iPhone Life - Best Apps, Top Tips, Great Gear

It's hard to earn a five star review from me, especially for something as mundane as a charging hub. But the Nomad USB Charging Hub (starting at $39.95) does the job of a hub, and hides the cables inside to prevent accidental disconnection and look good at the same time. Speaking of cables, Nomad has some of the most rugged cables you can buy, so when you're on the go, you can take Nomad quality with you.

ATTENTION: Our photo contest has recently undergone a few changes, so be sure to read our new rules carefully.

It's photo contest time again. We know you enjoy taking the occasional artistic shot with your iPhone, so why not get rewarded for it? Enter our iPhone Photography Contest on Instagram for a chance to win an Olloclip lens and a spot in our magazine! 

So you want to know how to hide photos on your iPhone, eh? Well the iPhone doesn’t really allow you to create a private photo album even though your photos are techincally hidden. Hiding picture on your iPhone within the Photos app has some big loopholes that makes it easy for someone to find the photos you mean to keep private. Which is why we’ll go over how to hide photos with the built-in 'private' photo album, yes, but also how to lock photos away on iPhone so that they are hidden behind a passcode. We consider this the way to really, truly hide photos on iPhone. But for even more security, you can also use an app to hide photos in a secret photo album on iPhone. Here’s how to hide photos on iPhone by creating a locked photo album.

I use the Reminders app on my iPhone quite a bit. I’ll create a reminder to pick up my dry cleaning, to buy my cousin a birthday present, or to pay a bill. When I create Reminders, I usually set them to remind me on a certain day, at a certain time. But if I need to make a change to one reminder among many, manually shuffling through them is a pain. For example, I made a Reminder to “pay a fee for the school trip” my son was going on. I forgot what the fee amount was and needed the information before the due date. Instead of tapping each folder and scrolling through them to find it, I simply accessed the Reminders search field. Here’s how to search for a particular reminder on iPhone.

These five to-list apps and task management apps are fairly simple, contain a sleek interface, and most importantly, keep you organized. Say goodbye to forgetting to write important tasks down and having to remember the paper list on the counter. The following to-do list apps can help you keep up with your everyday life while keeping the process as simple (or detailed) as you like and as personalized as you desire. Also, they all have free versions with the option to pay for premium with an in-app purchase. Give one (or all) a try and comment below on how it goes.

Let’s say you’re listening to music using your fantastic Bluetooth speaker and you get a call. When you answer that call, it will probably default to your iPhone. But what if you want the call to automatically default to you speaker? Or your headphones? You can choose where your call audio defaults to in your settings on iPhone. Here’s how to set your speaker or headphones as the default audio on iPhone.

There are a number of docks out there for Apple's new USB-C/Thunderbolt-3 devices but they tend to be either bulky and expensive or small and portable but incomplete. The Symbus ($124.95) from Moshi is a good alternative that fits nicely in the middle.

There is a big difference between deleting and disabling your Instagram account. If you want to delete your Instagram account, it’s actually quite easy to do. But when you delete Instagram, that account is gone forever. If you just want to take a break or see how it would feel to delete Instagram, you also have the option to deactivate your Instagram, which is also known as temporarily disabling your Instagram account. When you deactivate your Instagram, you always have the option of re-activating your Instagram account in the future. However, if you’re certain you want to permanently delete your account, we’ll show you how to ditch Instagram completely. Here’s how to delete an Instagram account, or just temporarily disable it via deactivation.

We do a lot of screen recording at iPhone Life for our Insider program. Before iOS 11, learning how to record your iPhone screen meant either finding a screen capture app or plugging your iPhone into a computer with a software that can screen record, which we’ll go over how to do below. But with iOS 11 on iPhone, you can record your screen with nothing more than the built-in function. There are many instances in which you might need or want to record an iPhone screen. There are plenty of iPhone screen recorders on the market if you don’t mind spending some money. But we’ll cover your free options here. Whether you have iOS 11 or iOS 10 & earlier, here’s how to record your screen on iPhone.