Despite the fact that many of us spend far more time on our phones than we’d like to admit, there are a whole host of hidden iPhone features that many don’t know about.
TikTok creator and former Apple employee Tyler Morgan, known by the username @hitomidocameraroll, regularly posts hints and tips on how to get the most out of your iPhone, and a recent viral video that has amassed over 5.5 million views shares nine incredible features that may not be so obvious.
Quicker way to record a video
We’ve all been in a situation where you’re rushing to take a video of something and find yourself being slowed down by having to scroll across in the camera app to get to the video setting.
One of Morgan’s handy tips reveals a quicker way of recording a video which you can do by simply holding down the shutter button while in the ‘photo’ setting of the camera app.
One-handed keyboard
With phones steadily increasing in size, it is getting more and more difficult to type, particularly if you’re using one hand and your thumb just won’t quite reach the far side of the screen.
One hidden feature to combat this is the one-handed keyboard, which shifts the keys over towards your preferred side of the screen so you can reach all of the keys more easily.
To activate, hold down the keyboard/emoji button in the bottom left of the screen while your phone’s keyboard is open, this brings up a list of keyboard options, including the one-handed keyboard.
Save yourself a tap
Morgan also showed off a slightly more efficient way to type in numbers.
Instead of tapping the ‘123’ key once, typing in the number(s) you need and tapping the key again, you can hold the key down with one finger and type the number(s) you want and when you let go of the ‘123’ key, the keyboard will automatically revert to its default view.
Spacebar mouse
Trying to select an exact spot in a sentence you’ve just typed can be a fiddly process.
But if you hold down the spacebar on your keyboard, a cursor will appear in the message bar, allowing you to select a point in the text more easily.
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Shake to undo/redo
Made a typo in the text you’ve been writing? Not to worry as you can simply shake your phone and a message will pop up on the screen asking if you want to undo your most recent typing.
Similarly, if you’ve just undone a piece of text and would like to get it back, shake your phone again and it will give you the option to redo it.
Adding extra options to the Control Center
This wasn’t a specific point that Morgan made in his video but it’s one that this writer picked up on as one I didn’t realize you could do.
The Control Center is the drag-down menu you can open – on the latest iPhone models you do this by pulling down from the top right of the screen. This will let you change the volume and brightness levels, turn on/off the wi-fi, Bluetooth and airplane mode as well as the phone’s flashlight.
But you can also add some extra shortcuts to this menu by heading into settings, finding the Control Center page and selecting from the range of available options.
In-built background noises
One of the notable options that Morgan highlighted within the Control Center can be found in the ‘Hearing’ shortcut which does things like monitoring your headphones’ battery level and whether the volume level you have them set to could be harmful.
The iPhone feature that the TikToker shows off here is ‘Background Sounds’ which can play soothing noises like the sound of rain or a stream to help you concentrate or drift off to sleep, meaning there’s no need to play videos on YouTube or have a separate meditation app.
Harry Potter easter egg
If you say the word ‘Lumos’ to Siri, your phone’s flashlight will automatically turn itself on in a charming reference to the wand-lighting spell in the Harry Potter franchise.
Similarly, you can turn off your phone’s torch again by saying the word ‘Nox.’
Force reset phone
And the last of the hidden features that Tyler Morgan shared in his video is how to force restart your iPhone if it’s being buggy and playing up on you – the old ‘have you tried turning it off and on again?’ trick.
Morgan demonstrates this by quickly pressing and releasing the volume up button, then the volume down button, before holding down the side/lock button until the phone cycles off and back on again.
