointment, today’s weather, reminders due, whose birthday it is, and so on.
Maps. Apple’s Maps still can’t give you directions using public transportation, but at least it now has walking directions. And in dim light, Maps automatically substitutes a dark-gray background to avoid distracting you as you drive.
It’s a lot of tweaks, polishing, and finesse—and a lot to learn. Fortunately, 500 pages of instructions now await you.
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