The Big Picture

The iPhone has many best-of-class features, but perhaps its most unusual feature is the lack of a physical keyboard or stylus. Instead, it has a super-high-resolution touchscreen (326 pixels per inch for iPhone 4, 4S, and 5; 160 pixels per inch for other models) that you operate using a pointing device you’re already intimately familiar with: your finger.

And what a display it is. We venture that you’ve never seen a more beautiful screen on a handheld device in your life.

Another feature that still knocks our socks off is the iPhone’s built-in sensors. An accelerometer detects when you rotate the device from portrait to landscape mode and adjusts what’s on the display accordingly. A proximity sensor detects when the iPhone gets near your face, so it can turn off the display to save power and prevent accidental touches by your cheek. A light sensor adjusts the display’s brightness in response to the current ambient lighting situation. (Let’s see your BlackBerry do that!) The iPhone even has a gyroscope for advanced motion sensing and includes GPS sensors so your phone can determine where in the world you are.

In this section, we take a brief look at some of the iPhone’s features, broken down by product category.

The iPhone as a phone and digital camera/camcorder

On the phone side, the iPhone synchronizes with the contacts and calendars on your Mac or PC, as well as contacts and events on iCloud, Google, Yahoo!, and Facebook. 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 5-megapixel (iPhone 4) or 8-megapixel (iPhone 4S and 5) digital camera is accompanied by a decent photo management app, so taking and managing digital photos and videos on it 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. Okay, we still wish the iPhone camera took better photos and shot better video. But models prior to iPhone 4 are still better than some other phone cameras we’ve used, and the iPhone 5 camera is almost certainly the best phone camera we’ve seen to date.

Another 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 ones to listen to or delete without being forced to deal with every message in your voice mailbox in sequential order. Now, that’s handy!

Finally, the iPhone 4S and 5 come with Siri, an intelligent voice-controlled assistant that not only understands what you tell her (usually), but also figures out what you mean (again, usually) and determines which (if any) iPhone app to use to find the right answer. And, like a real personal assistant, she replies in a natural sounding human voice. Last but certainly not least, she takes dictation!

If you’ve tried voice control before, forget everything you’ve learned and give Siri a try. We think you’ll be as impressed as we are.

We’ve mentioned just the highlights of the iPhone’s superb set of features. But because we still have the entire book ahead of us, we’ll put the extended coverage on hold for now (pun intended).

The iPhone as an iPod

We agree with the late Steve Jobs on this one: The iPhone is a better iPod than any iPod Apple has ever made. (Okay, we can quibble about the iPod touch and the iPad, as well as wanting more storage, but you know what we mean.) You can enjoy all your existing iPod content — music, audiobooks, audio and video podcasts, iTunes U courses, 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 an Internet communications 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 Exchange ActiveSync. (For more on this topic, see Chapter 12.) Also on board is a world-class web browser (Safari) that, unlike on most other phones, makes web surfing fun and easy.

Another cool Internet feature is Maps, which is all-new in iOS 6. By using GPS, Maps 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 app not only displays your current GPS coordinates but also orients Maps to show the direction you’re facing.

You might also enjoy using Stocks, an included app that delivers near real-time stock quotes and charts any time and any place, or Weather, another included 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 we’ve seen, except the iPad. (Technically, we’d call the iPad a “two-hands-held device” because it’s difficult to hold in one hand for more than a few minutes. But we digress.)

Technical specifications

One last thing before we proceed. Here’s a list of everything you need before you can actually use your iPhone:

An iPhone

In the United States, a wireless contract with AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, or one or of the smaller carriers, such as C Spire or Cricket.

An Apple ID

Internet access (required) — broadband wireless Internet access recommended

In previous editions of this book, we said you needed one of the following. But now that you can activate, set up, update, back up, and restore your iPhone wirelessly and without a computer (a welcome feature added in iOS 5), we’ve amended our advice. Although you don’t technically need a computer to use your iPhone, we think you’ll find many tasks are faster and easier if you perform them on a computer with iTunes instead of on your iPhone’s much smaller screen. And some tasks, such as reordering Home screens, can only be accomplished in iTunes.

If you decide to introduce your iPhone to your computer (and we think you should), here’s what’s required:

For Macs: A Mac with a USB 2.0 or 3.0 port, Mac OS X version 10.5.8 or later, and iTunes 10.7 or later

For Windows: A PC with a USB 2.0 or 3.0 port; Windows 7 or 8, Windows Vista, or Windows XP Home or Professional Edition with Service Pack 3 or later; and iTunes 10.7 or later (free download at www.itunes.com/download )

One last thing: Although the preceding specifications are correct, if you want to use iCloud (and you probably will), the system requirements are somewhat more stringent. You need a more current version of Mac OS X (Lion 10.7.2 or higher) or Windows (Windows 7 or Vista Service Pack 2 or later). Finally, although not officially supported (and still in beta at press time), iCloud appears to work fine with Windows 8 previews.