Getting contacts off your old mobile phone and onto the iPhone may or may not be a straightforward process. If you already have your contacts stored neatly in Outlook (Windows), Address Book (Mac) or a Yahoo! Address Book (Mac/Windows), the process is as simple as syncing via iTunes. If all you have is a set [...]

Though this is an extremely basic usage note, we couldn’t find documentation of it elsewhere and the process for execution isn’t very intuitive. We recently received an email from an iPhone Atlas reader asking when the ability to save draft email messages would be added to the iPhone. This functionality is already there, but it’s [...]

If your iPhone is exhibiting inordinately short battery life and you’re not sure why, check your Mail settings.

First, if you’re using a Yahoo! account, navigate to Settings > Mail then select your Yahoo! account and choose “Advanced.” Check the “Use Push Mail” setting. If push mail — which allows the iPhone to notify you of [...]

ZiPhone 2.5, a new release of the tool that can jailbreak and unlock iPhones through a graphical interface under both Mac OS X and Windows, has been released in an iPhone 1.1.4-compatible edition. This means that any iPhones with any firmware version — including those that shipped with 1.1.4 out-of-the-box (OTB) can be jailbroken and [...]

Despite its quirky interface, the venerable tool Mac OS X utility iFuntastic [70MB download] offers some great tools for customizing and manipulating jailbroken (full read/write access to the filesystem enabled) iPhones. With a new release — version 5.0 — the tool adds a few noteworthy new functions:

can copy all files from the iPhone to a [...]

Surprisingly, iPhone software/firmware update 1.1.4 can still be jailbroken — for the use of unofficial third-party applications — via some currently available methods, including ZiPhone (for full instructions, see this page). Previous software/firmware updates from Apple have broken jailbreak methods. (the tool “iJailbreak” does not work with 1.1.4)

After jailbreaking, the iPhone should be restarted once [...]

If you’re willing to void your iPhone’s warranty and risk serious, irreparable damage to the unit, you can undercut Apple’s price of a replacement battery by more than $60. USB Fever is now selling a replacement battery for the iPhone, with an accompanying toolset and installation instructions, for $25. Though the product selling page doesn’t [...]

The iPhone can playback H.264 video at throughput rates up to 2.5 Mbps, 640 by 480 pixels, 30 frames per second, Baseline Profile up to Level 3.0 with AAC-LC audio up to 160 Kbps, 48kHz, stereo audio in .m4v, .mp4, and .mov file formats. This means that videos in other formats — including AVI — [...]

HandBrake, a free Mac OS X/Windows utility for ripping videos from DVDs and saving them in various formats — including MP4 files that are playable by the iPhone/iPod Touch — has been updated to include the ability to generate iPhone-compatible anamorphic video at its full size. As such, we’ve put together a quick guide for [...]

We recently reported that attaching a small piece of scotch tape to the outer side of the iPhone’s SIM card (the side that does not have metal contacts) or the inside of the SIM slot (again, on the contact-less side) can provide a surprisingly dramatic boost in signal strength. Despite the naysayers, several readers have [...]