Apple’s MobileMe Gallery iPhone app offers the option to take over all gallery.me.com links. Enabling this option in the app will open a Safari page to confirm this option.

A clunky aspect of this feature is that tapping a Gallery link will open it first in Mobile Safari, then switch you to the Gallery app. If you click a link from, say, Mail, this means you first switch to Safari, then to MobileMe Gallery just to view the gallery. Apple apparently does not allow any other apps (including its own) to take over URLs at the system level, like iTunes is able to. Tapping an iTunes link in Tweetie, for example, will present a prompt to open the iTunes Store; it won’t bounce you around like these Gallery links.

Let’s say you know two people, John Doe and Jane Doe who live together. Each has an address book entry on your phone, but they share a land line, so both entries contain the same phone number. If you get an incoming call from that number, the phone displays, “Jane or John Doe,” intelligently handling the fact that they have the same last name.

When purchasing a ringtone from iTunes Store on the device, you can immediately set it as the default ringtone or assign it to a contact during the purchasing process. Convenient.

Like other media, you can download podcasts with the on-board iTunes Store. Unlike other media, you can delete it from the iPod app. However, if you haven’t synced a downloaded podcast back up to iTunes, you’ll be warned before you finish tossing the episode.

An increasingly common spammer tactic is to link images in messages instead of attaching them (this is sometimes referred to as “HTML email”). The URLs for these images can contain unique email address variables for each victim on the spammer’s list, which means that when you click the message to load its contents (including the images), the spammer’s servers confirm that your address is valid for spam and selling to more spammers.

An easy way to help keep your email off these lists and cut down on the spam onslaught is to disable the automatic loading of remote images. Like Mail’s desktop version, you can toggle this feature under Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendars.

I’m not sure how long this feature has existed in iPhone OS. I’m almost positive it wasn’t in 1.x, and almost as sure that it wasn’t in 2.x either. I’ll be happy to update if you can confirm otherwise in the comments.

Unfortunately, and unlike its desktop counterpart, Mobile Mail does not display a button in messages to load remote images when this feature is off. You’re just stuck with a message full of white outlined boxes and blue question mark warnings where the images should be. Still, this can be useful if you are on the spam offensive, especially because Mail can flip through messages individually and will blindly load everything in an HTML message without prompting.

By default, you can use voice search in Japanese with the new version of Google’s Mobile App for iPhone only if your iPhone language settings is also set to Japanese. If the iPhone is set for any other language, the voice search options will be English (Australia/India/UK/US) or Chinese (for some reason, Japanese isn’t on this list).

To enable japanese voice search, change your iPhone language to Japanese (Settings > General > International > Language). If you are not familiar with Japanese characters, do this with someone who is. Then, run Google Mobile App, change Voice Search’s language setting to Japanese (日本語). Finally, reset iPhone’s language settings back to your language.

Your Google Mobile App voice search setting should appear as in the picture above, without any language selected, and you’ll be able to do voice searches in Japanese.

I think this could be very useful for foreigners living in Japan who are capable of searching for addresses, places, names and so on, or even for those who are not familiar with kanji/Japanese characters.

In WeatherBug Elite, you can tap-and-hold anywhere on the map to drop a pin and get weather for that region. Controls in the popup bubble that appears allow you to refine the distance radius for that region’s weather or to tap through to more details. Note that this is only in the 99¢ paid version, WeatherBug Elite, not the free, ad-supported version.

One way to select a word or a couple sentences on an iPhone is to tap once to place your cursor in a text field, then tap again to choose the Select or Select All option from the popup bubble, then perhaps tap a third time on one of the selection markers if you need to expand the selection.

A faster way is to simply double-tap the word you want to select. If you need to expand the selection to more than a single word, tap-and-hold on the second tap and begin dragging left, right, up, or down from the word you selected. iPhone OS will do the right thing and increase your selection in any direction, keeping the original word you double-tapped as either the beginning or end of the selection.

The iPhone OS keyboard displays smart quotes and apostrophes, but swaps them out for straight quotes when you use the tap-and-hold option. With most other keys, the original character remains in place when using tap-and-hold, while any alternative characters or symbols are laid out in the popup bubble.

Starting at least with iPhone OS 3.1, possibly earlier, you can choose whether your device auto-joins some WiFi networks. I don’t see this option for my home network, but I caught it on the AT&T WiFi hotspot offered at Starbucks.