16 Things You Didn’t Know Your New iPhone Could Do

Take advantage of all the (literally) bigger and better features right at your fingertips.

Chris Ritter

01. It charges faster with an iPad charger than the charger that comes with it.

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Your mileage may vary, but people are reporting a full charge in 2 hours with an iPad charger.

02. About to die? You can conserve battery life by putting your phone in grayscale mode.

03. You can actually see which apps are draining your battery now.

Peggy Wang

Just go to your Settings > General > Usage > Battery Usage. Kill off whatever dumb thing that’s eating up all that battery life.

04. You can now take and send audio and video that self-destruct in two minutes via iMessage by holding down the camera or microphone icons.

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A little circular menu will pop up, letting you record your message, so you can send a snippet from the Kanye concert that your friend is having supreme FOMO about.

Warning: Just make sure you don’t send an accidental selfie with this feature. IT HAPPENED TO ME.

05. For small hands: tap the home button twice to make the top row of apps easier to reach with one hand.

A larger iPhone means it’s harder to get a good handle on it, so get used to double-tapping.

06. Create “shortcuts” that look like apps for websites you visit often.

Peggy Wang

Click on the “share” icon (square with an arrow pointing up) to access this menu from Safari.

07. Drag down on an iMessage notification instead of tapping it — you can reply right then and there.

Peggy Wang

If you get alerts instead of banners, you can also quick-reply to a text by hitting the “reply” button — no need to go back into the Messages app.

08. Access Siri hands-free (which is great for driving).

Peggy Wang

Enable the “Hey Siri” setting, which allows you to access Siri by voice, rather than by holding down the “home” button.

09. Accidentally closed a tab in Safari? Get it back by accessing “Recently Closed Tabs.”

10. You can access emergency medical information from the passcode screen.

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From the passcode screen, tap “Emergency” and then “*Medical ID” to access.

You’ll have to set up your medical profile first by going to the new Health app and tapping the “Medical ID” link in the lower righthand corner. Add pertinent information like blood type and allergies.

11. Quickly send another iMessage user your exact location.

Peggy Wang

Just hit the “Details” link in the upper righthand corner of your message. It’s at least two steps less than dropping and sending a pin.

12. You can now hide photos to keep them from showing up in your photo stream.

Peggy Wang

13. The Health app tracks all of your motion, including flights climbed, and easily syncs up with popular fitness apps like MyFitnessPal.

Peggy Wang

On the iPhone 6, the battery is 50% more efficient, which means that this kind of constant motion tracking will NOT drain your battery the way it would on your 5s.

14. Swap out your default search engine in Safari to DuckDuckGo, a crowd-funded search engine that doesn’t track your data or clutter up your results with sponsored ads.

If you’re paranoid like that.

15. Attention online shoppers: you can now quickly scan your credit card in Safari when you’re ready to check out.

Peggy Wang

The physical act of typing out 16 digit numbers is not long for this world.

16. In the Camera app, hold on the “photo” button to go into burst mode. It’ll take a bunch of photos at once — perfect for capturing fidgety kids and spazzy pets.

Peggy Wang

Once you’ve taken a series of photos using burst mode, go into the photo roll. Choose the photo stack and hit “select” to pick the ones you actually want to keep.

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