My iPhone died today. It left me feeling sick to my stomach. I hadn’t backed it up for a long time, I only had some of my photos and videos in the iCloud and I had a number of notes that I hadn’t recorded elsewhere.

I tried the iPhone hard reset a number of times, which is when you hold the home key and the off switch together for about 8 seconds. I did this multiple times, with no success.

I thought perhaps the power was completely flat, even though it had been at 100% full charge a couple of hours earlier. I plugged it into several power sources with no success.

By this time the prospect of having a dead iPhone overnight was becoming a reality and I really was starting to panic.

Then by chance I plugged some earphones in, unplugged them and then plugged them back in again. All of a sudden my iPhone sprang to life! Why? What happened here?

and yes, I have just backed it up!

The iPhone has a viewer which will display a number of known formats when you open an attachment. If it doesn’t recognise the format, then then you will just see the name of the file, but you won’t be able to download it.

The formats that are supported by iOS5 are:

Microsoft Office – *.doc; *.docx; *.ppt; *.pptx; *.xls; *.xlsx; *.vcf
Adobe Reader *.pdf
Text Files – *.txt; *.rtf
Web Pages – *.html; *.htm

Are there other formats you have found are supported?

I cannot believe I didn’t know about this cool iPhone Weather Tip! Is it new in iOS5 or have I been living under a rock for 3 years?

Anyway, you can actually view hour by hour for the current day, simply by tapping on the actual day and it will give you the expected temperature and forecast for the hour.

Unless you have a jailbroken iPhone you cannot automatically add a signature to your SMS/TXT Messages when sending from an iPhone.

However, there is a nice workaround for this in iOS5 using Shortcuts.

To insert a Signature to your iPhone SMS or TXT messages go to:

General
Keyboard
Add New Shortcut

Enter the text you want to appear as your Signature – Such as Sent from my iPhone, then enter the Shortcut you wish to use, such as ‘Sig’ (without the quotes)

Now whenever you enter the letters Sig your phrase will appear. Cool huh?!

Have you found that sometimes your iPhone Calendar does not appear to be synching with your Outlook Exchange Calendar? Some items are in sync and others may not be.

We have found with Exchange 2007 SP1 some iPhone Calendars get out of Synch. We aren’t sure why! We have noticed the frequency is higher if you have multiple Apple devices synching to the same Exchange Mailbox.

The quickest way to troubleshoot iPhone Calendar Sync’ing is not to bother troubleshooting, but simply reinitiate a synch. Do this by:

1. Go int your Mail, Contact, Calendar option in iPhone Settings
2. Select the Exchange Account
3. Turn Calendar Synchronization off and select Delete from my iPhone
4. Turn Calendar Synchornization on again.

Sometimes it just isn’t worth Troubleshooting when it’s so easy to set up Calendar Synching again!

With iOS5 came a wonderful feature of iCloud called Photo Stream. Photo Stream for the iPhone will let you take a photo on an iOS device and then wirelessly synchronize it to other iOS devices.

This means you can take a photo on your iPhone and have it appear on your iPad.

To setup Photo Stream:

1. Make sure your devices are running iOS5.
2. When you first upgraded to iOS5 you were prompted to setup iCloud. If you skipped this step, then click Settings and go to iCloud
3. Tap the on/off switches to enable the individual Cloud Services such as Photo Stream.

iCloud will store you photos for 30 days, so you have plenty of time to download your photos from the cloud.

For Windows users to sync photos you must install the iCloud Control Panel.

Troubleshooting Photo Stream for iPhone

If you have trouble uploading Photos to iCloud

1. Check that Photo Stream has been turned on under Settings, iCloud
2. Ensure you have an active iCloud account
3. Ensure your Wireless is turned on
4. Your iDevices have iOS5 installed
5. Your Photo Stream will only work for photos taken after Photo Stream was enabled.

Last week Apple released iOS5 packed with over 200 new features. What do we love the most?!

There is a lot to choose from, but our 5 favorite iOS5 features are:

The Notification Center – The Notification Centeris a new app where you can customize which applications you want to provide notifications for. It also lets you customize the type of alert style for some of the applications. This is a nice touch as it puts you in charge of deciding whether you want to be rudely interrupted or discreetly notified. But wait there’s more! You can also choose which apps you want to see alerts for in the Lock Screen too
With a downward finger swipe in the Home Screen, you can also view your key notifications, and then flick them easily away again. Loving the stock screen ticker as well!

Wireless Syncing – Another one of the great iOS 5 features is Wireless Syncing which let’s you sync your apps, media content, photos etc without tethering your iDevice to your PC or Mac. Your iPhone must be plugged into the power and connected to the same Wi-Fi network as your computer. Additionally, you can only do this with iOS5 and iTunes 10.5.10.5. Be sure to check Sync over Wi-Fi in the Summary screen in iTunes first.

Twitter Integration – Twitter integration with iOS shows the impact Twitter has had in social networking. Additionally, and as you would expect, Twitter is also included in the Notifications Center to keep you completely up to date.

iCloud – iCloud will store your photos, mail, calendars, reminders, Documents and Data in the cloud and wirelessly sync these back to your other devices. And it’s free! Well, 5 gig is. We are loving the Photostream which means you can take a photo on one device and it just appears on the other! It just works and it’s beautiful thing.

Mail Improvements – If you are a heavy mail user, then you will notice some great improvements to the Mail App including some rich text formatting such as bold, italic and underline as well as indenting and flagging those important messages you need to attend to later.

Let us know what your favourite features are!

Dropped your iPhone in water? Or into the basin and found it’s dead on retrieval?

Then try this rice trick to bring your iPhone back to life.

Firstly, do not try to power it on when wet as this is how you could fry it’s little chips sky high.

1. Remove sim card
2. Try to carefully dry with a hairdryer on a low temperature however be careful not to fry it.
3. Put the iPhone in a bag of rice for 2 – 3 days, which will absorb all the left over moisture. If your iPhone was in water longer than a minute or two, leave it for at least a week in rice.
4. Woohoo as good as new!

What are the best Social Networking Apps you should download onto your iPhone to keep in touch? Where can your friends find you?

With your iPhone and it’s free social networking apps your friends can connect with you anywhere.

Facebook - Who doesn’t have a Facebook account these days? Even if it’s simply to have one and live precariously through your friends. Download this free app and keep in touch with your friends.

LinkedIn – LinkedIn is not the social playground that Facebook is, but it’s great to foster your professional relationships and connections.

Twitterific - Many people use the power of Twitter to microblog their way through their day. Twitterific is one of the best free iPhone Apps available to do this.

Google + - This is Google’s new social networking platform which is streets ahead of their Buzz attempt last year. It’s still in it’s infancy so you may or may not be able to access it. But jump in and see if you can add people to your circles.

You Tube – It already comes with the iPhone by default, but set yourself up with an account and start uploading your own videos!

Have you ever been in a meeting when your iPhone has rung and you’ve fumbled around trying to turn down the volume or just declined your callers phone call to shut up the phone?

This has been downright embarrassing for me, worse still it took me a year to figure out how to simply Silence the iPhone!

If you forget to silence your iPhone in a meeting and it goes off, just press the off key once. This will stop the ring and the vibration yet allow the call to continue so your caller can leave a message. How simple is that?!

If you do want to receive calls but be alerted by a call, then before you go into a meeting just switch the button on the left hand side to silence. The phone will continue to vibrate (if you have vibrate turned on) but you won’t be disturbed by the ringtone of your iPhone.

If you are running iOS 4.3.3 or later you can automatically download new purchases that you have made on other iDevices. This is pretty handy if you don’t get to synchronize your iPhone or your iPad as frequently as you would like.

To enable Automatic Downloads you must be logged into your Apple ID. If you aren’t this feature will not be work.

To enable this feature
Tab Settings
Tap Store
Tap On for Apps

If you wish to download Apps via the Cellular Data network, tap On for Cellular as well.