iPhone: The Missing Manual, 3rd Edition

If you have a new iPhone 3GS, or just updated your 3G with iPhone 3.0, iPhone 3.0: The Missing Manual will bring you up to speed quickly. New York Times tech columnist David Pogue gives you a guided tour of every feature, with lots of tips, tricks, and surprises. You'll learn how to make calls and play songs by voice control, take great photos, keep track of your schedule, and more. This entertaining book offers complete step-by-step instructions for doing everything from setting up and accessorizing your iPhone to troubleshooting. If you want to learn how iPhone 3.0 lets you search your phone, cut, copy, and paste, and lots more, this full-color book is the best, most objective resource available.

• Use it as a phone -- save time with things like Visual Voicemail, contact searching, and more
  
• Treat it as an iPod -- listen to music, upload and view photos, and fill the iPhone with TV shows and movies
  
• Take the iPhone online -- get online, browse the Web, read and compose email in landscape, send photos, contacts, audio files, and more
  
• Go beyond the iPhone -- use iPhone with iTunes, sync it with your calendar, and learn about the App Store, where you can select from thousands of iPhone apps

Unlock the full potential of your iPhone with the book that should have been in the box.

The new iPhone 3GS and iPhone 3.0 software have arrived, and New York Times tech columnist David Pogue is on top of it with a thoroughly updated edition of iPhone: The Missing Manual. Each custom-designed page helps you use your iPhone for everything from web browsing to watching videos. The iPhone is packed with possibilities, and with this handy book, you can explore them all.

iPhone 3GS Picture-Taking Goodies
by David Pogue

If you have an iPhone 3GS, then you’re in for some extra camera goodness. See the white box in the center of the screen? That’s telling you where the iPhone thinks the most important part of the photo is. That’s where it will focus; that’s what it examines to calculate the overall brightness of the photo (exposure); and that’s the portion that will determine the overall white balance of the scene (that is, the color cast).

But often, dead-center is not the most important part of the photo. The cool thing is that you can tap somewhere else in the scene to move that white square—to make the camera recalculate the focus, exposure, and white balance.

Here’s when you might want to do this tapping: 1) When the whole image looks too dark or too bright. If you tap a dark part of the scene, you’ll see the whole photo brighten up; if you tap a bright part, the whole photo will darken a bit. You’re telling the camera, “Redo your calculations so this part has the best exposure; I don’t really care if the rest of the picture gets brighter or darker.” 2) When the scene has a color cast. If the photo looks, for example, a little bluish or yellowish, tap a different spot in the scene—the one you care most about. The iPhone recomputes its assessment of the white balance. 3) When you’re in macro mode. If the foreground object is very close to the lens—4 to 8 inches away—the iPhone automatically goes into macro (super closeup) mode. In this mode, you can do something really cool: You can defocus the background. The background goes soft, slightly blurry, just like the professional photos you see in magazines. Just make sure you tap the foreground object.