Five iPhone tips

Some quick tips to get your iPhone skills slicker than the guy or girl next door. To rearrange the icons on the home page, tap and hold any icon until all the icons start to giggle. Now you can drag icons about, including on and off the Dock or between pages. Click the Home button to lock the icons again. The Dock is limited to four icons but, if you set the Home button’s double-click to call up your Contact favourites, you can remove the Phone icon from the Dock.

If you manage to crash your iPhone 3G playing with third-party apps, hold both the power and home buttons for 10 seconds to reboot the phone. Recalcitrant apps can be uninstalled using Installer.

Apple originally charged for custom ringtones but now you can create your own in GarageBand, while Windows users can follow the video tutorial at . SendSong supposedly lets you add any track in your iPod playlist to the custom ringtone list under Settings/Sounds/Ringtone, but we couldn’t get any love from it.

When using Safari, you need to rotate the phone *before* calling up the keyboard. Safari has a useful “.com” button, but you can add international domain extensions by enabling extra languages under General/Keyboards/International Keyboards. Back at the Safari keyboard, use the globe key to toggle through languages. Now when you press “.com”, drag your finger up to get extra options. Our iPhone 3G review unit from Optus surprisingly didn’t feature an Australian keyboard with .com.au, but for a first-gen iPhone there’s a hack for adding com.au at http://www.linka.co.nz/iphone_keyboard.php

Many of the GSM command codes also work on the iPhone. There’s a good list at but *3001#12345#* is handy for viewing network and cell information.