iPhone: The Missing Manual, 3rd Edition

Introduction

How do you make the point that the iPhone has changed the world? The easy answer is "use statistics"—25 million sold in the first two years, availability in 85 countries, 60,000 downloadable programs on the iPhone App Store, 1.25 billion downloads in the first year. 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, 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 BlackBerry, Palm Pre, Google (Android) phones, and even Windows Mobile phones all have their own app stores. How, in essence, everybody wants to be the iPhone.

The thing is, they can chase the iPhone all they want—but they'll never quite catch up, because Apple is always moving, too. In July 2009, for example, it introduced the third iPhone model, the iPhone 3GS. The S is supposed to stand for "speed," and yes, the new phone is much faster than the old. It also has a few new features, including video recording, voice dialing, a better camera, and a compass—which comes in handy more often than you might think.

More importantly, there's a new, free version of the iPhone's software, called iPhone 3.0. It adds all kinds of new features people have been pining for: Copy and Paste, a whole-phone Search, picture and video messaging, an audio recorder, wireless Bluetooth stereo music, "shake to shuffle" (to play a different random song), and so on.

Why is it so important? Because you can run iPhone 3.0 on all the old iPhone models (the original and the 3G) without having to buy the 3GS. That's darned generous of Apple. This book covers both the 3GS and the 3.0 software, even if you've installed it on an older phone.

About the iPhone

So what's the iPhone?

Well, it's a cellphone, obviously. But it's also a full-blown iPod, complete with a big, dazzling screen for watching TV shows and movies. And the iPhone is also the best Internet phone you've ever seen. It shows fully formatted email (with attachments, thank you) and displays entire Web pages with fonts and design intact. It's still tricked out with a tilt sensor, proximity sensor, light sensor, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS, and that amazing multitouch screen.

Therefore, it's still a calendar, address book, calculator, alarm clock, stopwatch, stock tracker, traffic reporter, RSS reader, and 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 tens 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, musical keyboard, time tracker, remote control, voice recorder, tip calculator, eBook reader, and so on. And whoa, those games! Hundreds 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.)