Your iPhone is so much more than a cellular phone. Even the smartphone label seems limiting. With each new generation, iPhone has added more functions and features. IPhone itself is the hardware and the iOS and apps are the software that let you do so many things. In the next few sections, we give you the proverbial taste of what you can do.
Phone
Clearly, iPhone is a cellular telephone, that makes voice calls and offers text messaging. Nothing extraordinary there. The standout functions include multimedia messaging with active links in messages you send and receive. Consider visual voicemail that displays a list of messages so you can listen to the most important ones first rather than go through them in chronological order. You have two ways to communicate cost-free with other iOS device owners: FaceTime lets you communicate via video chat and iMessage gives you SMS-type message exchanges.
Music and videos
This is not your standard MP3 player. With its peerless screen and excellent stereophonic output, your iPhone plays music, movies, podcasts, and more with crisp, clear sound and images. From iTunes, you can download music, movies, TV shows, podcasts, courseware, and audiobooks. Watch and upload videos to YouTube. Connect your iPhone to a monitor or television with a cable or via AirPlay or Apple TV and watch everything on a big screen. All you have to do is pop the popcorn.
Camera and video camcorder
Eight megapixels make the digital still camera on iPhone 4S one of the best smartphone cameras on the market. And iPhone 4S video cameras capture high-definition video in 1080 rows of pixels. The LED flash next to the objective lens on the back of your iPhone illuminates both still photos and videos. iOS 5 added a few editing options to the Photos app, which you use to organize and view your photos and videos after you capture them.
Personal digital assistant
iPhone 4S becomes a true personal digital assistant (PDA for short) with the addition of Siri, the voice-recognition interface. Just speak your commands to Siri and it (she?) does what you ask, such as typing and sending a dictated e-mail, finding a florist, or changing your dentist appointment.
Don’t let Siri steal the limelight from iPhone’s other PDA features. Barbara got her first iPhone about the same time she and her husband downsized to a smaller apartment that didn’t have an extra room for a home office. That change, combined with a desire to make the absolute most of iPhone, led her to relying on iPhone’s PDA features.
Contacts eliminated the need for a paper address book. Calendar replaced the little black Filofax she’d coveted for years, and Notes made all those scraps of notes and grocery lists obsolete. The addition of Reminders in iOS 5 makes sure no task or appointment is
forgotten.
Internet communicator
You start to see the real power of your iPhone when you go online. Able to access the Internet via either your cellular network, 3G, or Wi-Fi, you never have to miss another time-sensitive e-mail or tweet. You can search the Internet with Safari as you would on any computer. For example, you can search for movie times, book airline tickets, settle bets with Wikipedia, and read the news from your favorite news outlets.
You access your e-mail accounts through Mail. If you have multiple accounts, you can sync them all with Mail and see them individually or all together.
Your iPhone comes with some specific apps that gather information from the Internet. Stocks lets you follow international investment markets as well as your personal investments. Weather leans on Yahoo! to bring you the weather forecast for cities you want to know about.
Personal GPS navigator
Between the Compass and Maps apps and the GPS, Wi-Fi, and cellular sensors, 99 percent of the time your iPhone can tell you where you are and tell you how to get where you want to go. What’s more, Maps and Siri can give you suggestions for vendors and services, like bookstores and restaurants, based on your location. The links in Maps are active, as they are in most iPhone apps, so you just click on the suggested vendor and the website for that vendor opens in Safari.
E-book and document reader
E-readers and tablets are all the rage and we admit the larger screen does make reading easier on an e-reader than on your iPhone, however, your iPhone is a fine e-book and document reader in a pinch. You can download books directly from iTunes to your iPhone.
You can also read many types of documents on your iPhone. If a colleague sends you a PowerPoint presentation or a PDF document as an e-mail attachment, just tap on the attachment and your iPhone opens it so you can review it. You can’t edit the document (without an additional app), but you can print the document from your iPhone with AirPrint, if there’s an AirPrintenabled printer on your wireless network.
Personal fitness trainer
When we talk about the Nike+ iPod app, which tracks the distances and times of your runs or walks by receiving information from a sensor in certain models of Nike running shoes.
That’s not the only app that helps you stay fit. The App Store boasts dozens of apps that create workout routines or track your progress toward fitness goals. Browsing YouTube turns up aerobic, Pilates, and yoga videos for every level and taste, and you can watch them in streaming on your iPhone.
Pocket video game console
With all the ruckus, you might think Angry Birds is the only game in town. Actually, the App Store boasts more than 100,000 games, and many are free. Take that, Nintendo DS! With iPhone, you have a video game console with you at all times, and with Game Center, you can play against friends online and see who has the highest score.
System wide functions
The keyboard used in any app where typing is involved supports 21 languages. Voice Control can initiate phone calls, control Music, and tell you what time it is. Accessibility settings make iPhone easier to use with features like enlarged font sizes, custom vibration signals for incoming calls, and spoken text.
Notifications, such as text messages, calendar requests, and voicemails, come in while you’re doing other things and you get a small indication at the top of the screen. When it’s convenient, you can see them all together on the Notifications screen and choose to which and when you want to respond.
If you use Twitter, knowing you can tweet directly from Safari, Photos, Maps, and YouTube on your iPhone might make you downright chirpy. If you want to find something, Spotlight searches from within many of the apps on your iPhone, and you can search Wikipedia and the web directly from Spotlight.
And a thousand other things!
Even if you never add another app to your iPhone, it would do a lot, but adding third-party apps ups the potential. In the online bonus content, we try to knock your socks off by introducing some of the newest, most innovative, and problem-solving apps available.
We certainly found apps we never imagined existed when we were researching them, and hope this nudges you to do some research on your own.
With that, dear reader, you should have some idea of where you want to go.
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