5 “Hidden” iPhone 3.0 Firmware Tricks

I have been playing around quite a bit with my new iPhone 3GS and the apps and firmware therein. I can’t say enough positive things about the release so I wanted to write about a few items that people might not know about because they are buried away or not immediately apparent. I’m sure there are many people who have already found these tidbits, so this is for those who haven’t. If you know of other gems like these, please leave a comment.

In no particular order:

• Turn on Battery Percentage
• Selecting multiple images for sharing
• Opening links in the browser
• Testing the Voice Memo mic
• Added iPod playback controls and Lyrics

Turn on Battery Percentage

When I was on the iPhone 2.x firmware, I jailbroke my iPhone. One of the tweaks that I enabled was showing a percentage for the battery instead of the battery icon. Apple has now made this option available for all users. For someone who watches battery consumption like I do, this is a quick thing that you must do.

Note: This is currently only available on the iPhone 3GS, however I would think that Apple will make this available on all iPhones with the 3.1 firmware release.

To enable the battery percentage, go to: SETTINGS > GENERAL > USAGE and there you will see the toggle to enable the battery percentage indicator that appears to the left of the battery.

Select Multiple Images for Sharing

To me, this is much more of a reminder that this capability exists than showcasing something “hidden.” With previous versions of the iPhone Firmware, you could only send one image at a time. The 3.0 firmware introduced the ability to send multiple items (photos and video) from your Photo Albums via email. Do note that you can attach multiple photos to an email but you cannot choose multiple videos, nor mix and match video and pictures in an email attachment. Also, you can only record video on the 3GS iPhone currently.

The way that you share multiple images is by opening the Photo Album you want, click the SHARE icon which looks like a box with an arrow coming out of it. Once you do that, the title of the screen that you are on changes to “Select Items”. From there, simply click on the items you would like to share and a check box will appear on that item and the photo or video will appear dimmed out. That’s it, once you have chosen all of the images you wan, you can share them.

Click-Hold Links

In the previous version of the firmware, you could click and hold on links in Safari to see what the full URL was, but that was about it. With 3.0, you now have much more control over links within Safari. Say, for example, you are on Google Mobile Search (and you can’t set your preferences to automatically launch a new window when clicking on search result item). You now have the ability to do that by simply clicking and holding the link. Once you do that, you will be presented with a series of options:

• Open
• Open in New Page
• Copy

The full URL is also displayed. Clicking the OPEN link does the same as what happens when you simply click on the link (without holding), it opens the linked page. OPEN IN NEW PAGE option is one that I find very useful when going through search results so that you can easily go back to your results without having to hit the Back button. Lastly, COPY is great in general because you now can easily copy a URL to paste elsewhere (e.g., in an email or note).

The same click-hold technique works in email but the options are slightly different: Open in Maps, Create New Contact, Add to Existing Contact and Copy. The click-hold option on links is pretty much across the new OS. See if you can find anything else exciting that you can do with the click and hold function and let me know.

Testing the Voice Memo Mic

This is more of just a fun thing to try out. It performs absolutely nothing useful really. I think it was just some programmers being cute. Here is what you do to test this out. Open the Voice Memo app. When it launches, tap a could of times on the microphone icon and watch the level meter jump. Now tap the empty space outside the mic, the level doesn’t react. Funny, no? I guess that takes the place of saying “Is this Mic on?”

Added iPod Playback Controls & Lyrics

There are some nice new controls added to the iPod app, specifically around the spoken voice (e.g., podcast) type of media. You can now speed up (2X) and slow down (1/2X) the speed of the playback. This is useful if you want to get through a podcast faster or listen to something a bit slower. Also there is now the ability to quickly rewind 30 seconds which is helpful if you want something repeated. There is now a SHARE icon that looks like an email envelope. This allows you to share (via email) the link to the podcast you are listening to if it is available.

When listening to music, you can also see that there is the Genius icon that will search for similar songs in your iTunes library and creates a Genius playlist. The Genius playlist can be saved, refreshed or a new one created. Just look for the Playlist called “Genius”.

Also, something that I didn’t notice before (it may have existed in the 2.x firmware) is the ability to view Lyrics (or Podcast show notes) on the song that you are playing. The only caveat here is that you have to have the lyrics present in the song on your computer’s iTunes. To enter in lyrics on your iTunes song (on your Mac or PC), simply get the info for the song and cut and paste the lyrics in. I must say that I’m surprised that Apple doesn’t automatically get lyrics for you. There are, however, several ways to update lyrics automatically within your iTunes.

The most common way to get lyrics is to use a 3rd party app that does it for you. I have tried a few on the Mac (mainly in the form of widgets). The widgetized lyrics fetchers seem to mainly just get the lyrics for the song that you are playing on your Mac (or PC) and will then populate it for that song only. One that I particularly like is called “TunesTEXT” which you can get here. It is currently in version 0.8.1.

Another way to retrieve lyrics that allows you to do batch lyric fetching is by installing Songbird (the Mozilla open source iTunes competitor). Songbird is actually quite a nice application (I won’t go into all of its features here). But there is a plugin called “LyricMaster” which will get individual lyrics on the song selected or even do batch (up to 1000 songs) lyric fetching. This is useful if you want to get all of your songs’ lyrics updated. And, the information is automatically copied back to iTunes (and subsequently to your iPhone).

I think there is a market here (for Apple or others) to have a better, batch lyric fetcher for use within iTunes.

Summing it all up

I’m always in search of hidden, unique or interesting features that aren’t immediately apparent to the user. If you know of any others that should be highlighted, please feel free to leave a comment. What is your favorite iPhone “hidden” features (from the list above or from elsewhere)? Let me know!

HTD says: iPhone 3.0 firmware brought lots of exciting new features to the iPhone. While some things are still missing, my opinion is that is was a very solid update to the software.