If you’re on of the many who put off owning an iPhone or upgrading until Apple released its new budget-friendly and smaller-screen iPhone SE, you likely need a little help familiarising yourself with it. Heck, even if you’re an old hand at all things iPhone, you may find yourself struggling to keep up with all the neat and useful settings available to you.

Below we take a look at 12 essential iPhone settings that will make it easier to use, let the battery last longer and make you an iPhone power-user.

Reduce screen brightness

Unless you’re using your iPhone in direct sunlight, there’s really very little reason to have the screen brightness dialed up to 100 percent. Simply reducing the screen brightness to around 50 percent means your iPhone’s battery will last longer.

To adjust your iPhone’s screen brightness, launch Control Centre (swipe up from the bottom edge of the screen) > drag the brightness slider to the left until it’s in the middle (about 50 percent).

If your iPhone is on iOS 9.3.1, you can even trick Siri to enable Low Power Mode and Night Shift simultaneously to save both battery and your eyes.

Enable Do Not Disturb

It’s great that people can reach us 24/7, but there are times when you simply don’t want to be disturbed by phone calls, texts, or someone ‘loving’ your cat picture on Instagram. Before bed or when you’re about to go into a meeting, turn on your iPhone’s one-tap Do Not Disturb mode.

To do this, launch Control Centre >tap the moon icon.

You can also automate Do Not Disturb mode and allow certain notifications through to make sure you don’t miss anything important or an emergency.

In Settings > Do Not Disturb > select Manual or Scheduled and set a From and To time.

To set exceptions, select to allow Allow Calls From > Favorites to allow calls from Contacts marked as Favorites.

You can also enable Repeated Calls to allow you phone to ring if the same person calls you for a second time in three minutes, safeguarding against missing an emergency.

Increase or decrease text size

You are not stuck with a one-size-fits-all text size in iOS. To increase or decrease the text size on your iPhone, go to Settings > Display & Brightness > Text Size > drag the slider to find a comfortable text size.

Note: This will only work in apps that support Dynamic Type, meaning all the native iOS apps but not all third-party apps.

You can also make all text bold in Settings > General > Accessibility > toggle ON Bold Text.  

Turn on Auto-Lock

If you don’t want to, or often forget to, push the standby button to lock your iPhone screen, you can set you iPhone to automatically lock after a pre-set interval. Go to Settings > General > Auto-Lock > pick from 30 seconds up to 5 minutes.

Turn off Wi-Fi Assist

It’s handy to have your iPhone fail-over to a cellular data connection if the Wi-Fi signal is poor or unavailable but can result in hefty data usage. To turn Wi-Fi Assist off, go to Settings > Cellular > scroll down and toggle OFF Wi-Fi Assist.

Add up to five fingers to Touch ID

Touch ID is designed to make your iPhone more secure and also to more conveniently unlock your phone — who wants to enter a six-digit passcode dozens of times a day?

If you’re juggling a latte while trying to unlock your front door and iPhone at the same time, chances are you won’t be able to get the one finger (it’s your thumb, right?) you added to reach the button just then. To add more fingers to Touch ID, go to Settings > Touch ID & Passcode > enter your passcode > tap Add a Fingerprint > follow the onscreen prompts.

Turn off background app refresh

Save your iPhone’s battery life and data usage by preventing apps from constantly refreshing in the background. Go to Settings > General > Background App Refresh > switch the main Background App Refresh to the OFF position.

Turn off location services for apps that don’t need it

Some apps really do need to know where you are all the time, think Uber, Maps / Google Maps while others are simply gathering unnecessary data. Protect your privacy and save your iPhone’s battery life by turning off location services for apps that don’t need it.

Go to Settings > Privacy > Location Services > check the list of apps for those set to Always or While Using > honestly assess whether an app needs to know your locations and set those that don’t to Never.

Turn off push email

Part of a smartphone’s usefulness is that having one makes you always available, either via text, a phone call or email. But, unless you’re a slave to email, or use it for mission critical communications, you can probably turn off push email — a power-hungry feature  — and get by with simply checking email when you need to.

You iPhone offers you three ways to refresh your email: via push, which is constantly checking for new email; fetch, which fetches email at preset intervals (e.g. every 15 minutes); and manually, which only checks for new email when you actually open the mail app.

To disable push and fetch for email, go to Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendars > tap Fetch New Data > turn off Push > scroll to Fetch > select Manually.

Bonus tip: Consider turning off push notifications for other apps for fewer distractions — think Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.

See exactly how much battery life remains

Change the default battery charge icon from just an icon to an icon with the exact percentage of remaining a battery displayed. Go to Settings > Battery > toggle ON Battery Percentage. No more guessing games.

Decide what you see in Today view

The Today view in the iOS Notification Center gives you access to relevant info from apps like weather, sports, etc. To customize what you see in the Today view, swipe down from the top edge of the screen to launch Notification Center > tap Today > scroll down and tap Edit > tap the delete icon to remove items from Today view or tap the plus icon to add items > change the order by dragging items up or down the list > tap Done.

Auto-delete Messages to free up space

Old iMessages can take up a lot of space, clear them out manually or automatically.

To clear out iMessages, go to the iMessage app > tap Edit (top left-hand corner) > select all the conversations you want to clear out > tap Delete (bottom right-hand corner).

You can also set up message to auto delete in the future. Go to Settings > Messages > Keep Messages > set it to 30 days or one year.

Image credit: tookapic, Pixabay