Paula Bostrom

Author Details

Paula Bostrom's picture

Author Details

Paula Bostrom

Paula is a freelance media broadcaster and journalist. She enjoys life at home with her husband, two kids, two dogs, two cats and a parrot. Her iPhone is never more than two feet away from her and she can't imagine life without it.

In iOS 10, there are now two ways Siri makes app suggestions on the Lock screen. The first is the Siri app suggestions that appear in the Widget pane. The second are the time and location-based app suggestions that appear in the lower left corner of the Lock screen in the same place app icons appear when you’re using Handoff. If you don’t appreciate this feature, it’s easy to turn off app suggestions.

A while back, Apple added more racial diversity to the faces on its emoji keyboard. While none of the emoticons or family groups offer options for different skin tones, the single human characters and body parts (hands, noses, etc.) all come with the diversity options. At this point, we’ve all seen Apple keyboard emojis in all their diversity, but not everyone knows how to use or change what emoji they select. Here’s how to use the diverse emoji keyboard on iPhone or iPad.

If you want to buy an iTunes or Apple gift card for a friend, you can easily do so right from your iPhone. Sending an iTunes gift card is a great gift because it can be used in iTunes, the App Store, Mac App Store, or iBooks so long as the recipient is logged in to each with the same Apple ID. This means the iTunes gift card you buy and send can pay for not only their music but any monthly app subscriptions or best selling novels they’ve had their eye on. If you’re not sure how to send that iTunes gift card, no worries, we’ll go over the whole process below. Here’s how to send an iTunes or Apple gift card from your iPhone.

I have several hours of commute time every week, and I don’t always have my iPhone’s Bluetooth headset with me. The last thing I want to do while going 55 on the highway is fidget around in Contacts looking for the person I need to call. Luckily, you can use Siri to make speakerphone calls whenever you need to keep your hands free. Here’s how to make speakerphone calls using Siri.

I don't know about you, but if I don't write down my appointments and activities, I'm sure to lose them in a deep, dark corner of my mind. To say I'm merely forgetful is an understatement. The Reminders app allows me to set reminders on iPhone based on the time, day, or location. For example, my iPhone can remind me to pick up some milk on the way home from work using the phone's GPS. If you use iCloud, your reminders can also be synced among all your devices. Here's how to set a reminder on iPhone X and earlier iPhones. We'll also cover how to set an alarm or due date reminder, how to add a location-based alert, and how to get reminders to pop up on your iPhone so you don't miss them.

The placement of app icons on your iPhone’s Home screen can make life simple or hard. OK, maybe that’s a bit of an overstatement, but app icon placement is important to those of us who crave organization. You can choose to organize your apps using your iPhone, but you may find it more efficient to do so using iTunes, since you can do things like reorder Home screen pages and sort apps according to your preferred criteria.

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