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Ping iPhone button - quick tap vs. press & hold = different actions!

ideal.dreams

ideal.dreams

macrumors 68020
Original poster
Jul 19, 2010
2,387
1,301
In the quick settings glance, simply tapping the ping iPhone button will make your iPhone play a loud noise, if it's in range, even if it's on silent. What if you need some extra help finding it though?

Press and hold the ping iPhone button and in addition to making your iPhone play the sound, it'll make the camera's LED flash flash several times too!

I thought this was a really neat trick and I found it totally by mistake – I didn't see documentation of it anywhere so I thought I'd share here :)
 
ideal.dreams said:
In the quick settings glance, simply tapping the ping iPhone button will make your iPhone play a loud noise, if it's in range, even if it's on silent. What if you need some extra help finding it though?

Press and hold the ping iPhone button and in addition to making your iPhone play the sound, it'll make the camera's LED flash flash several times too!

I thought this was a really neat trick and I found it totally by mistake – I didn't see documentation of it anywhere so I thought I'd share here :)
Click to expand...

This is probably the first tip I've seen so far that I'd consider a genuinely "secret" feature/tip. Well found. Thanks for sharing!
 
I did that in the middle of a meeting today by accident......luckily the phone was in my purse when it started flashing and making noise.
 
We saw this once with my wife's phone - but had no idea why the flash illuminated that one time only.

So now we know. Thanks!
 
maliu said:
I did that in the middle of a meeting today by accident......luckily the phone was in my purse when it started flashing and making noise.
Click to expand...

This is one of my concerns with the watch. Because it's on your body and subject to accidental and inadvertent touches, it might be easier to do things accidentally with unpleasant consequences.

  • Like flash and beep your phone in a movie theatre
  • Start playing happy music on your phone at a funeral.
  • Flashing and beeping your phone in a work environment where you're not supposed to be carrying a phone at all.
  • Being on an overseas business trip and turning off your house's heating in the middle of a freeze.
  • Being away from home and hitting the "all lights off" button on your family back home.

Touch ID or slide to unlock protects you from a lot of these in the iPhone. Not so on the watch.
 
Turning off the "activate on wrist raise" feature would go a long way toward avoiding accidental inputs, since you would have to tap the screen to activate it. I have yet to actually have any accidental inputs with my watch though, so I think your scenarios are rather far fetched.
 
mightyjabba said:
Turning off the "activate on wrist raise" feature would go a long way toward avoiding accidental inputs, since you would have to tap the screen to activate it...
Click to expand...

Ah, okay, hadn't thought of that. That would help. Another poster in a different thread suggested taking potentially troublesome apps out of glances and also putting their icons far out on the edge of the home screen. That sounds like a good plan too. This may also explain why the phone screen turns off so quickly - some folks speculated it was primarily to save battery life - but this would make sense too. Especially once remote-control apps start appearing to turn on space heaters, open garage doors, unlock houses, start cars, etc.

I guess the tricky balance to be found is that app makers want to keep their apps easy and convenient so customers use them, but customers need to balance that with the potential for embarrassment or other more serious consequences.

The scenarios I described above, BTW could all apply to me. I have a lot of iPhone home automation, I travel a lot and in a couple of past projects sometimes took a phone where I really shouldn't have. (Certainly not a switched on phone that could be pinged remotely to create a disturbance)
 
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