Syncing will safeguard the following data:

• Music
• Videos
• Photos
• Contacts
• Calendar
• Bookmarks
• Settings (mail account settings, device settings, etc.)

Backups, on the Other Hand, will safeguard the following data:

• Text messages
• Notes from the notes application
• Locations from the maps application
• Call history
• Contact favorites
• Cookies
• Settings (sound, widget, network)
• Photos (Yes, they get backed up and synced)
• And most importantly it will store the data of third party apps!

You see, there is a big difference as regards which data gets transferred between your mobile device and your stationary computer. You should always do both backups and synchronizations.

When you want to protect your data from being lost, there are only a few important things you need adhere to:

1. Learn how to backup your iPhone or iPod touch
2. Learn how to restore your valuable data
3. Backup your data regularly

How to backup your iPhone or iPod touch

Backing up your data is easy. Just connect your iPhone to your desktop computer. Depending on your settings, the synchronization will start automatically or you need to start the synchronizationmanually by pressing the sync button on the Summary tab in iTunes. If you are using a laptop computer, remember to connect your laptop to the power supply as backups may take several minutes to complete with the iPhone software version 2.2. If you are using an older software version it can take considerably longer. You should configure iTunes to sync automatically when you connect your device. iTunes will backup your device only when you connect it to your computer regardless of how often you press the sync button in iTunes. If you want to enforce a new backup you must disconnect and reconnect your device. This will trigger a new backup.

Never disconnect your iPhone or iPod touch while it is backing up your device. If you do, you will have a corrupt backup.

You can see the created backups in iTunes > Preferences > Devices > Device backups. This is where you can delete older backups. The backup files have a file extension of .mdbackup. You can find these files in your home directory by following Library > Application Support > MobileSync > Backup. In Backup you will find different sub folders. For each of your devices there will be one. Beneath this directory you will see the actual backup files which have been created by iTunes. You can analyse these files by using the iPhone backup extractor as described below.

How to restore your data

In order to restore a backup you created earlier just connect your iPhone or iPod touch to your computer and press the restore button on the Summary tab in iTunes.

Though I have never tried it myself, it should also be possible to restore your iPhone backups to a different device. Naturally all data gets overwritten when you restore a backup. Therefore be extremely careful. 

The backup extractor

There is a supercrazyawesome tool available with which you can have a peek into the backup files iTunes creates. The backup extractor has just two buttons. The Read Backups button will look for backup files on your computer and lists all backup files it finds. When you select one backup file from the list in the main window and press the second button labeled Extract the extractor will ask for a directory where you want to save the extracted data.

In the listing of your backup files you will see one backup which is especially interesting. It is labeled Other Files. If you extract this one you will come across lots of familiar data. For example you will see a sqlite3 data base file, which contains your address book data. As far as I know it is not possible to alter any data and play it back onto your device. The author of the iPhone backup extractor is considering adding this functionality in the future. The backup extractor tool is donation ware. So, if you use it on a regular basis please support the author by making a donation.

Do backups regularly

With the new iPhone Software version 2.2, backups get created fairly quickly. Therefore, I advise you to configure iTunes to sync your device automatically each time you connect it to your computer.

This should be everything you need to know about securing your iPhone against data loss. Go ahead, start your backup now.

Should you still feel a desire for more information on making backups, please head over to the official Apple site and check out what Apple has to say about iPhone backups.

1. Protect your iPhone against unwanted access. Activate the Pin Pad under Settings > General > Passcode Lock. Also set the Auto-Lock to at least 5 minutes. This will lock the iPhone automatically after 5 minutes. You can also configure your iPhone in a way that will erase all data after 10 failed passcode attempts. I am not using this feature, because I am afraid that my 2 year old daughter will try to guess the code and will not achieve it under 10 attempts.
2. Ensure that you reveal your location only to those services you trust. Therefore deactivate location services by default. You can do this in Settings > General > Location Services. Yes, I am paranoid.
3. Configure your iPhone to ask for permission before connecting to wireless networks. Set Settings > Wi-Fi > Ask to Join Networks to on.
4. Whenever possible, use an SSL connection when you surf with mobile Safari. You can see that a connection is secure when mobile Safari is displaying a little lock in the address bar.
5. Whenever possible, use an SSL connection to retrieve your mail. Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendars > Your Account > Advanced > Use SSL is the right place to do it.
6. Under Settings > Safari you can control various security settings for mobile Safari. You can deactivate JavaScript, block pop-ups and reject or delete cookies.
7. Use a secure data store application to store confidential documents. There are several offers in the App Store.
8. Use a secure password store application to store passwords. There are several programs which will do the job. Look for applications which do use encryption.
9. Do backup your iPhone regularly through iTunes. Apple has written a short article on their support pages about backing up your data and applications.

This list is not complete. For example, you can configure a virtual private network to use with your iPhone. The headline says easy to follow steps; therefore, I will leave the VPN to another post. You can also set restrictions on various iPhone applications. I do not consider these to be essential, but encourage you to play around with these (Settings > General > Restrictions). Certainly there are even more tips and tricks regarding iPhone security. Let us know your best tips and tricks.

I hope you are already determined to take security seriously. If not, read this funny story. Funny, because the story came to a good end. Imagine this happening to you. A nightmare!

• Sleep/Wake button, on the top right of your iPhone
• Volume button, on the left side
• Mute switch, on the left side of the iPhone, just above the volume control
• Home button, on the front of your iPhone, just beneath the touch screen

The Sleep/Wake button lets you lock/unlock the iPhone respectively. Locking does not mean powering off though. It just turns off the touch screen. Any open application will continue to run. To power off the iPhone you need to press and hold the Sleep/Wake button for a few seconds, then drag the slider to the right side. To turn your iPhone on again just press the Sleep/Wake button for about two seconds.

The volume button controls the volume of the playback audio or the ring tone volume, depending on the context the button is used in.

The mute button mutes the external speaker. When the switch is down you can see a red dot on the switch indicating that the phone is muted. Before the introduction of the Software update 2.2 muting did not work properly. For example it was not possible to mute the sounds which came from the Koi Pond application or other third party apps. But it seems to be fixed in 2.2.

The Home button has several functions:

• Pressing and holding the Home button while you are on one of the Home screens lets you rearrange your application icons. The icons will start to wiggle. You then can rearrange the icons. You can also delete applications by pressing the x control on the top left corner of an icon. Press the Home button once more when you have finished rearranging and deleting.
• Pressing the Home button briefly while you are on one of the Home screens will bring you back to the first Home screen.
• Pressing and holding the Home button and the Sleep/Wake button will reboot your iPhone. When you hold the buttons for a few seconds a slider will appear on the screen. Drag it to the right to reboot your device.
• Pressing the Home button while an application is open will end that application.
• Pressing the Home button for about six seconds while an application is open will force quit the application. This is useful when an application is not responding anymore.
• Pressing the Home button twice quickly will bring you back to your first Home screen, open your favorite contacts list or, start the iPod application. You can choose which of these features you want to activate in Settings > General > Home button.
• Pressing the Home button twice while the iPhone is locked will launch the iPod widget, with which you can control the audio playback volume, start/stop the playback or, change the track.

Apple provides a user guide optimized for mobile Safari. There is a link in the bookmarks folder of mobile Safari, which points to help.apple.com/iphone.

That’s all folks. Have I missed a button feature? Let me know in the comments.

Yes, yet another todo application for the iPhone. Why bother? Honestly, I didn’t. I stumbled upon it in AppSniper and, since it was free, I downloaded it. What a stroke of luck! I’m using it for nearly two weeks now and I am more than pleased by the design and usability of this little productivity helper. It has all the features I want from a decent todo application.

• Detached todos
• Priorities for todos
• Search through the complete todo and project list
• Sorting of todo lists and projects. Can be activated by tilting the iPhone
• Quickly enter new todos by copying other entries
• Projects with separate todo lists, notes and contacts
• Automatic archiving of completed todos
• Different views on projects and todo lists with filtering for completed entries
• Sync with Google Calendar
• Nice built-in help

Personally, I do not need the syncing capabilities with Google Calendar, and I haven’t tried it. But it should be pretty straight forward. Just enter your credentials in the iPhone’s settings and tap the big sync button. Syncing seems to be an important feature for most iPhone users, therefore I added it to the list above. Most of you will be aware of the possibility of syncing your Google Calendar with desktop applications like Microsoft Outlook.

What is much more important to me than syncing is the start-up time and the possibility of quickly entering new todos. Also the search capabilities are important to get a quick status of my various projects. All these work perfectly in TouchTodo.

The possibility of organising your todos in projects is also a big plus of TouchTodo. I try to organize all of my todos in projects, since the most important thing for me is to bring my projects forward. I am not a big fan of the Getting Things Done method (GTD) as proposed by David Allen. For those of you following David Allen’s approach the Things application might be better suited, though I haven’t tried it yet.

TouchTodo is also a great complement to GoalKeep.

This application does exactly what its name implies. It works like a real baby phone. When your little one starts crying, BabyFon will call the number you have denoted in the settings. You can also define the sensitivity. This will prevent the application from causing a false alarm, when your baby just coughs or turns around in bed while sleeping.

In our homes we do have two sets of baby phones. One set is the best rated baby phone on Amazon, yet it does not work satisfactorily. Our dwelling is surrounded by other buildings which block the baby phone’s signal when we are farther away than 50 meters from our home. The excellent Italian restaurant is 200 meters away, though. No signal there. No such problem in the case of the iPhone with BabyFon running on it. Just start the application and lay the phone in the room where your baby sleeps. If your sweet little one starts to cry you will get a call immediately. You can listen and decide whether you need to rush home or can stay and enjoy your bruschette.

You need to make sure, however, that you divert incoming phone calls on the iPhone running BabyFon. An incoming call will interrupt BabyFon and you won’t get a call afterwards.

It not only is very nice looking, but has excellent game play too. You can choose from two different controls.

1. The touch control, where you steer your ship by holding and moving your finger on the touch screen. You can define an offset between the ship and your steering finger.
2. Accelerometer control, where you steer Platypus by tilting your iPhone in the direction you want to fly. You can adjust the angle and the sensitivity in the settings. I prefer this control as it is very well suited for this kind of game.

The sound track is a good fit for the game and, it reminds me of the good old Amiga games. When you are in the middle of a gaming session you can quit playing and pick up the game in a later session exactly where you left.

Here is what the makers of Platypus have to say:

Based on the cult Mac classic from Idigicon, Platypus is a fast, fun side-scrolling arcade shooter with a unique difference – every tree, cloud, ship, and enemy was created from modelling clay – so explosions don’t bang, they splat!

Defend peaceful Mungola from the invading Collosatropolans using only your trusty F-27 Platypus fighter plane. Shoot down the enemy ships, and collect fruit bonuses and a range of weapon power-ups to aid you in your quest!

Choose to control your Platypus using accelerometer-based tilt, or guide your ship with your finger across 4 massive clay areas each with several challenging levels.

And here is the video they made to promote their game. Though I think you might end up with the wrong impression looking at the video, the game looks much better when you see it on your device.

Since I generally write only about apps I like, I do not give ratings or stars. But, if I did, Platypus definitely would deserve a full five star rating. Well, I rate it with five stars in the App Store.

Total cuteness alert!

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Footnote: I know, I know, funnest is not a valid word; but it’s funny.

• You can answer an incoming call by pressing the headphone button once. Press it again if you want to hang up.
• While you are listening to music on your iPhone, you can press the headphone’s button once to pause the music. Press it once more to start the playback again.
• Use a double click to play the next track in your playlist.
• There is another interesting feature. If you want to jump back to the beginning of the current track, you need only to press the button three times in a row. If the playback is a few seconds in the track, the playback of the previous track will be started. This will need some practice though.
• Pressing the button while no music is playing, the iPhone will pick a random track and start the playback.
• Pulling out the headphone while you’re listening to your iPod, will stop the playback. When you start the playback again you will notice that the iPod is repeating the last two or three seconds. This is especially useful when listening to podcasts.

Here is a short list of the tips and tricks you might find useful when surfing the web with mobile Safari. Some of these weren’t that obvious to me, so I thought I should share them with you.

• Rotate the iPhone by 90 degrees to surf in landscape mode.
• Double tap on a column zooms that column in for better reading. Double tap anywhere on the screen to zoom out again.
• A tap on the status bar (where the carrier, time and, battery information is shown) propels you right to the top of the current web page. This actually works in some other applications as well.
• Tap and hold down the finger on a picture to save that picture into the camera roll of the Photo application.
• You can sync the bookmarks between mobile Safari and your Safari installation on your desktop computer.
• When you are entering URLs you can omit the www. part of the address.
• When entering URLs into the address field you can use the top level domain shortcut I described in The Advantages of a Virtual Keyboard.
• A little lock icon on the left of the address bar shows you whether you are using a secure https connection. This is useful, because normally you will not see the scheme name (http, https, etc.) of the URL.
• Sometimes you want to see where a URL is pointing to before opening it. Tap and hold down the finger on the URL for a second. A little bubble will show you the link’s name and destination.

That’s all that comes to my mind when I think about how to best use mobile Safari. Have I forgotten some useful tips and tricks? Leave a comment to share your secret power tips with us.

With software update 2.2 it is now possible to turn auto-correction on or off. I think this has been the second most often requested feature right behind cut and paste, which was by far the most often requested one. You can find the auto-correction switch in the settings application under General > Keyboard > Auto-Correction.

Another feature which might be useful to you is the “.” shortcut. If switched on, you can tap the space bar twice to enter a period followed by a space character. The switch can be found in Settings > General > Keyboard > “.” Shortcut.

Have you noticed the little globe key to the left of the space bar in the keyboard screen shots? You can choose from different international keyboards in the settings application under General > Keyboard > International Keyboards. For example, when you need to write emails in different languages this is a convenient method to switch between different keyboards and languages. Just press the globe to switch to the next configured language. This will not only change the keyboard layout, but also the auto-correction dictionary. When you have pressed the globe, the language you have switched to is displayed on the space bar for about one second. For me, switching between different keyboards comes in handy when I want to write emails to my Spanish speaking friends.

One feature I wasn’t aware of before I read about it this week is the capability to hit the shift key twice to switch to caps-lock mode. You also need to enable this feature in the settings application under General > Keyboard > Enable Caps Lock. You might want to use this feature if you need to yell at your COLLEAGUES, when writing them an email.

If you need to enter special letters like German umlaute (ü, ö, ä) or the Spanish letter eñe (ñ) just tap the underlying key and hold it for a short period. You will notice that a contextual menu appears where you can choose the special letter from. This also works when entering email addresses or URLs, as depicted in the screen shot.

Last but not least, here is one of my favourite keyboard tricks. You can enter characters by swiping on the keyboard. This is helpful when you need to enter passwords which are often a combination of letters, digits and special characters. For example, you can enter a digit by tapping on the 123 key and then swiping to the number key you want to enter. When you have entered the number just release the key and you will notice that the keyboard switches back to the mode for entering characters again.

Now, try these tricks with a device which has a real physical keyboard.

Did you know that the iPhone has a built-in scientific calculator? Just open the calculator and rotate your iPhone by 90 degrees into landscape perspective. You will see that your plain old calculator application has much more to offer. Just explore it and feel the difference.