What the Tech? Hidden iPhone tricks

(ABC 6 News) – Apple makes a big deal about certain features of the iPhone and iOS. It doesn’t mention others and they’re very difficult to discover unless you spend a lot of time tinkering in the settings menus.

Even then, they’re hard to find. You might refer to these as “I was today years old when I found out my iPhone does these things.”

1. Ever needed to markup a photo or note to bring attention to something? So you try drawing a circle or square with your finger and it doesn’t go well. In iOS 16, the iPhone will turn lousy shapes into perfect ones. Just draw a circle on a photo, screenshot, or note and hold your finger down for a second. Use this trick to draw perfect squares, triangles, octagons, and other shapes. Perfect.
2. Don’t have time to respond to a text you’ve read? Swipe right and tap on the blue bubble to mark it as unread. This is handy if you receive a lot of texts that you don’t have time to deal with at the moment.
3. Send a text you wish you hadn’t. You have a few seconds to unsend it by holding down the message, choosing more, and sending it to the trash can. The person you’re sending it to will see that you’ve deleted a text but they won’t see what it says.
4. You can unsend emails too. Android’s had this for a while within Gmail but it’s new in Apple Mail. Hit send and you have time to change your mind. Go into settings, look for “mail” and at the bottom choose undo send delay. You can give yourself 10, 20, or 30 seconds before the email sends to give you time to undo.
5. Ever get an email you can’t respond to and forget about it? Swipe right to mark it as unread or, and I like this, choose “remind me” in an hour, tonight, tomorrow, or another time. You’ll get a reminder notification that you should respond.
6. If you’d rather hear a website than read it. Tap the two “a’s” next to the address bar in Safari on any website and choose “listen to page”. Siri’s voice will read it to you. There is no option for this in the Google Chrome browser. I find it helpful when you’re busy doing something else. It works on any website, but again, only in the Safari browser.
7. BONUS If you ever misplace your phone in the dark, just say “Siri, Torch” and it’ll shine the flashlight to help find it.