Alternatively, this tutorial focuses on the copy and paste method. It’s more complicated, but it enables you to attach images while composing emails, making it possible to format messages with text and images mixed together.

1. Create an email

Start by creating a new email. Add a recipient by typing their name into the To: field, then add a subject. Once you’re ready to attach an image, sound or video file, press the Home button to close the Mail app — don’t worry, your message is still open in the background.

2. Photos app

Next open the Photos app. Find an image you want to insert into your message, then tap and hold your finger in the middle of the photo. A small pop-up field will appear with the text “Copy”. Tap on it to copy the photo.

3. Paste into Mail

Close the Photos app and re-open the Mail app. Your draft message will still be open on-screen. Tap and hold your finger on the area you want to include the photo. It can be at the start of the message, in the middle of a sentence, wherever you like. Next, tap the Paste button that appears above your fingertip. The image will now be attached into the email.

4. Paste other files

Continue to write and copy/paste images until you’re happy with the email. You can also paste videos from the Photos app into messages, although these will be compressed before sending. You might also have to trim the length of longer videos.

5. Copy and paste

Please also note that this method of copying and pasting files works also for other apps. That means you can copy a photo from the web when using Safari, then paste it into an email, or paste photos and videos into iMessages.

To see what’s taking up all your storage space, open the Settings app, tap General, then tap Usage. There, you’ll get an overview of how much storage space you have used and how much you have available, and you’ll get a list of how much space each app uses for the app and associated data. If you want to see more specifics, tap the app’s name in the list: You can also delete the app via this screen.

This screen shows only the 10 heftiest apps; scroll down and tap Show all Apps for a complete list of your apps and the storage space they use.

In this case, Spotify eats up the most space on my phone; 11.4GB is tied up with songs I downloaded. Give it a try; you might be surprised by what you discover.

The trick here is combining the Gmail app with two syncing protocols called CardDAV and CalDAV (don’t worry, you’ll never actually need to know what these are to get them to work). You’ll need an iOS device running version 5.0 or above to take advantage of these, but each offers better and more powerful integration with Google’s services than just tapping “Gmail” when you first set up your email accounts on your phone. Much like the momentary pain of digging into your Facebook privacy settings, the five or ten minutes spent setting up this system will save you email stress for months to come.

Part 1: Setup Gmail and Mail

If you haven’t already, download or update to the latest version of Google’s iOS Gmail app. With multiple account support, a full redesign, and infinite scrolling, it’s a massive update that will serve as the core of your iOS mail experience. To set up additional accounts in the app, simply tap the menu bar icon on the top left, and then the drop down at the top of the navigation list. From here, you can add up to five new Gmail accounts. Don’t forget to turn notifications on in the iOS Notifications (Settings > Notifications > Gmail).

But unfortunately, the Gmail app won’t take over all the emailing functionality on your iPhone. So you need to set up what amounts to a send-only Gmail account, for when you want to send a URL from Safari or a photo from your camera roll. Just go to Settings and scroll down to Mail, Contacts, Calendars. Tap Add Account and pick Gmail. Then enter your username and password, plus your name and a description for the account. On the next screen, make sure only Mail is set to “On.” Then go back to the Mail settings and tap on “Fetch New Data.” Scroll down to “Advanced,” and then tap on the account you just set up. Make sure Manual is selected — that makes sure the account will never retrieve data, but will still let you send emails when you want to.

Note that for these accounts, you’ll want to turn notifications off, otherwise you’ll be receiving updates from both Gmail and Apple’s Mail app.

Part 2: Syncing contacts with CardDAV

The second key part of the setup is managing your contacts. To sync your Google contacts with your phone, go to Settings in iOS and scroll down to Mail, Contacts, Calendars, tap Add Account… and then select Other. Choose Add CardDAV Account and enter “google.com” for the Server field, then enter your account credentials under Username (use your full email address) and Password. There’s a field where you can enter a description of the account if you like, and after you fill that out, tap Next and ensure that the Contacts toggle is enabled. Navigate back to the Contacts app, and once you enter it your contacts should start syncing right away.

Part 3: Selecting the Default Account

If you’ve got a previously configured iCloud account that syncs your contacts, you still have a few more steps. CardDAV needs to be designated as the Default Account if you want any new contacts you add to be synced with Google automatically, and to do that, make your way back to the Mail, Contacts, Calendars pane within the Settings app. Swipe down to the Contacts section and tap Default Account, which will only be visible if you’re syncing more than one. Finally, select your newly added CardDAV account, and your new contacts will sync with Google automatically after you’ve entered them.

Part 4: Syncing Calendars with CalDAV

The steps required to integrate Google Calendar with iOS are very similar — go to Settings and navigate down to Mail, Contacts, Calendars once again. This time, tap Add Account… and select Other, and then Add CalDAV Account. Just like above, you’ll enter “google.com” for the Server field, your user name and password, and add an optional description. After clicking Next, navigate back to the Calendar app and the entries should appear shortly. To sync multiple calendars, go to this page and select the calendars you want to sync, then click Save. If you run into any problems, double check that SSL is enabled in both your CardDAV and CalDAV accounts.

With all of this configured and the new Gmail app for iPhone installed, you can now enjoy a similar level of integration with Google’s productivity ecosystem that Android users boast about. Go have some fun organizing your contacts — you’ve earned it.

These settings will almost certainly give you hassle with trying to send email.
If you do not wish to collect email on your iPhone – This is how to remove an email account

(even if you do wish to use email on your iPhone – we recommend you remove any accounts and then follow our instructions to set it up manually)

To delete a mail account on your iPhone

Go to settings
Select Mail, Contacts, Calendar
If you see an account, select it Mail Account

Now scroll to the bottom and select Delete Account (Press again to confirm)

Congratulations – You have now deleted your mail account

5 Tips for Cleaning Up Your iPhone or iPad

1. Check your usage.
Click on the Settings icon. Select General. Select Usage.

At the very top, you’ll see two numbers: GB available and GB used.

You don’t need to understand these numbers deeply. All you need to know for the purpose of cleaning out the junk from your iOS device is the percent of free space you have. There are no hard and fast rules, but you probably want your available space to be at least 10 percent, but perhaps as much as 15 or 20 percent. Obviously, if the available space is larger than the used space, you’re in good shape.

Note that when you add the available space and the used space, it won’t add up to the total size of your phone (e.g., a 16GB iPhone will appear to have only about 13.6GB total space) because it doesn’t include the space being used by the operating system.

Select any app, and a new page will break down the usage into two parts: the app and the data and documents stored in the app. For example, my Instapaper app takes up 30.7MB total: 22.9MB for the app (see where it says “app size” on the image) and 7.8MB for documents and data.

Sometimes, this information helps you see that it’s not the app but what you store in it that’s eating up space. In the case of my Instapaper app, I’m in the clear. Neither the app nor the data are taking up much space. To delete documents and data when they are taking up too much space, open the app where they’re contained and remove them there, because you can’t delete them from the iPhone or iPad Settings area.

2. Decide which apps to delete by looking at how much space they use.
Next, you’ll need to decide which apps to delete.

Staying right on the same screen from step no. 1, look through the next section, which shows the apps you have installed and how much space they use. This list automatically sorts by space used, from greatest to least. The apps appear at the top are using the most space. Most of your apps are probably measured in MB rather than GB (1GB=1,024MB).

The app highest on your list is probably either Music or Video. You can’t actually delete those apps, but you can remove some of the music or video files, explained next in step no. 3. But first, take a look at the other apps in the list and decide which ones you’ll delete. Judging them by the amount of space they consume could be more effective than simply thinking about whether you want to keep them.

To delete apps, go to your iPhone or iPad’s homescreen and press and hold any app. You’ll see all the apps quiver on screen, and a small black X will appear. Press the X, and confirm to delete. For some apps, you may see a second confirmation screen, warning you that you’ll lose additional information associated with the app, such as data in Game Center. To kiss those apps goodbye, confirm.

When you’re done, just press the home button. Click Next below to continue to the next page.

Select any app, and a new page will break down the usage into two parts: the app and the data and documents stored in the app. For example, my Instapaper app takes up 30.7MB total: 22.9MB for the app (see where it says “app size” on the image) and 7.8MB for documents and data.

Sometimes, this information helps you see that it’s not the app but what you store in it that’s eating up space. In the case of my Instapaper app, I’m in the clear. Neither the app nor the data are taking up much space. To delete documents and data when they are taking up too much space, open the app where they’re contained and remove them there, because you can’t delete them from the iPhone or iPad Settings area.

2. Decide which apps to delete by looking at how much space they use.
Next, you’ll need to decide which apps to delete.

Staying right on the same screen from step no. 1, look through the next section, which shows the apps you have installed and how much space they use. This list automatically sorts by space used, from greatest to least. The apps appear at the top are using the most space. Most of your apps are probably measured in MB rather than GB (1GB=1,024MB).

The app highest on your list is probably either Music or Video. You can’t actually delete those apps, but you can remove some of the music or video files, explained next in step no. 3. But first, take a look at the other apps in the list and decide which ones you’ll delete. Judging them by the amount of space they consume could be more effective than simply thinking about whether you want to keep them.

To delete apps, go to your iPhone or iPad’s homescreen and press and hold any app. You’ll see all the apps quiver on screen, and a small black X will appear. Press the X, and confirm to delete. For some apps, you may see a second confirmation screen, warning you that you’ll lose additional information associated with the app, such as data in Game Center. To kiss those apps goodbye, confirm.

When you’re done, just press the home button. Click Next below to continue to the next page.

From Settings. Staying in the Usage screen (Settings > General > Usage), tap the option for Music or Video in the apps list. The next screen summarizes your music and podcast data usage. Clean out any of these in one shot by pressing the Edit button (top right), hitting the red circle with white stripe next to the appropriate entry, and selecting “delete.” This action deletes all the files associated with the entry. It doesn’t give you a track-by-track option for deleting.

From within the apps. You can delete track by track, album by album, and so forth, from within the app. Launch the app, navigate to a page that shows the items you want to delete, and simply use one finger to swipe from right to left across the listings you want to delete. When the delete button appears, press it.

4. Delete Photos.
Confusingly, when you navigate to Settings > Photos, you can’t see how much space the images on your iPhone or iPad use. The easiest way to see this statistic is to connect your device to your computer and open iTunes. Click on the device name at the left side of the dashboard, and you’ll see at the bottom a graph showing how many GB different features use. It’s color-coded; photos are orange.

If you want to save images to your computer, you can import to your computer. To delete them from the iPhone or iPad, go to the Photos app and open any album. Click the square-with-arrow icon at the top left, then tap each photo you want to delete; when you’ve selected them all, press the red delete button. Alternatively, from the Album page, select “Edit” to delete entire albums in one shot.

5. Clear Safari’s cache.
Another way to clean out junk on your phone is to clear the Safari Web browser cache.

Go to Settings > Safari.

Next, two buttons are applicable: Clear History and Clear Cookies and Data. If you’ve never cleared your Safari browser before, you’ll probably want to use both these buttons. When the history or cookies and data sections are empty, the text of those buttons turns gray.

There’s one more step you can take in the Safari area, and it’s under this section: Advanced > Website Data. At the bottom of that page, you can select “Remove All Website Data,” which may free up some additional space.

Like a lot of other phones, the iPhone has a multitude of keypresses and combinations that perform cool and funky stuff like take screenshots and automatically launching the camera all the way from the 11th home screen.

Not only that, users have found and documented ways to bypass certain, how shall I put it — shortcomings, that the iPhone has. These tips make the iPhone even more functional than it is documented to be. I’ll be listing 6 of my favorite top tips, those that I find most useful in everyday life. Let’s hope that there’s something new and interesting you can learn. If not, feel free to share them in the comments.

Starting off at number 6.
Send Full Resolution Photos Through Email

If you wanted to email photos taken with your iPhone, you’d hit the “Share” button on the lower left corner and press the “Email Photo” button. The photo will then be automatically added into a new email. Press Send and off it goes. Right? What Apple isn’t telling you is: the photo that you’ve just emailed isn’t at its highest resolution — it’s scaled down.

To send full resolution photos via email, open the photo in your iPhone’s camera roll, tap on it and hold until the “Copy” button appears.

Copy the photo, then compose a new email. Press and hold somewhere within the content section, let go and the contextual menu will appear. Press Paste to insert your full resolution photo.

To send multiple full resolution photos, get to the camera roll on your iPhone and hit the “Share” button on the lower left corner.

You’ll then be able to select multiple photos. When you’re done, hit “Copy”. Compose a new email and paste in your photos.

Unlearn words

The iPhone has the capability to learn new words if they are used often. But somehow, something went wrong somewhere — whenever I try to type “the”, my iPhone auto-corrects it to “Tge” instead.

Unfortunately, there’s no way to unlearn particular words. The dictionary can only be reset back to factory settings — it will wipe all learnt words and start from scratch. I figured that’s not as bad as getting “Tge” every time. Here’s how to do it:

Enter Settings
Hit General
Scroll down and tap on Reset
Tap “Reset Keyboard Dictionary”
A warning will pop up to confirm the procedure. Hit “Reset Dictionary” if you’re sure.

Sleep The iPod After A Certain Period Of Time

If you frequently listen to music on your iPhone before going to sleep, this is a pretty cool tip. You can set the iPod function to sleep after a desired period of time.

To set the sleep timer, launch the Clock. Select the Timer function. Set the amount of time you’d like to listen to your music before the iPod goes to sleep.

Tap on the “When Timer Ends” menu and you’ll be brought to a page where you’re able to select a particular alarm that is played when the timer ends. Scroll up and tap on “Sleep iPod”.

Open Link In New Page

There have been a lot of tips regarding Safari. A popular tip, if you didn’t already know, is tapping on the top of the screen to bring you back up to the beginning of a webpage. Another time-saving tip is to tap and hold a link then tap on “Open in New Page” to browse the link in a separate browser page.

When you’re done reading, just close it and you’ll be brought back to the main webpage. I find this tip very useful when reading blogs with multiple entries — I avoid pressing on the Back button and the need to reload the page each time.
Forget About .com Domain Extension

Here are some tips to use when typing in webpage address in Safari. If the webpage’s URL ends in “.com”, you can actually leave out the whole “http://www.” and “.com” bits. Just enter “makeuseof” to go to “http://www.makeuseof.com” or “tuaw” for “http://www.tuaw.com”.

If the webpage’s URL doesn’t end in “.com” this trick doesn’t work. However, you can easily type “.net”, “.org” and “.edu” by pressing and holding on the “.com” button until the other domain name extensions appear. Slide to the one you need and let go to insert it into the URL.

Create Silent Ringtones

If you’re the type of person who doesn’t like to announce that you’re getting a call, you’d have your iPhone on silent most of the time — I know I do. Sometimes, I do forget to flip the switch and my iPhone starts ringing notoriously in the middle of a lecture. Here’s how you can go one step further and make sure that it never rings — create a silent ringtone.

This is basically an empty AAC file that has been converted into an iPhone ringtone. I’ve made one that’s 20 seconds of pure silence. Download it here and double-click on the file to add it into iTunes. Sync it to your iPhone and enable it — boom, no more noisy ringtones.

Here are some of the best iPad tips I’ve come across:

Organize your apps with folders

Added in the 4.0 release of iOS, folders allow you to easily organize your iPad and separate apps into different categories. The neat part is the iPad will create a default folder name that is often a pretty good description of the apps it contains. To create a folder, simply hold your finger down on an app’s icon until all of the apps begin to shake. Next, just drag it on top of another app and the iPad will create a folder containing the apps. To add more apps to the folder, simply drag them over and drop them on the newly-created folder.

Reboot the iPad

Did you know you can solve more problems with the iPad by simply rebooting it than any other troubleshooting step? Is your iPad running slow? Reboot it. Does an app quit every time you launch it? Reboot it.

Unfortunately, it’s easy to confuse putting the iPad into suspend mode as the same thing as rebooting it. To really give your iPad a fresh start, you can reboot it by following these quick steps: (1) Hold down the Sleep/Wake button for a few seconds. (2) When the iPad prompts you to slide a button to shutdown, follow the directions. (3) Wait a few seconds after the screen goes blank and then hold down the Sleep/Wake button again to boot it back up. (4) When you see the Apple logo appear, you can release the Sleep/Wake button. The iPad’s home screen will appear momentarily.

Turn down the brightness to save battery life

A quick way to get the most out of your iPad’s battery is to turn down the brightness of the display. You can do this by going to the iPad’s settings and choosing “Brightnesss & Wallpaper” from the left-side menu. The further to the left you move the slider, the less bright the screen will be (and thus the less power it will use). I have mine at about 33%, but your setting will depend upon the amount of ambient light in your house and how bright you need your iPad.

Skip the apostrophe when typing

The iPad’s auto-correct can sometimes get on your nerves, but there are other times when it can really be nice. If you type a lot, you’ll no doubt need to use the apostrophe on a regular basis, especially when you are typing in a contraction like “can’t” or “won’t”. But did you know you can skip the apostrophe? My favorite iPad typing tip is using the auto-correct to change “cant” to “can’t” and “wont” to “won’t”.

Quick onscreen music controls

The iPad has buttons on the side for changing the volume, but how about skipping a song? You don’t need to launch the music app just to skip a song. The iPad’s control panel will let you do things like adjust the brightness of the screen, turn Bluetooth on and even get at a timer. These controls are a little hidden, but they are easy to locate if you know where to look. Simply slide your finger up from the very bottom edge of the screen. You can pause, play, skip forward or skip backwards.

Lock the screen orientation

I don’t think there is anything more annoying than trying to view the iPad with one orientation like landscape mode and having the slight tilt of the iPad change it to a different orientation like portrait mode. This is especially true if you are trying to watch a movie or play a game, but you are sitting at an angle.

You can actually lock the screen orientation through two different methods. First, you can flip the switch next to the volume controls on the side of your iPad. Depending on how you have it set up in your iPad settings, this will either lock the orientation or mute the sound. If it muted the sound, you can get to the orientation lock the same way you got to the onscreen music controls in the tip above this one. The icon for locking the orientation is just to the left of the music controls.

Find apps quickly

As you can imagine, I download a lot of apps. In fact, I have the app store on my dock because I am constantly in it searching for new apps or just checking out what is available on a subject. So how do I find a particular app I have installed on my iPad? I don’t waste time flipping through the six screens filled with different icons. Instead, I use the iPad’s Spotlight Search, which can be accessed by clicking the home button while on the first page of the home screen.

Once you get used to searching the iPad through this screen rather than flipping page by page looking for a particular icon, you won’t know how you had the patience to do it any other way. You can also use this method to search through your contacts or even your email.

Disable in-app purchases

One thing every parent should know how to do is turn off the ability to make in-app purchases on the iPad. Otherwise, that seemingly ‘free’ game may end up costing tens or even hundreds of dollars after your seven-year-old buys a bunch of in-game currency at $4.99 a pop.

Luckily, it’s pretty simple to keep this from happening. First, you need to enable parental controls by going into your iPad’s settings and choosing general from the left-side menu. On this screen, locate restrictions. In the restrictions menu, you’ll need to enable restrictions, which will ask you four a 4-digit passcode.

Once you have enabled these parental controls, it is simply a matter of scrolling down the page until you see the option for In-App Purchases. When you slide this to the off positions, most apps won’t even show the screen for purchasing items within the app, and those that do will be prevented from going through with any transactions.

Turning on multitasking gestures

A neat feature brought to the iPad with the iOS 5.0 update was the addition of multitasking gestures. These gestures allow you to switch between open apps by putting four fingers on the display and sliding them to the left or right. You can also bring up the home screen by pinching in with four fingers or bring up the “task bar” by pinching out.

But first you need to turn on the multitasking gestures. This is done in the iPad settings under the General settings on the left-side menu. Scroll down until you see Multitasking Gesture and slide it to the “On” position.

Add apps to the bottom tray of your home screen

The iPad comes with four apps on the bottom tray of the home screen, but did you know you can add up to six apps to it? You can even remove the ones that are there by default and add your own.

How? Simply tap an icon and hold down your finger until all the apps are shaking. This allows you to move the app. To get it on the bottom tray, just drag it over and drop it on the tray. You’ll see the other apps move over to make room for it, and that let’s you know it is okay to drop it.

Project Gutenburg

Project Gutenburg is a project to bring public domain books to the digital world for free. And these books are available through the iBookstore, though (unfortunately) Apple doesn’t make it quite so easy to find these books.

You can find a list of all the free books by going to the store within iBookstore, choosing browse and choosing “Free” from the tabs at the top. Not all the books here are from Project Gutenburg — some are just books that newer authors are giving away for free– but you’ll see plenty listed if you prefer to browse.

Project Gutenburg includes a lot of great books like Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and the Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. If you have a particular book in mind, you can simply search for it.

Delete old games you no longer play

When we buy something, we have a built-in urge not to get rid of it. But the coolest thing about the iPad is that you only need to buy an app once and you can download it however many times you want. You can even download an app on your iPad that you bought on your iPhone so long as both are connected to the same iTunes account.

So if you have a game (or any other app) that you never use anymore, you can feel safe in deleting it to free up some more room. And, if you ever have an urge to play it again, there is a whole section in the app store dedicated to previously purchased apps. That makes it easy to find again. When you combine this with the ability to stream your movies and music through home sharing, you may not need that 32 GB or 64 GB iPad after all.

Remember: if you delete an app from your iPad, any data associated with that app will be lost. So think twice before you delete that word processor, but unless you want to keep your save game, deleting most games should be fine.

Bonus Tip: Connect Your iPad To Your HDTV

You aren’t just limited to the iPad’s display if you are watching a movie or playing a game. You can also connect the iPad to an HDTV. The easiest way to do this is through Apple TV, which supports AirPlay and lets you wirelessly “throw” your iPad’s screen to your TV.

But even if you have no interest Apple TV, you can buy an adapter to plug your iPad into your TV. The best solution is Apple’s Digital AV Adapter, but you can also get composite or component cables.

1. Take a picture instantly from the lock screen. It happens all the time: you catch your little one in an adorable snap-worthy pose but by the time you reach for your iPhone, unlock it, and swipe through your phone to find the camera app, it’s too late and the moment is gone. You can avoid missed opportunities by taking a picture directly from the home screen, even when your phone is locked. You might not have noticed it but there’s now a tiny camera icon located on the home screen of your iPhone 5. If your phone is locked, simply tap the home button and the camera icon will appear, letting you activate the camera app and take pictures without unlocking your phone.

2. Capture DLSR quality shots. Skip the pricy DLSR camera and try the Olloclip lens for the iPhone 5 instead, which lets you take professional quality photos with your iPhone without the expense and the bulkiness. The tiny 3-in-1 lens simply slides on to your iPhone 5. And you will be amazed at the stunning detail and clarity, the lens brings to your mobile and Instagram photos.

3. Snap stills while recording video. This is a neat little feature of the iPhone 5 camera. You no longer have to decide between shooting a video or capturing stills, you can do both! While, taking a video, just hit the camera icon at the top right-hand of your screen to take photos simultaneously. Doing so won’t stop your video from recording.

4. Take a vertical panorama. Most iPhone 5 owners are addicted to the panorama mode on their camera, which lets them take sweeping landscape shots. But did you know that you can give your panoramic shots a creative twist by composing a vertical panorama? To do this, open the camera app, hold your phone in landscape mode and using the panorama function move your camera upwards.

5. Use your headphones to click pictures. Try as I might, I have not mastered the art of pressing the camera button delicately. I tend to jab at the camera button on the screen, which results in blurry pictures. I recently discovered that there has been a smarter solution all along. You can actually use the volume up button on your Apple headphones or the volume button on your phone to click pictures.

6. Create a shared PhotoStream. With iO6, there’s an easy way to share pictures with friends and family who also own an iPhone or iPad. You can simply set up a shared photo album (or PhotoStream) on your iPhone, add the mobile pictures you want to share, and select the subscribers who can view, comment on and “like” your photos. To activate the PhotoStream feature in your iPhone 5 go to Settings>Photos and Camera. Toggle both “My Photo Stream” and “Shared Photo Streams” options to “On.” Here are more details on how use photostream.

Many of iOS 7′s fancy new features are handy if you need/want them. If you don’t, they’re just eating away at that precious battery life behind the scenes, and give you exactly zero help for your trouble. So shut ‘em down.
Turn off parallax

Parallax is fun, but it’s the definition of “extra.” And maybe it even makes you dizzy. Who needs it? Not you. You can turn it off in accessibility settings, by going to Settings>>General>>Accessibility and setting Reduce Motion to on.

Turn off AirDrop/Bluetooth if you’re not going to use it

AirDrop is great when you are AirDropping. The rest of the time it’s just fidgeting in its seat, looking for another device to play with. Turning it off is easy, just swipe up your Control Center, and hit the toggle.
Stop searching for Wi-Fi

There’s no need to have your phone searching for Wi-Fi when there’s no trusted network in sight. You’ll save yourself some trouble if you get in the habit of turning of Wi-Fi from the Control Center when you leave the house. Alternatively, you can go to Settings>>Wi-Fi and turn Ask to Join Networks to off. This way your phone will hop on Wi-Fi networks it knows, but won’t look around for more without direct orders.

Disable location services (for apps that don’t need it)

Google Maps needs to know where you are, yes. But Facebook? Hop over to Settings>>Privacy>>Location Services to get a full list of the apps that are asking about where you are. You can probably turn off about half, and cut down on a lot of GPS polling.

Turn off background app updates

Immediate app updates are rarely a huge deal, but having enough battery always is. Go to Settings>>iTunes & App Store and then scroll down. You’ll see Updates under Automatic Downloads. Turn it off. Just don’t forget to stop by the App Store and update manually now and then.

Turn off background app refreshing

The brutal downside of good multitasking is running things in the background (duh). But if you go to Settings>>General>>Background App Refresh, you can disable background-runnin’ for the apps that aren’t important. Or all of them if you want to go all the way.

Disable auto-brightness

Chances are, auto-brightness keeps you more well-lit than you need to be. You can shut it off and get your mood-lighting on by going to Settings>>Wallpapers & Brightness and flipping the toggle. While you’re there, crank that backlight alllll the way down, or as far down as you can handle. If you step outside, that’s what the Control Center is for.

Go on a push notification diet

Not every app needs to push its notifications; that stuff takes power. Go to Settings>>Notification Center and scroll down to the Include section. Then go on a toggling spree.

Don’t push; fetch

If your email isn’t that important, or you have a couple of accounts, go turn the low-priority ones to Fetch instead of Push, which means your phone will go retrieve mail at set intervals instead of having it pushed to you every single time Uncle Harry or a spambot blasts you. This one is pretty dependent on how often you get emails and how crucial they are, so you’ll have to feel it out, but you can set to fetch in Settings>>Mail, Contacts and Calendar>>Fetch New Data

Turn off Siri’s “Raise to Speak” feature

If you want Siri to eat less of your precious battery, turn off his or her Raise to Speak feature in Settings>>General>>Siri>>Raise to Speak. Or, if you’re really not fond of the dude/lady turn him/her off to go dream of electric sheep.

Turn off 4G (if times are tough)

Disabling 4G is going to hurt a little but, but desperate times can call for desperate measures and LTE is a battery-burner. You can choke off the data-hose by going to Settings>>Cellular>>Enable LTE/Enable 4G

And treat your battery right in general

But even without all these tweaks, it pays to treat your lithium-ion battery right from the start, especially if you have a new gadget. Just keep on scrolling down for our tips and tricks that’ll work for any phone.

Apple’s iPhone is a revolutionary gizmo that has changed the mobile landscape forever, but even if you’ve had one for years, there are still a few things you probably don’t know about it. Each major update that Apple rolls out — and there have been many — brings new features and changes. Here are just a few of the things you’ve likely missed along the way.

1. CONTROL YOUR PHONE WITH YOUR HEAD

The iPhone is a “smartphone,” but it might be even smarter than you ever thought. There is a special control option built into it that lets you use tilts of your head to perform various functions. It’s part of a feature called Switch Control, and you can enable it in the Accessibility menu of the iPhone settings.

You can set up a Switch Control command to notice when you tilt your head to the left or to the right, and use that movement as input for things like pressing the home button or checking the notification center. It’s built into the phone to assist those with certain disabilities, but it can also be convenient for controlling your device when your hands are busy with other tasks — like when you’re wrist-deep in dinner preparation, and don’t want to get goo on your gadgets.

2. UNDO TYPOS WITH A QUICK SHAKE

Tapping quickly on a tiny screen with our big ole’ clumsy thumbs means typos are an annoying and inevitable part of life. So rather than send texts laden with errors, just give your iPhone a little shake, as I show you in the accompanying Tech Now video. That motion brings up a prompt to undo the typing or cancel and continue. It also works if you accidentally select, copy or paste text you didn’t want to. Seems so simple, yet can be so satisfying, when it comes to dealing with this daily digital dilemma.

3. A BURST OF CREATIVITY

Taking an important photo only to have it turn out poorly is one of the most frustrating things in the world, but you can greatly increase the chances of capturing the moment perfectly by using your iPhone’s burst photo feature.

Normally when you take a photo you simply tap the on-screen capture button, which produces just a single photo, but if you hold down the button you’ll automatically activate burst mode. Using burst mode, your phone will capture a ton of photos in rapid succession, and save them in a small gallery. Taking photos this way ensures that between the inevitable blinks and giggles, you’ll snag a perfect photo.

4. LOCATION-BASED REMINDERS

Have you ever gotten home and realized that you forgot to pick something up from the store? How about arriving at a relative’s house and remembering that you have something for them back at home? Believe it or not, your iPhone can help with this common occurrence using its Reminders app, one of the most underutilized iPhone functions.

All you need to do is set up a Reminder as you normally would — and if you’ve never set up a reminder before, it takes just a few seconds — and then tap on the information icon that pops up. From this menu you can activate the location feature, which will use the iPhone’s GPS to notify you of the reminder whenever you enter or leave a specific location. It’s like having a personal assistant with you at all times!

5. BLOCK PESKY CALLERS AND MESSENGERS

Is there a telemarketer who just doesn’t get the hint to leave you alone? What about a texting service that you accidentally gave your number to, that buzzes you at all hours of the day and night? You can easily block those annoying communications using your iPhone!

Head into the Phone menu of your iPhone settings and add any offending numbers to the Blocked list. That’s it! Now, if the bothersome calls and texts continue, you’ll never hear a peep. Peace of mind at last.

What are some of the magic tricks you use on your iPhone? Be sure to let us know.