FEATURES YOU DIDN'T KNOW YOUR IPHONE COULD DO
The more time goes by, it is still ridiculous to call smart mobile devices "phones". Android and iOS devices are some of the most powerful supercomputers on the planet.
These smartphones can be taken anywhere with you to do all the vital tasks throughout the day. Devices like the iPhone X can do so many different things that it's tough to even remember all of them. But features are hard to keep track of, so here are some useful features you did not know your iPhone even had.
Battery throttling
Apple recently took some heat for secretly decreasing the iPhone's performance as the quality of its battery degraded over time. But, after the outcry – and price slash for battery replacements – you can now choose whether or not to activate this battery throttling "Performance Management" feature. Just go to Settings, Battery, and the Battery Health beta.
How to record your screen
Everyone knows you can take a quick snapshot of your phone screen by pressing the Home and Power buttons at once. But now you can record whole videos of what’s happening on your screen. Under Control Center go to Customize Controls and enable Screen Recording. The recording button will now appear under Control Center.
Squeezed Keyboard
Phones are way bigger now. Everyone but me seems to like this. But a bigger screen means a bigger keyboard, and potentially a keyboard too big for your thumbs to comfortably navigate. The simple solution would be to just get a smaller phone, but you also have the option under keyboard settings to shift the keys to the left or right for easier one-handed typing.
Live Photos
For a while now Live Photos have been letting us live our Harry Potter dreams by turning snapshots into brief videos that come to life when we press on them. If you never want the illusion to stop, you can also loop a Live Photo, kind of like an Instagram Boomerang. Just swipe up on the photo to see the new potential effects.
Face ID Alarm
Arguably the most attention-grabbing aspect of the iPhone X is its ability to deeply recognise your face using Face ID. Some folks use this for security reasons, others use it to turn themselves into animoji puppets. But the meanest use of the Face ID is just staring at your phone in the morning to shut up the alarm. (IT KNOWS WHAT YOU LOOK LIKE!)
Black Wallpaper
This is more of a hack than a feature, but because of the way the OLED screen works on newer iPhones, “black” images essentially allow that part of the screen to turn off. So if you use dark images as wallpaper and night themes in apps, you can potentially save a lot of battery power during everyday use.
Do Not Disturb in Car
Hey! Don’t text and drive! You could get somebody hurt or worse! But, if you need extra motivation, go to Control and Customize Controls to enable “Do Not Disturb While Driving.” As the name implies, thanks to CarPlay, your phone won’t even attempt to distract you while on the road.
Virtual Home Button
In order to accommodate its even bigger screen, the iPhone X has no physical home button. You navigate via intuitive touch gestures. But if you’re not ready to give up on a home button yet, or one of the other physical buttons is broken, you can add a virtual home button to your screen by going to Accessibility and then Accessibility Shortcut
Files
Apple’s slavish commitment to making its computers seem like magic instead of computers meant that for years the way iOS handled files was weirdly obfuscated. No more. The new Files app easily shows you content you’ve saved to your phone across apps and even across other devices using iCloud.
Drag and Drop
The more powerful iPhones become, the more they just start letting you use them like computers. You’ve been able to drag and drop files easily on computers for years. But on iPhone, it’s almost revolutionary being able to move a link, text snippet, photo, or file from one app to another like it’s nothing.