The Lock Screen

To wake the phone when it’s locked, press either the Sleep switch or the Home button just below the screen. That gesture alone doesn’t fire up the full iPhone world, though. Instead, it presents the Lock screen shown here. From here, slide your finger to the right across the gray arrow, as indicated by the animation, to unlock the phone, wake it up, and start using it.

These days, the Lock screen is more than just a big Do Not Disturb sign. It’s a veritable bulletin board for up-to-date information about your life—information you can scan without unlocking the phone at all. 

For starters, you can use the iPhone as a watch—millions of people do. Just tap the Sleep switch to consult the Lock screen’s time and date display, and then shove the phone right back into your pocket. The iPhone relocks after a few seconds. 

If you’re driving, using the Maps app to guide you, the Lock screen shows the standard navigation screen . Handy, really—the less fumbling you have to do while driving, the safer you are. Better yet, the Lock screen is a handy status screen. Here you see a record of everything that happened while you weren’t paying attention. It’s a list of missed calls, text messages received, notifications from your apps, and other essential information. 

Now, each of these notices has come from a different app (software program). To call somebody back, for example, you’d want to open the Phone app; to reply to a text message, you’d want the Messages app, and so on. 

Here, then, is a handy shortcut: You can dive directly into the relevant app by swiping your finger across the notification itself, like this:

Adopting that shortcut saves you the trouble of unlocking the phone, fum- bling through your Home screens until you find the app you want, and tap- ping it to open it.

NOTE: On the other hand, if you’d rather not have all these details show up on the Lock screen, you can turn them off. (Privacy is the main reason you might want to do so—remember that the bad guys don’t need a password to view your Lock screen. They just have to tap the Sleep switch or the Home button.)

You can hide these items from your Lock screen on an app-by-app basis. For example, you might want missed calls to show up here but not missed text messages. To set this up, choose SettingsÆNotifications. Tap the app in question; scroll to the bottom, and then turn off View in Lock Screen.