Tips

With the iPhone's beautiful and vibrant LCD, the last thing anyone wants to do is risk damaging or negatively affecting it. One of the most typical problems with LCD screens on mobile phones, smartphones, and PDAs is dust and dirt getting behind the screen. In many cases, what users identify as dead pixels is actually dust or dirt.

If you're like us, with the iPhone's two big, wide-open inputs, you might be feeling a little paranoid about dust and dirt getting inside the iPhone itself. If you carry your iPhone in your pocket, chances are every time you pull it out you'll find a bit of dust or pocket lint lingering in the dock connector. More worrisome, perhaps, is the headphone jack. When the LCD screen is illuminated, it's easy to see just how far down inside the iPhone offending particles can travel via the headphone jack.

The good news is that there's a neat and tidy solution to the problem - well, at least part of it. For usually less than $5, you can pick up a rubber dummy plug that protects the dock connector from unwanted particles when in your pocket, a purse, or wherever.

Though it is often sufficient in Safari, Google Maps, etc, to double-tap in order to zoom in and out - often you need to be able to control your zooming more accurately.

The instructed method of accomplishing such is to use the two fingered "pinch" motion. Pinching your fingers together zooms the display out, while pulling your pinched fingers apart zooms the display in. We've found that this motion can often be a little clumsy, especially for those of us with iPhones that are protected by screen protectors and/or cases.

Those of you who don't have your finger on the pulse of the internet at all times might not yet have heard of Seeqpod. Seeqpod a search engine that returns playable results. For the most part, this means MP3s. This might not sound exciting at first, but once you've taken more than a few seconds to visit Seeqpod, you'll realize just how monumental this is.

A bit ago, we reported on a trick that came out of David Pogue's iPhone "missing manual" that clued us all in on a much quicker way to add single strokes of punctuation while typing on the iPhone keyboard.

This may have already been a source of frustration for many of you. One of the frustrating things about the iPhone's touch-screen keyboard is the need to switch to a separate keyboard screen to type a period, comma, question mark or other punctuation. Well, consider that a thing of the past, thanks to David Pogue's Missing Manual.