iPhone Controls and Interface

The iPhone Touchscreen

• Proximity sensor: Recognizes when the iPhone is near your ear during a phone call and turns off the display and touchscreen until you’re finished.
• Ambient light sensor: Detects the brightness of the iPhone’s surroundings and adjusts the screen brightness accordingly. This feature conserves your iPhone’s battery power.
• Accelerometer: Senses when you turn your iPhone sideways. The touchscreen responds by rotating certain images or pages (such as websites or videos) horizontally to provide a larger landscape view.

How to Use the iPhone’s Touchscreen

• Tapping: Press any soft button or icon simply by tapping it once with your fingertip.
• Dragging: If you want to move an image—for example, if you want to scroll from one part of a web page or photo to another—place and hold down your finger against the screen and then move your finger in the desired direction.
• Flicking: If you want to scroll more quickly down a page—for example, through your contacts or album covers—you can flick the screen with your index finger, brushing it quickly across the touchscreen, as if you were flicking a bit of dust from the screen.
• Zooming in and out: To zoom in on an image, either tap it twice or place your thumb and index finger on the screen and spread them apart from each other, keeping contact with the screen with both fingers. To zoom out, place both fingers on the screen somewhat apart from each other and then squeeze them toward each other.

iPhone Buttons and Inputs

iPhone Buttons

1. Home button: The Home button is the only physical button located on the face of the iPhone. Pressing this button will always return you to the Home screen, no matter what you’re doing.
2. Sleep/Wake button: Press this button to put your iPhone into Sleep mode to save battery power when you’re not using it. Press it again to exit Sleep mode. Holding down the button turns off the iPhone.
3. Volume Up/Down button: Press this button up or down to change the ringer volume. If you’re on a call or in iPod mode, pressing it up or down changes the audio volume.
4. Ring/Silent switch: If you flip this switch to the left (so the small red dot shows), your iPhone will be in Silent mode. When you receive a call, text, or email, the iPhone won’t ring (though it may vibrate, depending on your settings).

iPhone Inputs

1. Headphone jack: Insert earphones to listen to music, or a hands-free headset to make phone calls. The jack can accommodate most 1/8" inputs.
2. Charger/dock connector: Use this 30-pin input to connect your iPhone to the dock and external accessories (such as iPod/iPhone speakers).
3. SIM card tray: Your iPhone’s SIM card is provided by AT&T and enables your iPhone to connect to AT&T’s network. In the unlikely event you need to remove or replace your SIM card, you can open this tray using the SIM eject tool provided with your iPhone.

How to Lock or Unlock the iPhone

1. Press the Home or Sleep/Wake button.
2. Drag the arrow across the Slide to Unlock button.
    
   

How to Lock the iPhone Manually

The iPhone Home Screen

How to Type on Your iPhone

Entering Text

To enter text, tap the letters you’d like to enter. Each letter you tap will momentarily magnify so that you can see what you’ve pressed. To access numbers and punctuation marks, tap the “.?123” button in the lower left corner of the keyboard. To return to the letters keyboard, tap the “ABC” button, which will be located where the “.?123” button was located previously.

 

Predictive Text

The iPhone uses predictive text technology to fix errors and anticipate the words that you’re trying to type, correcting itself as you go. The suggested word will appear in a different color above or below the word you’re typing.

 

• Capitalize: The first letter of a sentence and the first letter of a proper noun. For example, if you enter “p-a-u-l,” your iPhone will replace it with “Paul.”
• Insert contractions: If you type “i-m,” the iPhone will automatically replace it with “I’m.”
• Correct commonly misspelled words: For example, it will replace “recieve” with “receive.”
• Correct typos: If you’re trying to type a word and accidentally enter a letter next to the one you were trying to hit, predictive text will suggest what you may have been trying to type. For example, if you type “t-r-u,” it will suggest the word “try.”
• Learn new words: The predictive text function has an evolving library of words. If you enter a word regularly, the iPhone will enter it into its word database and not offer to correct it thereafter.

Tips and Tricks for Typing on the iPhone

• Don’t worry about small mistakes: Rather than worry about getting every single letter correct, just keep typing and trust that the predictive text technology will correct your mistakes. Your typing speed—and accuracy—will improve if you just let the predictive text feature take care of small typing errors.
• Use the double-space-bar trick: Tapping the space bar twice at the end of a sentence will insert a period and a space. This is easier than having to switch to the numbers-and-punctuation-marks keyboard to find the period.
• Use the slide-and-release trick: The iPhone doesn’t actually type the letter you press until you release your finger. You can move your finger around until you are sure you have the correct letter or punctuation mark. If you need a punctuation mark, press the “.?123” button, and the screen will change to the punctuation mark. Keep your finger pressed to the screen and slide it to the punctuation mark you want to insert. Release your finger. The correct punctuation mark will be inserted, and the screen will automatically return to the “ABC” keyboard. With this method, you can insert a punctuation mark in one finger tap instead of three.
• Use the magnifying tool: If you need to fix an error, hold your finger on the screen where you want to place the cursor. A magnifying tool will appear that makes it easier to find the exact entry point for your cursor.