Take Inventory of Preinstalled Apps
The iPhone comes with certain functionality and applications — or apps, for short — built in. When you look at the Home screen, you see icons for each app. This task gives you an overview of what each app does.
By default, the following icons appear in the Dock at the bottom of every Home screen (refer to Figure 3-1), from left to right:
Phone: Use this app to make and receive phone calls, view a log of recent calls, create a list of favorite contacts, access your voice mail, and view contacts.
Safari: You use the Safari web browser to navigate on the Internet, create and save bookmarks of favorite sites, and add web clips to your Home screen so that you can quickly visit favorite sites from there. You may have used this web browser (or another, such as Google Chrome) on your desktop computer.
Messages: If you love to instant message, the Messages app comes to the rescue. The Messages app has been in iPhone for quite some time. Now you can engage in live text- and image-based conversations with others on their phones or other devices that use email. You can also send video or audio messages.
Music: Music is the name of your media player. Though its main function is to play music, you can use it to play audio podcasts and audiobooks as well.
Apps with icons above the Dock on the Home screen include
FaceTime: Use FaceTime to place phone calls using video of the sender and receiver to have a more personal conversation.
Calendar: Use this handy onscreen daybook to set up appointments and send alerts to remind you about them.
Photos: The Photos app in iPhone helps you organize pictures in folders, send photos in email, use a photo as your iPhone wallpaper, and assign pictures to contact records. You can also run slideshows of your photos, open albums, pinch or unpinch to shrink or expand photos, and scroll photos with a simple swipe.Your iPhone can use the Photo Sharing feature to share photos among your friends. Photos displays images by collections, including Years and Moments.
Camera: As you may have read earlier in this chapter, the Camera app is Control Center for the still and video cameras built into the iPhone.
Mail: You use this application to access email accounts that you have set up in iPhone. Your email is then displayed without you having to browse to the site or sign in. You can use tools to move among a few preset mail folders, read and reply to email, and download attached photos to your iPhone. Read more about email accounts in Chapter 13.
Clock: This app allows you to display clocks from around the world, set alarms, and use timer and stopwatch features.
Maps: With this iPhone mapping app, you can view classic maps or aerial views of addresses and find directions from one place to another whether traveling by car, bicycle, foot, or public transportation. You can even get your directions read aloud by a spoken narration feature.
Weather: Get the latest weather for your location and others instantly with this handy app. You can easily add other locations to check for weather where you’re going or where you’ve been.
Reminders: This useful app centralizes all your calendar entries and alerts to keep you on schedule and allows you to create to-do lists.
Notes: Enter text, format text, or cut and paste text and objects (such as images) from a website into this simple notepad app.
Stocks: Keep track of the stock market, including stocks that you personally follow, in real time.
News: News is a customizable aggregator for stories from your favorite news sources.
Books: The Books app is bundled with the iPhone out of the box. Because the iPhone has been touted as being a good small screen e-reader — a device that enables you to read books on an electronic device, similar to the Amazon Kindle Fire HD — you should definitely check this one out. (To work with the Books e-reader app itself, check out Chapter 17.)
App Store: Here you can buy and download applications that do everything from enabling you to play games to building business presentations. Many of these apps and games are free!
Podcasts: Before iOS 8, you had to download the free Podcast app, but now it’s built into your iOS iPhone. Use this app to listen to recorded informational programs. Chapter 18 provides the scoop on using the Podcasts app.
TV: This media player is similar to Music but specializes in playing videos and offers a few features specific to this type of media, such as chapter breakdowns and information about a movie’s plot and cast.
Health: This is an exciting very useful app that you can use to record various health and exercise statistics and even send them to your doctor. See Chapter 24 for details.
Home: Home helps you control most (if not all) of your home automation devices in one convenient app. See Chapter 25 for more information.
Wallet: This Apple Pay feature lets you store a virtual wallet of plane or concert tickets, coupons, and more and use them with a swipe of your iPhone across a point of purchase device.
Settings: Settings is the central location on the iPhone where you can specify settings for various functions and do administrative tasks, such as set up email accounts or create a password.
There are also some preinstalled apps located on the second Home screen by default, including some in a Utilities folder. Wrapped up in the Utilities folder are some other handy tools: Compass, Calculator, Measure, Magnifier, and Voice Memos.
Additionally, on the second Home screen, you’ll find
Files: This app allows you to browse files that are stored not only on your iPhone but also files you may have stored on other services, such as iCloud Drive, Google Drive, Dropbox, and the like.
Find My: The Find My app combines the Find iPhone and Find Friends apps to help you locate Apple devices that you own (see Chapter 25 for more info) and track down friends who also own an Apple device.
Shortcuts: This new app helps you string together multiple iPhone actions into single Siri commands.
iTunes Store: Tapping this icon takes you to the iTunes Store, where you can shop ’til you drop (or until your iPhone battery runs out of juice) for music, movies, TV shows, and audiobooks and then download them directly to your iPhone. (See Chapter 16 for more about how the iTunes Store works.)
Translate: New to iOS 14, Translate does what its name says: translates text or voice between supported languages. See Chapter
