Home Button

Here it is: the one and only button on the front of this phone. Push it to summon the Home screen, which is your gateway to everything the iPhone can do.

 Having a Home button is a wonderful thing. It means you can never get lost. No matter how deeply you burrow into the iPhone software, no matter how far off track you find yourself, one push of the Home button takes you back to the beginning.

It sounds simple, but remember that the iPhone doesn’t have an actual Back button or an End button. The Home button is the only way out of some screens.

As time goes on, Apple keeps saddling the Home button with more and more functions. It’s become Apple’s only way to provide shortcuts for common features; that’s what you get when you design a phone that only has one button. In iPhone Land, you can press the Home button one, two, or three times for different functions—or even hold it down. Here’s the rundown.

Quick Press: Wake Up 

Pressing the Home button once wakes the phone if it’s in locked mode. That’s sometimes easier than finding the Sleep switch on the top edge. It gives you a quick glance at your missed calls and texts—or the time and date. 

Long Press: Siri (or Voice Control) 

If you hold down the Home button for about 3 seconds, you make the phone ready for voice control. If you have an iPhone 3GS or 4, you can use voice control to dial by speaking a name or a number, or use it to control music playback. If you have an iPhone 4S or 5, you can do a thousand times more: You can command Siri, your virtual voice-controlled assistant.

Two Quick Presses: Task Switcher

If, once the phone is awake, you press the Home button twice quickly, the screen dims, and the current image on it slides upward—to reveal the task switcher strip at the bottom. This feature is the key to the iPhone’s multitasking feature. What you see here are icons of the four programs you’ve used most recently. Each time you swipe your finger to the left, you bring more icons into view, representing programs you opened less and less recently.

The point is that with a single tap, you can jump right back into a program you had open, without waiting for it to start up, show its welcome screen, and so on—and without having to scroll through 11 Home screens trying to find the icon of a favorite app. 

In short, the task switcher gives you a way to jump directly to another app, without a layover at the Home screen first. 

Two Quick Presses, Part 2: The Widget Bar

Most of the time, you’ll do the two-presses thing to open the task switcher so you can, well, switch tasks. But there are hidden gems awaiting. If you summon the task switcher and then drag your finger to the right, the task switcher reveals a set of four hidden controls. These go by the name of  widgets, meaning that they’re not quite as full blown as actual apps, but they still get their own icons. Here’s what they do, from left to right: 

•Rotation lock. 

When you tap this button, the screen no longer rotates when you turn the phone 90 degrees. The idea is that sometimes, like when you’re reading an ebook on your side in bed, you don’t want the screen picture to turn; you want it to stay upright relative to your eyes, even though you’re lying down. (A little m icon appears at the top of the screen to remind you why the usual rotating isn’t happening.) The whole thing isn’t quite as earth-shattering as it sounds—first, be- cause it locks the image in only one way: upright, in portrait orientation. You can’t make it lock into widescreen mode. Furthermore, there aren’t that many apps that rotate with the phone to begin with. But when that day comes when you want to read in bed on your side with your head on the pillow, your iPhone will be ready. (Tap the button a second time to turn rotating back on.) 

•«, ÷, ». 

These controls govern playback in whatever program is play- ing music in the background. They’re always two Home-button presses away, no matter what program you’re in. You can skip a horrible song quickly and efficiently without having to interrupt what you’re doing. 

•Music-app button. 

The app icon here represents your iPhone’s iPod app, or the Pandora Internet radio app, or the Spotify app, or whatever program is playing music in the background at the moment. Once again, the idea is to give you a quick shortcut when you want to switch albums, songs, or podcasts, so you don’t have to meander back to the Home screen. 

•Volume slider and AirPlay control. 

New in iOS 6: If you swipe again to the right from the music-playback controls, you reveal a volume slider and a button that lets you switch playback to a wireless speaker or Apple TV, courtesy of AirPlay 

Three Presses: VoiceOver, Zoom, White on Black…

In Settings>General>Accessibility, you can set up a triple-press of the Home button to turn one of several accessibility features on or off: VoiceOver (the phone speaks whatever you touch), Invert Colors (white-on-black type, which is sometimes easier to see), Zoom (magnifies the screen), AssistiveTouch (help for people who have trouble with physical switches) or Guided Access (aka kiosk mode).