The phone

A key feature of the iPhone, as its name would suggest, is a highly graphical mobile phone that makes excellent use of the 3.5in high-resolution touchscreen display to give you a great deal of control over your incoming and outgoing calls.

The Phone features sit behind the green Phone icon on the toolbar at the bottom of the Home screen, which also gives you access to your contacts and voicemail . Network coverage, meanwhile, is indicated by a signal strength diagram at the top of the screen that shows your service provider name and a ramped graph of five strength bars to indicate the quality of the signal you are receiving.

Placing a call

The quickest and easiest way to make a call is to tap Contacts or Favorites on the bar at the bottom of the Phone application, and choose a name

from your contact list. However, you can also repeat recent calls or return missed incoming numbers by selecting from the list stored behind the Recents icon, or dial a number from scratch using the keypad (left). If you decide to opt for the keypad, you can employ a certain amount of automation by inserting pauses in the dialled number, by pressing the # key once for each pause required.

Once your call is connected and the iPhone is pressed to your ear, the screen's touch-sensitive surface will be disabled to avoid any accidental button pressing by your cheek or ear. However, removing it from your ear will give you access to a range of call-management features, which you can access through a large semi-transparent interface. This gives you one-click access to muting or placing the call on hold, adding the other party to your contacts list, entering tones using the keypad or simultaneously dialling another number so you can set up a conference call.

Conference calling

Tapping the Add Call button will place any existing callers on hold so you can add a second or third call. Choose your additional correspondent from your contacts list, or dial using the keypad, and you will be able to talk to them before 'merging' the calls so that all parties can conference together. Be aware, however, that even if the original call was incoming, and so would not be billed to you, any additional calls you make to invoke a confcrcncc call will incur charges on your own bill.

Visual voicemail

If you miss or decline an incoming call, the iPhone will take a message, like all well-behaved mobile phones. However, where it differs from regular phones is the way it then lets you manage stored messages.

iPhone introduced the idea of visual voicemail, which works in a similar way to text messages, in that you can sec details of all received messages and then listen to them in whichever order you choose. This is a network-dependent feature and users of hacked iPhones running on non-authorised networks will not be able to use this feature.

If you have not yet set up your voicemail, you will be asked for a password and prompted to record an outgoing message the first time you tap the Voicemail button. Not everyone likes the sound of their own voice, so there is an option of a default message provided by the network, but some callers do consider network messages rather impersonal. Once you have been through this short setup process, the Phone logo on the iPhone Home screen and the Voicemail logo on the Phone application interface will both show the number of stored messages.

Opening the Voicemail features of the Phone application draws down a list of waiting messages from the network provider's server, tagging each one with the caller's name if they appear in your contacts list.

Tap each message to download it to your iPhone, at which point it will start to play. You can control the message using the play and pause buttons, or by dragging the progress slider to skip forwards and backwards through boring sections to reach important information. Messages are stored on the server for 30 days from the time they arc first listened to, at which point they are erased.

Managing your messages

Various control buttons give you further control over the message, with a speaker button at the top that sends it to the iPhone's internal speaker rather than any connected headphones, a red Delete button erasing it from the phone, and a green Call Back button for returning the caller's call.

Deleted messages arc not gone for good, however, as they arc simply moved to the bottom of the call list, allowing you to listen to them again at a later point.

Sometimes you will receive calls from numbers that arc not yet in your contacts list. If you would like to add the caller as a contact, tap the blue circle to the right of each one and select Create New Contact. You will be taken to the contacts application, at which point you can fill in the remaining details. On other occasions an existing contact will call from a number you don't already have in your records, at which point you can tap the same button and instead select Add To Existing Contact.