So you have a great, new iPhone that you can’t get enough of. You play games, send messages, tweet and update Facebook. And every time you receive an e-mail, a WhatsApp message or get tagged in a Facebook photo the phone chirps and demands your attention. All well and good unless it’s in the middle of the night, a meeting at work or during a thriller in the cinema. Sometimes muting the phone is just not enough, you have to turn it off. So how do you switch off an iPhone? Like everything else about an iPhone, it’s incredibly simple:
1. Hold the Sleep (On/Off) button down for about 5 seconds.
2. The “red arrow” will appear on the top. Sliding it to the right will switch off the phone. You also receive the option to “cancel” at the bottom of the screen if you want to change your mind.
You can switch the phone back on by holding down the Sleep button again.
Turning off the phone is also a good way to conserve battery. Like your computer it’s good to do this weekly to free up the phone’s memory so it can perform better. Also known as soft reset, this method can help when the phone freezes or an application becomes unresponsive.
But what if one of the Apps malfunctions, interfering with the workings of the phone, and a restart doesn’t help? In such cases you may need to resort to a hard reset. This is more equivalent to a reboot on your computer. The phone is reset, but none of your Apps, music or settings are lost. To hard reset a phone:
1. Hold down the Sleep (On/Off) and Home button simultaneously for 10 seconds (or longer in some cases, depending on how unresponsive the phone is).
2. The screen will go blank.
3. Keep holding down the buttons until the Apple logo appears.
In general, to keep your iPhone working in good order, it’s good to close down Apps at the end of the day and restart the phone at least once a week. After all an iPhone is like a mini computer.
But as Steve Jobs said – “That when you die, it doesn’t just all disappear. The wisdom you’ve accumulated. Somehow it lives on.” That’s the reason there is no on/off switch on the iPhone.
