When you go to your Home screen on your iPhone there's a paltry offering of four apps and 13 widgets that don't even fill up the whole screen. But there's a lot of function built into the iPhone, and some of it may not be obvious at first:
Document Viewer This app (or apps) views a huge number of file formats including HTML, word, excel, pdf, plain text, jpeg, png, gif, and tiff that come in email attachments.
Quicktime Media Player Plays audio and video in most standard formats except Windows Media Player.
Photo Viewer Not just for images taken with iPhone's camera. You can add a huge photo library to your iPhone and view it.
SMS Despite only being 160 characters long, an SMS can some really advanced stuff. It depends on who you're sending to. Much of what SMS can do is duplicated by email and Safari on your iPhone. But alerts, news, email, Google searches can be sent. Money can be transferred by SMS. There's a lot more. As the iPhone has no native instant messaging app, SMS is still it for texting. And the iPhone interface that lists your messages as threads rocks.
Phone Books Both the Google search in Safari and Maps work like white and yellow pages. Maps is a phonebook with a sallelite view.
Traffic Reporter In certain cities the Maps app shows live expressway traffic in the zoomed out view. Where I live he have had a public service traffic network for many years. Google ties into it for very accurate info.
Where The Heck Am I? In Maps press the Locate button on the bottom left. This scans for cell towers and wifi hotspots and check them against a database. Accuracy depends on populations density. In rural areas it can be as far off as 25 miles. I love in urbia and mine is accurate to 25 ft. from my my apartment.
WiFinder Home>Settings>WiFi. Or just keep your phone on. It automatically alerts you when WiFi is within range.
Web Apps There are hundreds of free Web apps that work in Safari.
Alarm Clock It's on the main screen of the Clock widget.
Timer With Alarm Cook with this one. It's on the main screen of the Clock widget.
Stopwatch Again, it's on the main screen of the Clock widget.
World Clock Ditto.
Celsius Current Temperature Converter Open Weather, click the i button and push the Celsius button.
ATT Browsers The ability to check phone stats is slightly hidden. Home>Settings>Usage shows some. Home>Settings>Phone>ATT Services shows the rest. You can also manage your account online here.
Link Detective Links may not be what they seem. That link from PayPal may say there's trouble with your account, but it could be that it's not really PayPal. Hold a link and the real address pops up. Very useful for spotting spoof emails, illegit phone numbers and bogus Web connections in mail and on Web pages. If you don't want to connect, just slide your finger off the link.
HTML Debugger This is a nice little addition for those looking to debug Websites or iPhone Web apps. Home>Settings>Safari>Developer>Debug Console ON. When you use Safari the debugger will also run. You can check for all errors or HTML, CSS and Javscript errors separately.
Javascript Bookmarklet Editor and Corrector Not pretty, but it works. If you're adept at writing Javascript bookmarklets to add functions to iPhone's Safari, you can create them in the URL editor of Safari. Bookmark any page on the Web and retitle it as your bookmarklet. Press on the url and hold delete until the url goes away. Type javascript: and start coding. Strangely enough the url editor will correct with escaped characters for you. If you type # it will be replaced with %23. And if you accidentally hit the delete button at the end of the line, just press the Bookmarks button and go back in. The editor won't allow a blank address to be saved.
Flashlight This uses the about: URI scheme to give you a blank white page in Safari. Save any Web address as a bookmark and edit it. Retitle it Flashlight and change the URL to about:. Call up the bookmark when you need a little extra light.
iPod Well, it's not hidden, but often overlooked for all it can do: not just music, but also video, audiobooks and podcasts. It's a capable media center.
The Invisible Apps
