iPhone The Missing Manul- P10 doc

Settings 259 Clear Cache. See page 259. iPod On this panel, you can adjust four famous iPod playback features: Sound Check is a standard iPod feature that attempts to create a stan- dard baseline volume level for the different songs in your library, so you don’t crank up the volume to hear one song, and then get your eardrums turned to liquid by the next due to differences in CD mastering. Here’s the on/off switch. Audiobook Speed. If you’ve bought audio books from Audible.com, you can take advantage of this feature to make the reader speed up a little or slow down a little—without sounding like either a chipmunk or James Earl Jones. (Your options are Slower, Normal, and Faster.) EQ. EQ is equalization—the art of fiddling with specific frequencies in your music to bring out highs, lows, midrange, or whatever, to suit cer- tain types of music and certain musical tastes. This screen offers a scroll- ing list of predesigned EQ “envelopes” designed for different situations: Bass Booster, Hip-Hop, Small Speakers, Spoken Word, Treble Reducer, and • • • • Chapter 13 260 so on. You can also choose Off, if you want the music to play just the way the record company released it. Volume Limit. It’s well established that listening to loud music for a long time can damage your hearing. It’s also well established that parents worry about this phenomenon. So all iPods, and the iPhone, include an optional, password-protected maximum-volume control. The idea is that if you give your kid an iPhone (wow, what a generous parent!), you can set a maximum volume level, using the slider on this screen. If you do adjust this slider, you’re also asked for a four-digit password, to prevent your kid from bypassing your good intentions and dragging the slider right back to maximum. (The password isn’t especially hard to bypass.) Needless to say, the risk of hearing damage exists only when you’re wearing iPhone earbuds. Music pumped through the tiny speaker wouldn’t damage a gnat’s hearing. Photos All of the options here govern the behavior of the photo slideshows described on page 95. Play Each Slide For. How long do you want each photo to remain on the screen? You can choose 2, 3, 5, 10, or 20 seconds. (Hint: 2 is plenty, 3 at most. Anything more than that will bore your audience silly.) Transition. These options are visual effects between slides: various cross- fades, wipes, and other transitions. Repeat, Shuffle. These options work just as they do for music. Repeat makes the slideshow loop endlessly; Shuffle plays the slides in random order. • • • • Setup and Signup 261 Setup and Signup T he iPhone stands out from most cellphones in plenty of ways—no buttons, all touch screen, gigabytes of memory. But one of the most radical differences is the way you sign up for your cellular service. It’s not in a phone store with a salesperson breathing down your neck. It’s at home on your computer, in iTunes, where you can take all the time you need to read about the plans and choose the one you want. The signup process pretty much explains itself. But it’s worth noting a few twists and turns you’ll meet along the way. All of this, by the way, requires iTunes 7.3 or later. (See page 195 for details on getting this software for Mac or Windows.) To get started, put the iPhone into its cradle, and plug that into your computer. iTunes opens automati- cally, ready to begin. A Appendix A 262 Activation, Step by Step Activation means signing up for a plan, turning on the service, and either finding out your new phone number or transferring your old number to the iPhone. Until you activate, the iPhone can’t do much of anything. It can’t make calls, play music or video, or get on the Internet. So no, you can’t buy an iPhone and hope to use it as a fancy iPod: Without an AT&T account, it just won’t work. Signing up for AT&T service is required. For that matter, the iPhone is a locked GSM phone, meaning that it works only with an AT&T account. It won’t work with Verizon, Sprint, T-Mobile, or any other carrier, and you can’t insert the SIM card (page 8) from a non-AT&T phone and expect it to work. Here are the screens you’ll encounter as you click Continue to work your way through the signup process: Welcome to Your New iPhone. Aww, isn’t that nice? Are You a New or Existing AT&T (Cingular) Wireless Customer? If you’re already an AT&T or Cingular customer, clicking Replace a phone on my account with this iPhone lets you transfer your old phone number and calling plan to the iPhone. You’ll just have to pay $20 more a month for the iPhone’s unlimited Internet service. Click Add a new line to my existing account if you intend to keep your old phone as a backup, but add the iPhone. If you’re not already with AT&T/Cingular, click Activate one iPhone now to get your new iPhone signed up. To activate more than one iPhone—for example, to get one of AT&T’s family plans and get additional phones for your spouse and kids at a huge discount—click Activate two or more iPhones on an Individual or FamilyTalk plan. Transfer Your Mobile Number? You can bring your old cellphone or home phone number to your new iPhone. All your friends and cowork- ers can keep dialing your old number—but your iPhone will now ring instead of the old phone. • • • Setup and Signup 263 If that’s what you want, fi ll in the blanks. It usually takes under an hour for a cellphone number transfer to take place—but it may take several hours. During that time, you can make calls on the iPhone, but can’t re- ceive them. (At least you didn’t sign up for this service the fi rst weekend that the iPhone was available, when it sometimes took 30 hours for the swamped AT&T computers to process the number transfers!) Transferring a landline number can take several days. If you’re not transferring an existing phone number, just ignore this screen and click Continue. Select Your Monthly AT&T Plan. Here’s where you can read about the various monthly plans. All of them include unlimited Internet use, 200 text messages a month, and unlimited calling to and from other AT&T phones. All of them also off er Rollover Minutes, which is something no other carrier off ers. That is, if you don’t use up all of your monthly minutes this month, the unused ones are automatically added to your allotment for next month, and so on. All but the cheapest plan also off er unlimited calls on nights and week- ends. The primary diff erence between the plans, therefore, is the number of weekday calling minutes you get. • Appendix A 264 Apple lists the three plans it considers the most mainstream—sort of a Good/Better/Best menu—but there are bigger plans available. You can upgrade your allotment of text messages (1,500 a month for $10, for ex- ample) or the number of minutes (click More Minutes). The heavy-talker plans range from $80 a month (1,350 weekday minutes) to $200 (6,000 minutes). The choice you make here isn’t etched in stone. You can change your plan at any time. At www.wireless.att.com, you can log in with your iPhone number and make up a password. Click My Account, and then click Change Rate Plan to view your options. All iPhone plans require a two-year commitment and a $36 “activation fee” (ha!). As you budget for your plan, keep in mind that, as with any cellphone, you’ll also be paying taxes as high as 22 percent, depending on your state. Ouch. iTunes Account (Apple ID). If you’ve ever bought anything from Apple or the iTunes store, then you already have an Apple ID. Type your email address and password here. If you don’t yet have an Apple ID, you’ll need one to sign up for iPhone service. If you click Continue without filling in any blanks here, a series of screens will guide you through the creation of an iTunes account (Apple ID). Customer Information for Apple and AT&T. This screen might have been better titled “Miscellaneous.” On it, you input your birthday (to prove that you’re over 18), and you can turn on two checkboxes that land you on the Apple and AT&T email lists (so you can receive all kinds of exciting new junk mail). • • Setup and Signup 265 Billing Information. AT&T will send your cellphone bills to the address you supply. And why does AT&T ask for your Social Security number? The same rea- son any cellphone carrier does when you sign up: so it can run a credit check to make sure you’re a worthy credit risk. If you’re uncomfortable sending your Social Security number over the Internet, you can also stop in at an AT&T store, provide it to a salesperson there, and return home with a “credit-check code,” which you then plug into this screen. The truth is, though, that the Social Security number is less likely to fall into the wrong hands if you send it over the Internet because iTunes encrypts it to keep it secure. You can’t say that about the human AT&T salesperson who types your Social Security number into a computer to generate the check code. If you don’t pass the online credit check, you can write a check at an AT&T store. In that situation, too, you’ll get a credit-check code to plug into this screen. It’s at this point that you could sign up for one of AT&T’s pay-as-you-go plans. The drawback is that these are very expensive. The beauty is that you can cancel at any time, leaving your iPhone incapable of making calls but fully operational as an iPod and Wi-Fi Internet machine. (It’s true! See page 267.) Accept iPhone Terms & Conditions; Accept AT&T Service Agreement. Gotta keep those lawyers occupied somehow. Review Your Information. You’re getting one last look at all the informa- tion you’ve provided so far. Completing Activation. Here’s where you find out what your new iPhone’s phone number will be (if you didn’t transfer your existing num- ber). That’s one downside of signing up for service at home: You can’t ask for a couple of different phone-number options and choose the easiest one to remember. • • • • Appendix A 266 While you wait for your phone to be activated, it’s not completely useless. You can still drag playlists from the iTunes Source list directly onto the iPhone’s icon to get some music onto it. You still can’t access the iPhone’s onscreen controls, of course—but you can use the earbud clicker to play, pause, and skip to the next song. Just something to keep you occupied until the activation is complete. Once you make it through all the previous steps, you return to the regularly scheduled world of iTunes for two final bits of administrative business: Set Up Your iPhone. Here’s where you get to name your iPhone. Your iPhone’s icon will bear this name each time you sync. You can always change it later in iTunes by double-clicking the same icon. You also get your fi rst (but not last) opportunity to turn off the automatic syncing feature that makes loading up your iPhone so eff ortless. See page 208 for details. Your iPhone contains diagnostic information. The iPhone keeps inter- nal logs of crashes, restarts, and other glitchiness. If you give your permis- sion on this screen, the phone will transmit these logs to Apple—without any identifying information like your name. The idea is that its engineers, when studying the collected, aggregated glitch data from thousands of anonymous people, will be better able to spot trends, debug the thing, and issue a software update that improves stability. • • Setup and Signup 267 And that’s the ball game. You now arrive on the main iTunes screen, with the six iPhone tabs across the top: Music, Podcasts, Videos, and so on. Now you can specify what you want copied onto the phone. Turn to Chapter 11 for details. Pay-As-You-Go Plans Most people assume that a two-year AT&T commitment is required, possibly because Apple says, “two-year AT&T commitment required.” That’s not techni- cally true, however. If you enter 999-99-9999 as your Social Security number and click Continue, you’ll fail the credit check. And what happens to people who fail the credit check? They’re offered the chance to sign up for one of AT&T’s GoPhone plans. These are prepaid plans, intended for people with poor credit (or a fear of commit- ment). You pay for each month’s service in advance, and it’s very expensive: $60 a month buys you only 300 minutes, for example. But here’s the thing: There’s no two-year commitment, no deposit, no con- tract. You can stop paying at any time without having to pay the usual $175 early-termination fee. In fact, if you remove the SIM card at that point, the Wi-Fi and iPod features of the iPhone still work. If you really want an Internet terminal/iPod that can’t make phone calls, or if you can afford an iPhone but not an AT&T service plan, well, here’s your chance. Clearly, this business about using the iPhone without an AT&T plan is something of a loophole—and Apple/AT&T may eventually close it. Caveat hacker. Appendix A 268 [...]... That’s a bad thing • The USB factor Trace the connection from the iPhone, to its cradle, to the USB cable, to the computer, making sure everything is seated Also, don’t plug the USB cable into a USB jack on your keyboard, and don’t plug it into an unpowered USB hub • The iPhone factor Try turning the phone off and on again Make sure it’s got a battery charge • The iTunes factor The iPhone won’t show up in versions of iTunes earlier than 7.3... lists (like Songs) To see the video, open the podcast from within the Videos list • The phone volume is low—even the speakerphone That’s true The iPhone s ringer, earpiece, and speaker aren’t as loud as on some other phones (P.S.—With all due respect: did you remove the plastic film from your brand-new iPhone? This plastic, intended to be on the phone only during shipping, covers up the earpiece.) The speaker volume is a lot better when it’s pointed at you, either on a table or ... if your computer’s address book program lets you set up contact groups, create  one called Notes to hold all of these fake memo contacts iPod Problems The iPhone is a great iPod, but even here, things can go wrong • Can’t hear anything Are the earbuds plugged in? They automatically cut the sound coming from the iPhone s built-in speaker Is the volume up? Press the Up volume key on the side of the phone Also make sure that the music is, in fact, supposed to be playing (and... somebody else, to make sure the problem isn’t with the number you’re dialing If nothing else works, try the resetting techniques described at the beginning of this chapter • Can’t get on the Internet Remember, the iPhone can get online in two ways: via Wi-Fi hot spot and via AT&T’s EDGE network If you’re not in a hot spot and you don’t have an EDGE signal—that is, if neither the µ nor the G icon appears at the top of the screen—then you can’t get... you’ve saved all the taps and navigation it would have taken you to fi nd the manual brightness slider in Settings apple tried having the light sensor active all the time, but it was weird to have  the screen constantly dimming and brightening as you used it. So the sensor now  samples the ambient light, and adjusts the brightness, only once—when you  unlock the phone after waking it • Turn off the radios The iPhone has three... (Most zombies attempt to send mail directly to the addressees’ mail servers, so they’re eff ectively blocked.) Your iPhone tries to send mail on port 25—and it gets blocked The solution? Choose a diff erent port From the Home screen, tap SettingsÆMail Tap the name of your POP account Scroll down to the Outgoing Mail Server Tap the address there to edit it Whatever’s there, add :587 to the end of it So mail.ixmail.com... You create an outgoing message, you tap Send The whirlygig “I’m thinking” cursor spins and spins, but the iPhone never sends the message The problem’s cause is very technical, but here’s a nicely oversimplified explanation When you send a piece of postal mail, you might drop it off at the post office It’s then sent over to the addressee’s post office in another town, and delivered from there In a high-tech sort of way, the same thing... troubleshooting tips and anecdotal suggestions.  until  there  is,  this  chapter  will  have  to  be  your  guide  when  things  go  wrong First Rule: Install the Updates There’s an old saying that’s more true than ever: “Never buy version 1.0 of anything.” The very first version of anything has bugs, glitches, and things the programmers didn’t have time to finish they way they would have liked The iPhone is no exception The beauty of this... resetting both hardware and software back to factory-fresh condition if you’re able to sync the phone with iTunes first, do it! That way, you’ll have a  backup of all those intangible iPhone data bits: text messages, call logs, Recents  list, and so on. iTunes will put it all back onto the phone the first time you sync  after the restore To restore the phone, connect it to your computer In iTunes, click the iPhone icon and then, on the Summary tab, click Restore... charge by using these features: • Dim the screen In bright light, the screen brightens (but uses more battery power); in dim light, it darkens The screen adjusts with the help of an ambient light sensor that’s hiding behind the glass above the earpiece You can use this information to your advantage By covering up the sensor as you unlock the phone, you force it to a low-power, dim screen setting (because the phone believes that it’s in a dark room) . the earbuds plugged in? They automatically cut the sound coming from the iPhone s built-in speaker. Is the volume up? Press the Up volume key on the side of the phone. Also make sure that the. onto the iPhone this time, if the technology gods are smiling, with better success. • Appendix B 272 iPhone Doesn’t Show Up in iTunes If the iPhone s icon doesn’t appear in the Source list at the. see the video, open the podcast from within the Videos list. The phone volume is low—even the speakerphone. That’s true. The iPhone s ringer, earpiece, and speaker aren’t as loud as on some other