Visual voicemail

How often have you had to listen to four or five (or more) voicemail messages before getting to the message you really want, or need, to hear? The iPhone's clever visual voicemail presents a list of your voicemail messages in the order in which calls were received. But you need not listen to those messages in order.

How do you even know you have voicemail? There are a few ways:

A red circle showing the number of pending messages awaiting your attention appears above the Phone icon on the Home screen or above the Phone icon on the Home screen or above the Voicemail icon from within hte Phone application

You may also see a message on the iPhone display that says something like, "New voicemail form Ed (or Bob)."

Whatever draws you in, tap that Voicemail icon to display the list of voicemails. You see the caller's phone number, assuming this info is known through CallerID, and in some cases, his or her name. Or you see the word Unknown.

The beauty of all this, of course, is that you can ignore (or at least put off listening to) certain messages. We are not in the adivce-giving business on what calls you can safely avoid; if you disregard messages from the IRS or your parole officer, it's at your own risk, okey?

Keypad

From time to time, of course, you have to dial the number of a person or company who hasn't earned a spot in your Contacts.


That's when you'll want to tap the Keypad icon to bring up the large keys of the virtual touchtone keypad.Despite what you may have read elsewhere, we find it surprisingly simple to manually dial a number of this keypad. Just tap the appropriate keys and tap Call.

To add this number to your address book, tap the + key (it's the one with the silhouette of a person) on the keypad and click either Create New Contact or Add to Existing Contact.

You can use the iPhone's keypad also to remotely check your voicemail at work or home.

Come to think of it, what a perfect seque into the next section. It's on one of our favorite iPhone features, visual voicemail.

Recents

Tapping the recent icon displays the iPhone call log. The Recents feature houses logs of all the, well, recent calls or received, as well as calls you missed. Here's a tricks concept: Tap All to show all the recent calls and Missed to show just those missed. Under the All list, completed calls and missed call that have been returned by clicking the red entry are shown in black and missed calls that haven't been returned in this fashion are in red, along with a descriptor of the phone you were calling or received a call from (home, mobile, and so on).

By tapping the small blue circle with the right-pointing arrow next to an item in the list, you can find out the time the call was made or missed, as well as any known info about the caller from your Contacts information.

To return a call, just tap anywhere on the name.

If one of the call you missed came from someone who isn't already in your COntacts, you can add him or her. Tap the right-pointing arrow, and then tap the Create New Contact button. If the person is among your Contacts but has a new number, tap the Add to Existing Contact button. When the list gets too long, tap Clear to clean it up.

Favorites

Consider Favorites the iPhone equivalent of speed-dialing. It's where you can keep a list of the people and numbers you dial most often. Merely tap the person's name in favorites, and your iPhone calls the person.

You can set up as many favorites as you need for a person. So, for example, you may create separate Favorites listings for your spouse's office phone number and cell number.

Setting up Favorites is a breeze. When looking at one of your contacts, you may have noticed the add to favorites button. When you tap this button, all the phone numbers you have fot that person pop up. Tap the number you want to make into a favorite and it turns up on the list.

You can rearrange the order in which your favorites are displayed. Tap Edit, and then, to the right of the person you want to move, press your finger against the symbol that looks like three short horizontal lines stacked on top of one another. Drag the symbol to the place on the list where you want your favorite contaxt to appear.

You can designate new favorites from the Favotites application by tapping the + symbol at the upper-right corner of the screen. Doing so brings you back to Contacts. From there, choose the appropriate person and number. A star appears next to any contact's number chosen as a favorite.

If any of your chosen folks happen to fall out of favor, you can easily kick them off the favorites roster. Here's how:

1. Tap the Edit button in the upper-left corner of the screen.
You will notice that a red circle with a horizontal white line appears to the left of each name in the list.

2. Tap the circle next to hte A-lister getting the heave-ho
The horizontal white line is now vertical and a red Delete button appears to the right of the name, as shown in the figure.

3. Tap Delete
The person(or one of his or her given phone numbers) is no longer afforded the privilage of being in your iPhone inner circle.

Booting someone off the favorites list does not remove that person from the main contacts list.

The iPhone as an Internet Communication device

But wait - there's more! Not only is the iPhone a great phone and a stellar iPod, but it's also a full-featured Internet communications device with we're about to drop a bit of industry jargon on you - a rich HTML e-mail client that's compatible with most POP and IMAP mail services, with support for Microsoft Exchnage ActiveSync. Also on board is a world-class Web browser (Safari) that, unlike on other phones, makes web surfing fun and easy.

Another cool Internet feature is Maps, a killer mapping application based on Google Maps. By using GPS (3G or 3GS hardware) or triangulation (on hte original iPhone), it can determine your location, let you view maps and satellite imagery, and obtain driving directions and traffic information regardless of where in the United States you happen to be. You can also find businesses such as gas stations, pizza restaurants, hospitals, and Apple stores with just a few taps. And the Compass application (3GS only) not only displays your current GPS coordinates but also orients Maps to show the direction you're facing. Let's see your Nokia do theat!

You might also enjoy using stocks, a built-in-application that delivers near real time stock quotes and charts any time and any place, or Weather, another built-in app that obtains and displays the weather forecast for as many cities as you like.

The Internet experience on an iPhone is far superior to the Internet experience on any other handheld device.

The iPhone as an iPod

We agree with Steve Jobs on the one: The iPhone is a better iPod than almost any that Apple has ever made. (Okey, we can quibble about the iPod Touch or wanting more storage.) You can enjoy all your existing iPod content - music, audiobooks, audio and video podcasts, music videos, television shows, and movies - on the iPhone's gorgeous high-resolution color display, which is bigger, brighter, and richer than any iPod display that came before it.

Bottom line: If you can get the content - be it video, audio, or whatever - into iTunes on your Mac or PC, you can synchronize it and watch or listen to it on your iPhone.

The iPhone as a phone and digital camera/ camcoder

On the phone side, the iPhone synchronizes with the contacts and calenders on your Mac or PC, It includes a full-featured QWERTY soft, or virtual, keyboard, which makes typing text easier than ever before - for some folks.

Granted, the virtual keyboard takes a bit of time to get used to. But we think that many of you eventually will be whizzing along at a much faster pace than you thought possible on a mobile keyboard of this type.

The 2-megapixel(iPhone and iPhone 3G) or 3-megapixel (iPhone 3GS) digital camera is accompanied by a decent photo management application, so taking and managing digital photos (and videos on iPhone 3GS) is a pleasure rather than the nightmare it can be on other phones. Plus, you can automatically synchronize iPhone photos and videos with the digital photo library on your Mac or PC. Okey, we still wish the iPhone camera took better photos and shot better videos but it is still much better than most other phone cameras.

Finally, one of our favorite phone accoutrements is visual voicemail (Try saying that three times fast.) This feature lets you see a list of voicemail messages and choose which one to listen to or delete without being forced to deal with every message in your voice mailbox in sequential order. Now, that's handy!

How to know if you missed any calls

If you miss a call while your phone is asleep, you'll see the caller's name and missed call onscreen when you wake it(well, you'll see their name if they're in your Contacts list. If they're not , you'll just see their number and Missed Call). Also, when you wake it, you'll see the green phone icon now has a small red circle on its top-right corner with the number of calls you've missed, it's the calls you've missed combined with the number of unheard voicemail messages you've been left. So, if you missed five calls but those five caller all left messages, then you'll see the number 10, which represents those five missed calls and five voice messages, even though only five people actually called. I told you it was weird.

Check your Email while you're on the phone

If you're in a really boring phone conversation, and you want to do what everybody else in the business world does - check your email - it makes easier if you start by tapping the Speaker button (so you can still hear your conversation while you're looking at the touchscreen). Then, press the home button, and tap the mail icon. Don't worry - your call will stay live even though you're doing something completely different. To return to your call screen, just tap once at the very top of your screen (where it says touch to Return to Call), and it takes you back there. Note: Checking your email or surfing the web while on the phone is not supported over most EDGE networks.

Pausing the Music to take a call

If you've got your headset(earbuds) on and you're listening to music and a phone call comes in, you can pause the song and jump over to take the call all in one click (that's right - it's a click, not a tap). There's little button attached to the headset (about 5" form right earbud itself, it doesn't look like a button, it looks like a thin little plastic rectangle). Click the button, and the song playing is paused, and it answers your call. When you're done with the call, click the button again to hang up and pick up the song right where you left off.