Tips

Basic commands to Siri are useful, but how can you take your personal assistant to the next level on the iPhone 4S? There are a variety of tips and tricks that will help Siri become more powerful and better at doing its job. Not only will these pointers speed up simple tasks, but they open up a whole new level of functionality with Siri.

Of course, you'll need a data connection for Siri to work properly. We've noticed that Siri drops in accuracy dramatically when background noise is present, so plan accordingly. If you're still using an older iOS device you may not have Siri, but you can try one of several Siri alternatives for the iPhone 4 and iPhone 3GS. Here's a list of 10 tips to get more out of Siri:

Apple is currently investigating reported battery life problems experienced by iPhone 4S users. There are many tips and tricks floating around about how to extent battery life on your iPhone, but you shouldn't have to shut down most of the useful functions of your device to get battery life back. Normally these problems are due to specific bugs or corrupted files in the iPhone firmware or applications (this happened with the iPhone 4.1 update).

Apple will often issue a fix in the next iOS update, however in the meantime iPhone users must do what they can to solve the problem or deal with abbreviated battery time. There are many general tips and tricks that can improve battery life on your iPhone, but these involve much compromise and will switch off many features of your iPhone. In the past specific apps such as Ping and Game Center were pegged as culprits. The flood of feedback from users of the iPhone 4S point to these top 5 fixes for short iPhone 4S battery life:

Developers are moving closer to an untethered iOS 5 jailbreak every day. Thanks to BigBoss, now you can protect your tethered iOS 5 jailbreak from making your iPhone unusable during a crash or unplanned reboot. The solution to the problem, known as a semi-tethered jailbreak makes it possible for the iPhone to come back up when you can't be near your computer for a full tethered boot.

There are some quirks to the SemiTether package, but having an iPhone that will start up is much better than one that just stays on the Apple logo. You'll still have to get back to your computer eventually to boot tethered for access to jailbreak apps and Cydia. Safari and Mail will also not be functioning when the iPhone is in a semi-tethered state.

Are you missing some key jailbreak tweaks now that you've updated your iPhone 4 or 3GS to iOS 5 firmware? Already tired of dealing with all of the shortcomings in iOS 5 notification center? Luckily if you have saved your SHSH blobs you can easily downgrade and return your iPhone to a jailbroken state (and reinstall LockInfo!)

In order to downgrade you must have saved SHSH blobs. Pictured above are how saved SHSH files appear for each firmware version in Cydia, when they are saved to Saurik's server. Follow these steps to downgrade to earlier firmware, including iOS 4.3.3 for an untethered jailbreak with JailbreakMe.

If you're a regular iPhoneFAQ reader, this won't be the first time you've heard us advise you against buying iPhone or other mobile phone insurance through your wireless provider. When AT&T began offering iPhone insurance, we demonstrated how overpriced and undervalued their policy offerings were, hopefully saving many of you a great deal of money and frustration. Since the Verizon iPhone was announced, we've been waiting to find out what Verizon was going to step up to the plate with on the insurance front, hoping we'd be impressed. Unsurprisingly enough, we're not.

Hoping for anything else was sort of pointless given that Verizon and AT&T both offer insurance through the same third party company, Asurion. While the coverage that Asurion offers is excellent, the pricing is anything but. So, even though the same wizard is behind the curtain at both AT&T and Verizon and not ignoring the fact that replacement costs to the consumer are roughly $50 higher with the CDMA iPhone, we were hoping we'd see Verizon pushing aggressive pricing for insurance to give AT&T iPhone owners more reasons to switch.