Dec 11, 2008

iPhone Magic


So there’s a really amazing list of iPhone tips over at a blog called TapTapTap. But what’s more amazing is that none of these tips are to be found anywhere in the little iPhone manual that comes with the phone. (Not that said pamphlet really counts as an iPhone manual...) Nor are they easily found on the Apple site either.

And yet they’re all pretty basic tips. Like, for instance, if you’re in Safari and you hold down the status bar at the top of the screen, the page automatically scrolls back to the top.

Who knew?

Point is, they’re the sort of easy-to-remember tips that would make most people’s iPhone experience better and more useful. Not the sort of esoteric tricks involving AppleScript that one usually expects to find in these sorts of posts.

Compare that to the experience you get with a Blackberry, where your very first email is a message from RIM with ten useful tips and keyboard shortcuts.

Now if I was a conspiracy theorist, I’d say that Apple was trying to create a class of super user, the same sort of people who find the Easter eggs in software and who lord it over those who don’t know the difference between RAM and V-RAM.

By the same token, if I was cynical, I’d say it was a conscious omission, because if you’re selling the iPhone after all, things like user manuals just aren’t that necessary.

But truth is, I’m just baffled.

Anyway, if you own an iPhone, check out the TapTapTap post. I’m guessing you’ll learn something.

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