What is iPhone

iPhone is a Revolutionary Mobile Phone
iPhone is a revolutionary new mobile phone that allows users to make calls by simply pointing at a name or number. iPhone syncs all of your contacts from your PC, Mac® or Internet service such as Yahoo!, so that you always have your full list of up-to-date contacts with you. In addition, you can easily construct a favorites list for your most frequently made calls, and easily merge calls together to create conference calls.
iPhone’s pioneering Visual Voicemail, an industry first, lets users look at a listing of their voicemails, decide which messages to listen to, then go directly to those messages without listening to the prior messages. Just like email, iPhone’s Visual Voicemail enables users to immediately randomly access those messages that interest them most.
iPhone includes an SMS application with a full QWERTY soft keyboard to easily send and receive SMS messages in multiple sessions. When users need to type, iPhone presents them with an elegant touch keyboard which is predictive to prevent and correct mistakes, making it much easier and more efficient to use than the small plastic keyboards on many smartphones. iPhone also includes a calendar application that allows calendars to be automatically synced with your PC or Mac.
iPhone features a 2 megapixel camera and a photo management application that is far beyond anything on a phone today. Users can browse their photo library, which can be easily synced from their PC or Mac, with just a flick of a finger and easily choose a photo for their wallpaper or to include in an email.
iPhone is a quad-band GSM phone which also features EDGE and Wi-Fi wireless technologies for data networking. Apple has chosen Cingular, the best and most popular carrier in the US with over 58 million subscribers, to be Apple’s exclusive carrier partner for iPhone in the US.

iPhone is a Widescreen iPod
iPhone is a widescreen iPod with touch controls that lets music lovers “touch” their music by easily scrolling through entire lists of songs, artists, albums and playlists with just a flick of a finger. Album artwork is stunningly presented on iPhone’s large and vibrant display.
iPhone also features Cover Flow, Apple’s amazing way to browse your music library by album cover artwork, for the first time on an iPod. When navigating your music library on iPhone, you are automatically switched into Cover Flow by simply rotating iPhone into its landscape position.
iPhone’s stunning 3.5-inch widescreen display offers the ultimate way to watch TV shows and movies on a pocketable device, with touch controls for play-pause, chapter forward-backward and volume. iPhone plays the same videos purchased from the online iTunes® Store that users enjoy watching on their computers and iPods, and will soon enjoy watching on their widescreen televisions using the new Apple TV™. The iTunes Store now offers over 350 television shows, over 250 feature films and over 5,000 music videos.
iPhone lets users enjoy all their iPod content, including music, audiobooks, audio podcasts, video podcasts, music videos, television shows and movies. iPhone syncs content from a user’s iTunes library on their PC or Mac, and can play any music or video content they have purchased from the online iTunes store.

iPhone is a Breakthrough Internet Communications Device
iPhone features a rich HTML email client which fetches your email in the background from most POP3 or IMAP mail services and displays photos and graphics right along with the text. iPhone is fully multi-tasking, so you can be reading a web page while downloading your email in the background.
Yahoo! Mail, the world’s largest email service with over 250 million users, is offering a new free “push” IMAP email service to all iPhone users that automatically pushes new email to a user’s iPhone, and can be set up by simply entering your Yahoo! name and password. iPhone will also work with most industry standard IMAP and POP based email services, such as Microsoft Exchange, Apple .Mac Mail, AOL Mail, Google Gmail and most ISP mail services.
iPhone also features the most advanced and fun-to-use web browser on a portable device with a version of its award-winning Safari™ web browser for iPhone. Users can see any web page the way it was designed to be seen, and then easily zoom in to expand any section by simply tapping on iPhone’s multi-touch display with their finger. Users can surf the web from just about anywhere over Wi-Fi or EDGE, and can automatically sync their bookmarks from their PC or Mac. iPhone’s Safari web browser also includes built-in Google Search and Yahoo! Search so users can instantly search for information on their iPhone just like they do on their computer.
iPhone also includes Google Maps, featuring Google’s groundbreaking maps service and iPhone’s amazing maps application, offering the best maps experience by far on any pocket device. Users can view maps, satellite images, traffic information and get directions, all from iPhone’s remarkable and easy-to-use touch interface.

iTunes SMART PLAYLIST

One of the main problems is keeping your music collection interesting. You’ll want to hear newer songs more often than older ones, yet at the same time you’ll want to make sure that the old music doesn’t get lost. You want to hear your favourite songs slightly more often than everything else, but you don’t want to keep listening to the same old tracks over and over again. As such you need to make sure your playlists have a good degree of variety as well as and a high churn rate.

The way to achieve this is by utilising smart playlists, however it can be quite difficult getting the right balance.

The first thing I’ve done is organise my music into genre related playlists such as Indie, Dance, Chill etc. You could do this using a smart playlist and matching the genre to a specified keyword. However I find that the predefined genres tend to be pretty poorly defined. For instance I’ve got several Thievery Corporation CD’s as well as lots of random tracks from compilation albums. As such, their music is variously categorised as Electronica/Dance, Rock, Soundtrack, Reggae and Blues. Of course the other option would be to update the genre info, but there honestly aren’t enough hours in the day.

Next I’ve created a series of “base” smart playlists that will form the foundations of my proper playlists. Because I won’t actually listen to any of these base playlists I’ve given them a prefix of XXX so they appear out of the way at the bottom of my smart playlist list.
The first of these smart playlists is called XXX Highest Rated. As the name suggests, this playlist creates a list of the highest rated songs in my library; in this case songs with 4 or more stars.

I don’t want to keep listening to the same songs over and over again, so I have limited this playlist to songs I haven’t heard for a week.

Rating the songs in your iTunes library is a really good idea as it gives you the ability to create all kinds of preference based smart playlists. If you did want to spend a weekend or two rating your songs, you can easily set up a smart playlist to show you every song without a rating. Unfortunately I can’t be bothered going through all my songs, so I tend just to rate my favourites.

With so many songs, it’s easy for your newer music to get passed over. As such I’ve also created a XXX Latest Additions smart playlist.

This playlist is comprised of music added in the last 8 weeks. Obviously you can tweak the time depending on the size of your library and how often you add new tracks. I don’t want to keep hearing the same songs over and over again, however I do want to hear newer songs more frequently than older ones. Because of this I’m limiting songs in this playlist to ones I haven’t heard in only 2 days, as opposed to a week
You’ll also notice that I’m excluding audio books and radio stations from this playlist. There is nothing more irritating than the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy or a learn to speak French CD appearing in the middle of a playlist.
As well as wanting to hear the latest additions, I also want to hear stuff I’ve not listened to in a while. To accomplish this I’ve created a XXX Not Often Played playlist.

This playlist is made up of songs that have been played less than 4 times and haven’t been listened to in 6 months or more. This is a nice way of getting to hear older music that you haven’t heard often. Obviously the longer you use iTunes, the higher the play count will need to be.
So now I’ve got three playlists, one for my favourite songs, one for the new stuff and one for the older and less played stuff. To complete my base smart playlists I need to create one that deals with everything else. In this case I’m calling it XXX Fresh, because I want to make sure this playlist is full of fresh tracks that I haven’t heard for a couple of weeks.

If this playlist just contained songs not played in the last couple of weeks, it would be pretty large and the songs within it would have too much weighting in their favour. In order to put more weighting on the other playlist, I’m limiting this one to only 1000 songs. However I don’t want these 1000 songs to include those in my other playlists, so am excluding them.
With these base playlists in place, I created a new playlist called XXX Mix. This playlist basically brings all the other playlist together in one uber smart playlist.

This playlist contains a pool of around 2000 songs. Half of the songs come from my favourites, latest additions and old songs, the other half are songs I’ve not listened to in the last couple of weeks. If you wanted to get more scientific, you could actually set limits on all of the base playlists. For instance, if you wanted to hear twice as many new songs as favourites you could limit the new songs to 600 and the favourites to 300.
I want a way to skip over songs I don’t want to listen to, and I can do this by selecting the “Match only checked songs” option. If a song is playing that I don’t want to listen to, I can simply uncheck it, and iTunes skips to the next song. However periodically you’ll need to go through and re-check these songs or you’ll end up never hearing them again. To make this easier I’ve set up a couple of utility smart playlists.
My Checked playlist is simply a playlist that contains all the checked songs.

My Unchecked playlist then uses this to exclude any checked songs, creating a list of unchecked songs.

As well as un-checking songs I don’t want to currently listen to, I’ll also un-check songs that I don’t like or are damaged in some way. I can then later go though my Unchecked playlist and delete any songs I no longer want.

Here is a quick tip that frustrated me for a while, so I thought I’d pass it on. Selecting a song in a playlist and hitting backspace simply removes that song from said playlist. If you want to remove the song from iTunes you need to do Option (Alt) Backspace. And if you want to delete the song from your computer you can do Command (Apple key), Option (Alt) and Backspace.
Anyway, back to the XXX Mix playlist. You could happily listen to this playlist as is, although I’d probably choose to limit it to 30 tracks chosen at random, just to keep the sequence shuffled and fresh. However I prefer to listen to my music based on genre, so have created several more smart playlists called @Indie Mix, @Dance Mix, @Chill Mix etc. The @ prefix keeps these main playlist at the top of your smart playlist list, although you could equally use a colon, a full stop or an underscore to achieve the same effect.
Each of these main smart playlists look the same, so I’ll only show you the @Indie Mix playlist.
Here I’m simply creating a subset of my main mix playlist that only contains Indie music, and am limiting this playlist to 30 songs chosen at random from a much larger pool of songs.
And there you have it. That’s how I use smart playlists keep my music collection interesting and organised. However I know there are many ways to skin a cat, so I’d be interested to hear how you organise your music collection in iTunes.

RESETING iPod (5G)

How to reset an iPod Video 5th generation.

1. Toggle the Hold switch on and off. (Slide it to Hold, then turn it off again.)
2. Press and hold the Menu and Select buttons until the Apple logo appears, about 6 to 10 seconds. You may need to repeat this step.

Tip: If you are having difficulty resetting your iPod, set it on a flat surface. Make sure the finger pressing the Select button is not touching any part of the click wheel. Also make sure that you are pressing the Menu button toward the outside of the click wheel, and not near the center.

If the above steps did not appear to work, connect your iPod to the charger and plug the charger into a wall outlet, or connect the iPod to your computer. If you plug it into your computer make sure the computer is turned on and isn't set to go to sleep.

iPod is FROZEN

If your iPod is frozen or doesn't respond...

Symptoms
If your iPod does not power on, is stuck with just the battery logo showing, has stopped responding while playing music (in which case the Click Wheel doesn't respond) or it will not wake from sleep.

Solution when it will not power onTry the following steps:
1. Make sure the Hold switch is on. Toggle the Hold switch, slide the switch to Hold (an orange bar appears) and then slide it back (orange bar is hidden). Your iPod will not respond if the Hold switch is set to off.
2. Make sure the battery is charged. The iPod won't turn on if the battery is empty. Instead, a low battery screen appears for about 3 seconds when you try to turn it on. Note: If you are connecting via USB and the battery is completely discharged, there may be up to a 30-minute delay before iPod powers up.
3. Reset the iPod by holding down the Menu and Center buttons for 10 seconds.
4. Let the iPod charge for at least 20 minutes. Note: If the iPod is connected to a computer, make sure the computer is not set to sleep, standby, or hibernate.
5. After the iPod has charged for at least 20 minutes and while it is still connected to the power source, toggle the Hold switch again as in step 1.
- If the Apple logo appears on the display, connect the iPod to a computer and verify that it appears in iTunes and can play music. If the iPod appears in iTunes and can play music, no further troubleshooting is needed.
- If the Apple logo does not appear or the iPod is not seen in iTunes, the iPod should be serviced.
6. If iPod does not turn on, disconnect it from all power sources and leave it disconnected for about 24 hours, then reset your iPod again. If it turns on now, use the iPod Updater to update your iPod's software.
- If the Apple logo does not appear or the iPod is not seen in iTunes, the iPod should be serviced.