Wired How-to has a few good pointers on how to ensure you squeeze as much juice out of your iPhone battery when the charger is no where in sight. Also mentioned were some battery usage myths which you might have heard before, debunked.

Watch it here in Youtube.

Fancy tweeting the text you find on most app on the Mac with just ONE step? Simple. Find out how after the jump. Read more →

iOS4 will be available soon in the next few hours. While we wait for it to be ready, there are a few things you can do to get yourself prepared.

is your iOS device suitable for iOS4?

• Only iPhone 3GS and iPod touch 3G will be able to experience all the features of iOS4.
• iPhone 3G and iPod touch 2G will only have a subset of features while the original iPhone and iPod touch won’t be supported
• If you have jailbreak your iPhone, do refer back to the sites you got your jailbreak software to see if there are any updates before you upgrade to iOS4. Apple won’t support any issues from upgrading if it was done with a jailbreak phone.
• Alternative is to restore your iPhone to the original OS and update to iOS4, while waiting for the jailbreak software to be available.

Get iTunes 9.2

iOS4 requires you to use iTunes 9.2 to sync – so run Software Update on your Mac/PC or download from Apple and update your iTunes.

Update your iPhone apps

Developers have been advised to submit iOS4-ready apps and updates are streaming into your iTunes App Store. So download them while you wait for iOS4.

Backup, Backup and Backup

This is one step that thankfully is automatically executed whenever you sync your iOS device. Prior to updating, sync and do a backup of all your data on the iPhone. Just in case, bookmark this Apple Support Document on Backups and find out what is backup-ed, where is the back up and most importantly, how to restore your back ups.

Last but not least…be patient

When the iOS4 is released into the wild tonight, there will be lots, and I mean, LOTS of people who will be pinging their iTunes to download the OS. So there will be delays, drop connections and probably errors if the file wasn’t downloaded properly.

You don’t need to have it on day one, but if you do – be patient.

Here’s a quick tip on how you can save space on your iPhone with iTunes version 9.1 or later.

When you perform a sync of your iPhone to your Mac or PC, look at the first tab of iTunes and you should see this on the lower half of the screen.

Select the 3rd checkbox that says “Convert higher bit rate songs to 128 kbps AAC“. When you next hit sync, iTunes will convert songs of a higher bit rate to 128 kbps AAC format on-the fly and dumps it into your iPhone. Your mileage may vary depending on how many higher bit rate songs you have in your iPhone. It worked very well for me, giving me back about 7.58 GB worth of space for more songs.

Caveat Emptor:

• If you have a lot of songs, you might want to leave the conversion and sync it overnight, like I did.
• Plus if you have a Genius playlist or Smart playlist that constantly changes the songs in there, remember the time it will take for these new songs to be converted as well!
• For the audiophiles, the loss of bitrate will cause loss of quality – but probably 80% of the iPhone users ain’t audiophiles and won’t notice the difference, like me.

Update: For those whom like me had updated iTunes to 9.1.1 once it was released, and had tried this setting, you might find that your iPhone constantly re-save some songs during sync, lengthening your sync time. It is possibly due to a bug in an earlier release. To fix it, just go to Apple’s iTune page to download manually and install over the existing iTunes – it should be fixed.

With M1 and Starhub launching their iPhone soon, Apple has push their carrier settings for these two Telcos via iTunes and you should be able to start tethering without having to jailbreak. (7 Dec)

Check out the updated configuration instructions that will sort the tethering issue for Starhub and M1 users here

Internet Tethering is a new feature with OS 3.0 that allows you to share your Internet connection from your iPhone via 3G, to your laptop, either with USB or Bluetooth connection.

For Starhub and M1 users, you will first need to install a mobile configuration file that you can download from this site http://www.iphone-notes.de/mobileconfig/.

Make sure you choose the correct Carrier (Starhub or M1) and key in an email address which you can access via your iPhone.

Once that is done, when you receive the email with the configuration in an attachment, click on the attachment and click Install. Click OK and Done when the option is available during the installation process.

Next, restart your iPhone – press and hold the Sleep/Wake button at the top of your iPhone and slide your finger across the slider to switch off the iPhone, then switch it ON again.

Check the Tethering Settings when you access Settings-> General-> Networking as seen in the image on the side.

To learn how to use your iPhone as a modem, read this Apple document on doing that.

(infomation via HWZ and Tim Chong)

Update – seems like for Starhub, its either MMS or Tethering and not both — together (see user feedback at HWZ). Will update the page when a better solution is found

Update 2 – for those who had problems with the settings from the previous site – try surfing with Mobile Safari on your iPhone to help.BenM.at/help.php and install via Safari. Next, change your Cellular Data settings from shmms to shwapint, user and password left blank. Reboot and try. Tested by mambo31 at HWZ.

Disclaimer – I am not able to test as I still don’t own an iPhone (point fingers and toes at StarHub).