Bringing Techmoments out of retirement briefly to help out all of my new iPhone-toting friends. Here’s a list of my favorite apps and some tips and tricks. Enjoy!

Tips:

• There is a way to display a numeric battery meter next to the battery icon but it’s somewhat buried. Go into Settings/General/Usage and turn Battery Percentage On.



• Screenshots can be taken by holding power briefly and tapping the home button. The screen will flash and the image will be saved in your camera roll.
• Typing tip - If you need to enter a number and immediately go back to alpha mode, hold down the numeric button and slide to the number then release. Its quicker than tapping numeric and then tapping again to return.
• Emoji - Have you gotten a text with a little picture in it yet? These are emoji icons and Apple just figured us Americans didn’t want them (they are enabled in Japan). To enable them on your phone download Emoji Free, run the app (which has no purpose other than to enable this). Click through the prompts and when prompted, go to General/Keyboards/International Keyboards/Add New KJeyboard… and select Emoji. Now you’ll have a little globe icon on bottom left. Click that and you’ll be treated to plenty of little pics to spice up your texts, emails, etc. Emoji icons can be received/viewed by any iPhone (ONLY iPhones though) but if you want to send Emoji, you need to follow these procedures. FYI, I had to reset my phone once to get the icon to show up in SMS, so results may vary.



• Battery Life - If you have to go that extra mile without recharging, the single best thing you can do is disable 3G data. This little switch can add hours to your battery. Setting/General/Network “Enable 3G”.



• Facebook Photo Sync - Use at your own risk. If you like having a photo for all your contacts, you can enable Facebook Syncing. Go to Facebook, Friends, then sync. It will compare your contacts with your Facebook friends and then add their profile pic to your contacts as well as their Facebook URL which will allow you to link back to Facebook from the contact record. I like doing this but be warned it will erase any custom photos you’ve had set for your contacts.

Apps:

• Fluxtunes - This app is a lifesaver. It is a simple gesture driven music interface. I use it when the iPod is docked in the car and also when listening to music at my desk at work. Swipe to the side to change track, swipe up to change playlist, twist swipe to turn on shuffle. It’s very intuitive and can enable you to change tracks blindly.
• Reeder - For those of you who use Google Reader for your RSS feed consumption, I present to you, reeder. There are many apps that claim to be the best mobile version of Google Reader, but this one handily takes the cake. Very easy to scan feeds, mark items read and most importantly preserve your sort preferences, which other apps don’t do. And naturally it syncs your changes back to Google.
• Photoshop Mobile - Handy on-the-fly image editing from Photoshop. It’s basic, but it works. All the images above were cropped on the device with PS Mobile.
• IMDb - Does this really need an introduction?
• Games - There are so many out there, but you should definitely give these a try: Words with Friends, Flight Control, Bejeweled.

  Hope this helps, I can go on and on!!