Iphone tips and Tricks

4. iTunes Match

A more immediately exciting use of Apple’s cloud services is seen in iTunes Match. This is a service that you pay £21.99 a year for, and it lets you stream your entire music collection from the cloud to your phone, freeing-up any internal storage you might otherwise have had to expend on music. You have to “sync” your music library with iTunes Match, and can have up to 25,000 songs.

5. What is iCloud and how to use it

iCloud is Apple’s own cloud storage service. It doesn’t get all that much attention, but it’s a massively important part of the Apple infrastructure. By default, it’s used to back-up most of the data on your phone, including photos, contacts, emails and calendar entries. Apple gives you 5GB of storage for free, and should you need more you can pay a little extra for more. You’ll find iCloud info and storage options in Settings > iCloud > Storage & Backup.

Storage

6. There are accessories to expand your storage

iPhones do not let you plug in memory cards to increase the phone’s storage. It’s not something Apple has ever allowed. However, there are Wi-Fi-based solutions that can give you more room to play with fairly effectively. The last we looked at was the Kingston WiDrive. Devices like these are Wi-Fi transmitters that connect directly to the iPhone, through the medium of an app. They either have their own internal storage or offer a card slot. Files on these data drives can then be imported using the iPhone.

7. You can Tweet through Siri

As well as grabbing you information from the web, Siri can write tweets for you. However, we strongly recommend checking what she’s made of your words before posting, especially if you have an accent that she might stumble over.

Siri

8. Location-based reminders

Siri is the iPhone 5’s voice assistant. She takes an audio file of what you say over to Apple’s servers, which then decipher it and do their best to help with whatever you’re after. You can ask Siri to make Location-based reminders, which will pipe up when the iPhone 5’s GPS tracker has calculated that you’re in a certain place. To turn on Siri, check out the Siri sub-menu in Settings > General. To access Siri once enabled, you just need to hold down on the Home button.

9. How to transcode videos to iPhone format

If you want to watch downloaded videos using the native video player, you’ll most likely have to start transcoding files. Bits of software that can do this include Handbrake and Visual Hub. However, transcoding is a laborious process, so we recommend downloading a decent third-party video player if you have a big library of downloaded videos.