iPhone Shortcuts and Tips You Should Know About

You don't have to be a power user to appreciate time-saving shortcuts for your iPhone. Although we're sure some of you may already be familiar with a lot of these, here's a collection of some of the ones we like and think everyone should know about. We've also added some fun tricks you may not have been aware of. If we missed any of your favorites please tell us about them.

Press and Hold Typing Shortcuts Whether you call it long press, press and hold, or tap and hold, there are many time-saving shortcuts you can do on both an Android and Apple iPhone by pressing a key for an extra second or two.

On an iPhone, when you're writing an email address holding down the "." key will bring up a selection of domains like com, org, net, and edu that you slide your finger over to select and then release.

Hold the "123" button and drag your finger to insert a number or punctuation mark and it will go back to alpha mode when you release the key. A similar trick can be done with the shift key to get capital letters.

For another press and hold shortcut, just hold a letter for an extra second and a selection of alternate characters like the tilde over a letter in Spanish or accent in French. If the symbol you need doesn’t show up you can add an international keyboard under Settings > General > Keyboards.

Double Tapping Shortcuts You can quickly add a period at the end of a sentence by double tapping the space bar. You save the time it takes to go into "123" mode, select a period and return. To resize a Safari browser window to fit your screen double tap a column, word, or picture and it will resize to fit your screen width.

Misc. Shortcuts Everyone probably knows this one but if you tap the top of the screen in Safari and other apps and you will be taken to the top of the page Android owners can’t take a screen shot without rooting (jailbreaking) their phones and running an app. iPhone owners can use the built in screen shot feature. You press the home button and then push the sleep button on top of the iPhone the screen will flash white and the image of the screen will be saved to your "camera roll" folder. A similar function is available in Safari or Mail when you press the image for a second or two.

*Did you know? You can voice dial by nicknames that you have added to your contact's info?

Microphone Shortcuts There are a lot of functions you can perform with the microphone button here's the list: One press will answer the call (no surprise here) Two clicks sends the call to voicemail (you can do the same thing by pressing the "Sleep" button twice) During a call one press hangs up the call With a second incoming call One press puts call on hold and answers second call Hold down button for two seconds and release and to ignore call When you're not on a call the button can be used to control the iPod functions One press starts playing a song One press can pause a song being played Two presses skips to next song

Some Fun iPhone Tricks Next time you have the calculator up try turning the phone in the horizontal orientation and your calculator will go into scientific mode.

Scrub a Song or Podcast For fine tuning the point in a song drag the location indicator down. You’ll see a selection of scrub speeds. Without releasing your finger you can scrub left and right at the speed selected.

Focus Your Camera Touch the area of the picture you are about to shoot and the camera will focus on that spot.

Go to Sleep With Your iPod  Use the clock app, set the timer, select “when timer ends,” then “start” and scroll to "Sleep iPod."