WHILE ITS NICE, BRIGHT interactive touchscreen gets most of the attention, the Touch does have a few physical controls—a quartet of buttons along its edges and front. Two of these buttons let you turn the Touch on. One is the narrow little Sleep/Wake button on the Touch’s top-right edge. The other is the Home button on the front of the Touch (described in detail on the next page).

The Sleep/Wake button serves a second purpose, too—it puts the Touch in Sleep mode. Give it a gentle press to put the Touch down for a nap in power-saving standby mode.

To wake up a sleeping Touch, press the Sleep/Wake button once more or press the Home button.

If you want to turn your Touch off completely, the Sleep/Wake button acts as an On/Off button, too—just press and hold it down for a few seconds. The screen fades to black, and the no-nonsense “slide to power off” red arrow appears. Drag the arrow to the right to power down your ‘Pod.

When it’s time to play again, press the Sleep/Wake button to turn the Touch back on.

EVEN WITH ITS SIMPLE design, the Touch has one very prominent physical button, smack-dab on the player’s glass front: the Home button. You’ll press this one a lot, because it’s the portal to all the stuff stored on your Touch.

Most people associate the word Home with peace and stability, and this button lives up to that notion. No matter where you are in the Touch—16 levels up in a game, deep into the new U2 album, or out on the Internet, pressing the Home button always brings you back to the main Touch screen. You don’t even have to click your heels three times.

When you turn on your brand-new Touch, the Home screen will probably look something like this, with its included apps in their standard order. The Touch divides the icons into two groups: One is the four-by-four grid in the main part of the screen, and the other is the single row of four icons along the bottom. You can have up to 11 flickable pages of icons on the Touch’s Home “screen,” but no matter which page you flick to, the four icons anchored to the bottom row always stay onscreen.

Want to rearrange the icons—including that bottom row of four—so you can put your most-used apps up front? Press down on an icon until it wiggles, and then drag it to a new location. When you’re done rearranging, press the Home button to make the icons sit still again. Once you fill up the first Home screen with icons, swipe your finger to the left to go to the next screen of icons. Swipe your finger the other way to go back to that first screen. (If you find all this finger dragging, well, a drag, you can rearrange your icons more easily in iTunes; see Manage Apps in iTunes to learn how.)

The Home button can do other tricks, too, like letting you switch quickly from one app to another (Multitask on Your Touch) and forcing misbehaving apps to quit. If an app is stuck onscreen, hold down the Sleep/Wake button until the red “power off” slider appears (opposite page). Let go of Sleep/Wake and hold down the Home button until the app closes—and you’re back Home. And you can summon the Touch’s camera from the Lock Screen by pressing the Home button twice quickly to get a icon that takes you right into the Camera app.

SINCE YOU HAVE AN iPod, you probably want to play some music, right? To do that, tap the Music icon; you’ll see your audio collection sorted into all kinds of helpful categories, like songs, artists, and albums. Click a category to reveal its list of songs, musicians, or albums. Flick your finger up and down the screen to scroll through a list. In any category that goes right to a song list, tap a song’s title to hear the tune. For other categories, like Artists or Albums, click a name or title in the list to see all the songs in that category, and then tap a song title to play it.

Icons on the bottom row of the Touch’s Music screen take you to the first four categories, which vary depending on whether you synced up Genius Mixes (Chapter 6) from iTunes. Here’s what the categories look like:

The last icon in the row is aptly named More. Tap it to see more ways to sort your audio collection, including these categories:

As you tap around your collection, your Touch is ready if you want to add to it right there: A Store button in the top-left corner of most screens awaits your impulses.

VIDEO COMES IN MANY forms these days: movies, TV shows, podcasts, and more. If you have moving images on your Touch, they’re in one of these categories:

A thumbnail photo next to each video gives you a hint as to its content, and information like running time or number of episodes appears here as well.

Tap a title to play a video. If you have multiple episodes of a TV show or podcast, tap the show title and then tap the name of the episode you want to watch. Rotate the Touch to landscape view and enjoy the show. (Flip ahead to Chapter 8 if you want to know more about video right now.)

WHO NEEDS TO DRAG around a photo album or a laptop full of slideshows when you’ve got a Touch? And with the current Touch, you not only have a picture viewer, you get a whole digital camera and camcorder in the mix, too.

Odds are, though, you probably took most of your photos with a standard digital camera. As Chapter 9 explains, you can transfer copies of your favorite pictures and photo albums onto the Touch through iTunes. And when you do, they land here in the Photos app.

Give the Photos icon (the happy sunflower) a tap on the Home screen, and all those pictures await you in the iPod’s Photo library. Many photo-organizer programs, like Adobe Photoshop Elements and Apple’s iPhoto, let you sort pictures into albums, and you can see those same albums in the Photos app, if you opted to sync them over. The number in parentheses next to the album name reveals how many photos live there.

The Camera Roll album at the top of the screen collects all the photos you take and the videos you shoot with the Touch itself; you can import them back into your computer using your photo-organizer app. Other images that come right to the Touch—like screenshots you snap or photos you save from email messages—land here, too. Chapter 9 has all the photographic details.

THE TOUCH IS A powerful little media machine, and you fine-tune the way it works in the Settings menu. Here’s what you find by tapping the Settings icon on the Home screen:

THE MUSIC, VIDEOS, AND Photos icons on the Touch Home screen definitely get a workout, but several other icons await your gentle tap as well:

THE TOUCH’S RELIANCE ON a WiFi signal doesn’t make it a very good navigational device when you’re away from your home network or a coffee shop (unless you have a personal portable hot spot, like the Verizon MiFi). There are plenty of times, however, when getting directions and finding places on a map from the comfort of a WiFi connection comes in handy.

To plot your course, tap the Maps icon on the Home screen. Here are some of the things you can do with Maps and a network connection:

UNLESS YOU’RE PLAYING SOLITAIRE, games are usually more fun when you play with someone. Once you sign up for the Touch’s new Game Center, you can compete against thousands of other Game Center players around the world. You can add pals to a Friends list for quick competitions, do battle with strangers in multiplayer games, and join the race to the top of each game’s leaderboard.

Here’s how to get started with Game Center:

If your invitation goes ignored, tap the Auto-Match button to have Game Center pair you with an available player, or send a request to another friend. Even when you play solo, you can check player standings right after you finish a game (or later by tapping Games→[Name of Game]→Leaderboards).

SINCE THE EARLY DAYS of science-fiction movies and TV shows, the video-phone has been a staple of fantasy communication. Cheap webcams and teleconferencing systems made the fantasy real, but they’re so last year (and so stationary). For modern convenience, the Touch makes and takes video calls thanks to FaceTime, its built-in mobile video-chat app.

To use FaceTime, you need an Apple ID (Chapter 7) and a WiFi connection. You also need folks to talk to, namely other new Touch owners and people running around with iPad 2s and iPhone 4/4S models who have time to chat.

Once you have all that, getting started with FaceTime is easy:

If you need to temporarily turn off the sound during a call (like when the baby starts screaming), tap the Mute icon ().

Want to show your friend what you’re seeing without physically flipping the Touch around? Tap the icon in the bottom-right corner to switch to the Touch’s rear camera. Tap the icon again to return the view to you.

THANKS TO THE IMESSAGE app in iOS 5, iPod Touch owners now have a way to send free, unlimited text messages, photos, and videos to people who are also running iMessage on their iPads, iPhones, and Touches. It works over a WiFi connection on the iPod Touch. Setting up iMessage takes just a few steps:

To see your previous iMessage conversations, tap the Messages button in the upper-left corner of the screen. A list of earlier chats appear onscreen. From here, you can tap open a conversation to review or restart it. To whack old chatter, tap the Edit button, select the conversations, tap the icon next to each one, and then tap the Delete button.

Unlike a cellphone text plan, which ties your message Inbox to your mobile number, iMessage works by email address. This means you can get your messages on several iOS 5 devices to keep your conversations going. And, unlike a cell-phone text plan, iMessage is free—making it an affordable way to keep up with your pals, as long as they’re all using iOS 5 gadgets, too.

FOR LONG-TIME USERS OF iOS, one vital app has been missing for years: a to-do list. Apple has finally checked this task off its own to-do list and introduced the new Reminders app. Reminders is wonderfully easy to use, and you can jot down your chores in a straightforward list or assign them to a future date. Here’s how add a task either way:

As you complete your chores in either List or Date view, tap the empty square next to the task to check it off. Here are a couple of other things you can do with the Reminders app:

Can’t remember exactly when you did something? Search your reminders by tapping the Search icon in the top-left corner on either the List or Date screens. In the search box, type in keywords to bring up results that may jog your memory.

TWITTER, FOR THOSE WHO haven’t been paying attention the past few years, is a microblogging service; it lets you update friends about your activities or musings. Millions of people use it to report what they see or feel, check for public announcements, and share links to photos and web pages. You have 140 characters per message to express your thoughts. And it’s free.

If you already have a Twitter account—and use it—get ready to let out a joyous holler, because iOS 5 lets you tweet (post updates) directly from many iPod Touch apps, including Safari, Maps, YouTube, Camera, and Photos. Just tap the icon in those apps to see the Tweet menu option.

Technically, Twitter’s not a built-in app, but so many iPod programs offer a tweet option that it’s best covered in this part of the book. To get full use of the Twitter experience with your iPod apps and see reactions to the things you share, you can install the Twitter app right from the Settings screen:

So now that you have Twitter installed and your personal Twitter account set up, what do you do with it on your Touch? If you’re an experienced Twitter user, you’ve probably already put this book down and gone off to post a few tweets to your pals.

If you’re brand-new to Twitter, you should take a spin over to the Support area of Twitter’s site. The company has set up its own online guide for using the service, as well as using the search feature to find out what everyone else is tweeting about. The guide is at http://support.twitter.com/groups/31-twitter-basics.

THE IPOD’S NATIVE APPS can keep track of your life, from bugging you about meetings to reminding you to buy milk on the way home. Once you visit Settings→Notifications and turn on alerts for the apps you want to hear from, you’ll get little onscreen notifications no matter what you’re doing on the iPod.

But with all the various apps on board, wouldn’t it be great to have one place where you can review pressing matters, like calendar appointments, email messages, or pending to-do list items?

Thankfully, there is such a Dashboard of Your Life. It’s called the Notifications screen. To see it from anywhere or any app on your Touch, just place your finger at the very top edge of the screen and drag it downward, like you’re pulling down a miniature window shade. The Notifications screen appears.

You can get a quick hit of data and jump to any listed app or message by tapping it. Notifications also appear on the iPod’s Lock Screen so you don’t miss anything when you’re not using your Touch. To go right to a notice, put your finger on the app’s icon or message and slide it to the right. This both unlocks the Touch and opens the app that’s badgering you for attention.

By default, the Notifications screen shows you basic info-nuggets, like pending reminders, calendar appointments, stock prices, or any new email messages that have arrived. But like most things on the Touch, you can customize your Notifications screen by adding apps it, removing them, or resorting them.

To do all this, tap Settings→Notifications. You can sort the displayed apps manually or by time (meaning the newest updates appear highest up). To manually sort the apps, tap the Edit button in the top-right corner and use the grip strip () to drag them into a new order. Tap an app’s name to turn its notifications on or off—or to further customize its display with one of two different onscreen styles (a small, top-of-the-screen “banner” or a larger, middle-of-the-screen “alert”).

No matter when a notification popped onto your screen, you can always get a recap by dragging down the Notifications screen. To dismiss it, put your finger at the bottom of the iPod screen and flick upwards. Consider yourself notified.

Even though you may not use it—or haven’t had reason to yet—the Touch’s new built-in Newsstand app organizes all the digital newspapers and magazines you buy through the App Store. And Apple’s iBooks app, while not built-in, is easy to snag from the App Store so you can buy and download electronic books to read as well.

Yes, even though the Touch’s screen is much smaller than the iPad’s, the Touch is still a handy way to haul around dozens of magazines and hefty books in convenient electronic form—it’s like a bookstore that fits in your pocket, and the Touch is easier to hold and read on crowded trains, planes, and other tight spots.

First up, Newsstand. This app sits quietly on the iPod’s Home screen, waiting for you to download an electronic magazine or newspaper so it can display the material proudly on its virtual shelves.

“Hey,” you say, “That all sounds great, but how do I find and subscribe to digital magazines and newspapers in the first place?” Apple, in its quest to sell you more content, has made it extremely easy: Just launch the Newsstand app and tap the Store button in the top-right corner, as shown at the right.

The Newsstand whisks you to a special part of the App Store, one with electronic periodicals you can buy, subscribe to, and download to your Touch. The Store displays each ePublication as though it were an app, offering price, ratings, and other information. Tap a title to learn more, buy a single issue, or sign up for a subscription. The bill for your purchase goes to the credit card linked to your Apple ID (Set Up an iTunes Store Account).

If you need to cancel, renew, or adjust a subscription, log into your Store account with your Apple ID. You can do that right from the Touch by opening the iTunes Store app, flicking to the bottom of the screen, and tapping either your account name (if you’re signed in already) or Sign In. Tap View Apple ID, log in, and flick down to Subscriptions. Tap Manage and then tap the name of the ePublication you want to change.

If you sign up for a subscription, the Newsstand app automatically grabs each new issue and sends you a notification (if you have your settings configured to do so). The app also lists the number of new e-rags in a red circle on the Newsstand icon. Tap it open to see what awaits you on the faux-IKEA shelves.

On to iBooks. The first time you visit the App Store (Buy iPod Touch Apps), you’ll likely get a note from Apple asking if you’d like to download a free copy of its iBooks app so you can read eBooks. If this appeals to you, tap the Get iBooks button (you can always go back and download it later from the Apple Store).

Once you install iBooks, you see it also has a Store button that beckons you to tap it. When you do, you’re swept right into the section of the App Store that sells electronic books. After you find something to read, tap the price to buy it—and to have it billed to your iTunes account. If you’re not sold yet, tap the Get Sample button to download a portion of it to evaluate. Tap the Library button to leave the Store and return to your personal book collection.

The books you download appear in the iBooks app. Tap a book cover to open the title and start reading. You can read your book in either portrait (vertical) or landscape (horizontal) mode.

By tapping the electronic page onscreen, you can summon the controls for navigating and customizing your reading experience. For instance:

With your fingertip, use the brown slider at the bottom of the page to skip around in the book. When you’re done reading, tap the Library button in the top-left corner of a book’s page to close it and return to your Library. You can also open, read, and store PDF files in the iBooks app. The iPod as eBook and Text Reader shows you how.

THE TOUCH HAS FOUR buttons but no keys—and no physical keyboard. All your text input for web addresses, email messages, Game Center sign-ups, and more come from the Touch’s virtual keyboard. This keyboard magically appears onscreen whenever you tap an area that requires typed text.

Trained typists (or those with large fingers) may find the keyboard annoying at first, but most people feel it gets easier the more they use it. To enter a letter, tap the key you want. As your finger hits the screen, a bigger version of the letter balloons briefly into view so you can visually confirm your keystroke.

The keyboard works in portrait (vertical) mode, but it’s wider and easier to use in landscape (horizontal) view. It’s a regular old QWERTY keyboard, with a few special keys.

When you type letters into a note, an email message, a web form, or anyplace that’s not a URL, the Touch adds a return key to the keyboard so you can jump down from one line to the next. This key transforms itself to say “Join” when you type in a WiFi password, “Go” when you enter a web address, and “Search” when you enter keywords into the Safari search box.

To make up for its limited real estate, the Touch keyboard includes shortcuts that help you work faster:

THE TOUCH HAS COME a long way as a device that can handle the conventions of modern word-processing. There’s no Ctrl or ⌘ key on its keyboard, though, so Apple incorporated tap-friendly commands for those convenient cut-copy-paste functions right into the Touch.

Make a mistake and wish you could undo what you just did? Give the Touch a shake and then tap the Undo Edit button that appears onscreen.

In addition to the Cut, Copy, and Paste options in apps where you can edit text (like Notes or Mail), you can replace a misspelled word with one that’s spelled correctly—or look up its definition in the onboard dictionary by selecting it and tapping Define. If you have the Touch’s spell-check function turned on (flip back two pages), the Touch highlights typos (and unknown words) with a red underscore so they stand out as you proofread. (You do proof important messages, right?) These are the words you want to replace.

You can also replace one word with a closely related one (for those times when you typed close to, but not quite, the right word).

To get the Suggest option, double-tap (or Select) a word onscreen. When the Cut | Copy | Paste | Suggest… box appears (top right), tap Suggest. The Touch offers up a few alternate words. If you see the one you meant to type, tap it to replace the text. If it can’t find a similar word, you see a “No Replacements” message.

But enough about text—want to copy a photo or video into a message-in-progress or some other program? Hold your finger down on the screen until the Copy button pops up, as shown in the bottom-right photo. Tap the Copy button and then tap within the message body to get a Paste button. Tap it to insert your image or video.

If you want to copy multiple items, like pictures out of a photo album, tap the icon in the top-right corner. Next, tap the photos you want to copy; blue checkmarks appear in the corners to confirm your selection. Tap the Copy button on the top-left of the toolbar, switch to the program where you want to deposit your pics (like a mail message under construction), and then press the glass until the Paste button appears.

PROGRAMS FROM THE APP Store give your Touch all sorts of new powers. If you’re eager to try some out, here are two ways to trick out your Touch:

It’s a fact of life: Sometimes apps don’t work out. They’re not what you thought they’d be, they’re buggy (it happens), or they take up too much precious Touch space. Here are two ways to uninstall an app:

EARLIER IN THIS CHAPTER, you learned how to rearrange the icons on your Touch’s Home screen. And after reading the previous page, you may now have a ton of groovy new app icons all over your Touch—but not in the order you want them. Sure, you can drag wiggling icons all over the 11 pages of your Home screen, but that can get a little confusing and frustrating if you accidentally drop an icon on the wrong page.

Fortunately, iTunes lets you arrange all your Touch icons from the comfort of your big-screen computer:

FOR YEARS, MANY TOUCH owners have pined for a hardware feature that iPhone owners could take for granted: a camera. In 2010, Apple granted that wish and then some—the Touch now has two cameras, one on the front and one on the back. Together, they provide the hardware you need for FaceTime video calls, shooting quick video clips, and snapping off still photos.

This section deals with the Touch as a still camera; flip ahead two pages to shoot and edit video. As digital cameras go, the Touch’s camera isn’t exactly a multi-megapixel powerhouse—it’s relatively low-quality compared to your regular camera or even the iPhone 4S. (But at least the Touch now has a camera.)

To start using it, tap the Camera icon on the Touch’s Home screen. Make sure the little slider in the bottom-right corner is set to (still camera) and not (video camera). Then line up your shot and press the shutter button () in the middle of the bottom toolbar. The Touch makes a little shutter-click noise, just like an old-fashioned film camera.

The Touch saves your newly snapped picture in Photos→Camera Roll. A thumb-nail of the last shot you snapped also appears in the bottom-left corner of the screen; tap it to jump right to the photo in the Camera Roll album.

The Touch camera, while not exactly overloaded with the features of a standalone point-and-shoot camera, does offer a few controls for better photos:

In iOS 5, you can do basic image-editing on your iPod. Just tap open a photo that needs fixing and tap the Edit button at the top of the screen. You can tap:

Hate that change you made to a pic? Tap the Cancel button to reverse it. Once you like an edited photo, tap the Save button to put a copy in your Camera Roll.

To change cameras and take a self-portrait with the front camera (circled below left), tap the Switch Cameras icon in the upper-right corner of the photo screen. As shown on these pages, you can take photos in either portrait (vertical) or landscape (horizontal) mode. The Touch’s rear camera (circled below right) sits in the corner on the back, so be careful when you shoot with it or you may get a stunning portrait of your own finger.

CELLPHONES AND POCKET CAMCORDERS that can shoot video clips have boomed in popularity over the years—which could explain the noticeable increase in YouTube videos of cats riding Roomba vacuum cleaners. Thanks to its back camera that shoots high-definition video (at a resolution of 720p and at 30 frames per second), the Touch now joins the video party. Warn your pets.

Shooting a video on the Touch works a lot like shooting a still photo. And even though you can tap an area of the screen to adjust the exposure, there’s no zoom feature for video as there is for still photos.

Tap the Camera icon on the Touch’s Home screen to get started. When you want to shoot videos, make sure the slider on the gray toolbar is set to record video () and not to snap still photos ().

The tiny microphone next to the camera lens on the back of the Touch records audio to go along with your video.

You can hold the Touch vertically or horizontally to shoot video, but portrait-shot clips may get shrunk or letterboxed if you upload them to a video-sharing site that’s geared to display video in the more cinematic horizontal orientation. When you’re ready to start filming, tap the button. It flashes red to indicate that you’re recording.

The time stamp in the upper-right corner of the screen shows the current length of your video-in-progress. When you’re ready to virtually yell “Cut!”, tap the button again to stop recording.

Once you do, the Touch stores your clip in Photos→Camera Roll. To see what you shot without leaving the Camera app, tap the thumbnail preview at the end of the gray toolbar to call up the clip. Tap to play it back.

Editing Video on the Touch

Do you have a video where all the good action is in the middle? You know, the one where the first 5 minutes capture your voice trying to wheedle your toddler into dancing for Grandma—while the last 2 minutes show the inside of your shirt pocket because you forgot to turn off the camera? That stuff is easy to fix on the Touch.

Here’s how to trim off the unnecessary parts on either end of a clip (you can’t edit within a clip):

1. Open the video you want to edit.

2. Tap the screen to call up the editing controls. The frame-viewer bar at the top of the screen displays scenes from the clip.

3. Press the outer edge of the frame-viewer so it turns yellow, and then drag either end of the yellow bar to isolate just the frames you want to keep. Tap the Trim button to cut away the detritus.

After you press the Trim button, the Touch offers you a choice of cutting the original clip (which makes this edit permanent) or saving the edited video as a whole new clip—while leaving the original version intact.

Tip

The Touch offers rudimentary tools for quickly chopping video. If you want a more complete pocket movie studio that lets you add titles, transitions, theme music, and more, hit the App Store and check out programs like ReelDirector ($4) or Apple’s own iMovie for iPhone/Touch ($5).

NOW THAT YOU’VE TAKEN all these great photos and videos on your Touch, don’t you want to share them with the world—or at least your friends and relatives? You can do that several ways:

THE TOUCH CAMERA IS great, but if you like moving pictures—or pictures that really move—check out Cover Flow. Designed to show off your music collection to maximum effect, Cover Flow is basically a parade of album artwork that also lets you start playing music right away.

To use Cover Flow, tap the Music icon on the Home screen to get into your audio library. Instead of tapping through lists with the Touch in portrait mode, rotate it to landscape (horizontal) view. The text-based lists go away, replaced by full-color album covers. Flick your finger across the screen to see them whiz by.

An album cover doesn’t tell you what songs are on it, so stop flicking covers and tap one to see its track listing. You can also tap the button in the lower-right corner to spin the cover around and see the song list. To hear a song play, tap its title in the list. To pause the song, tap in the lower-left corner; press to start it up again.

To flip back to the album art, tap the track listing () or the button again. When you’ve exhausted the sheer visual excitement of Cover Flow (or you have to do something else for a while), turn the iPod back to portrait mode (upright) to return to your lists and screen icons. Cover Flow may not do much for some people, but it sure is pretty to watch.

THE TOUCH SHOWS OFF photos and videos quite nicely, and it even makes your music look good. Cover Flow (see the previous page) is one example, but even if you’re just listening to an album, you get a big visual reminder of what you’re listening to. This is called the Now Playing screen.

In addition to lovely giant cover art, the Now Playing screen displays icons and information along its top edge to control your music. Here’s what everything means, starting from left to right:

Like Cover Flow, the Now Playing screen looks the coolest when you have big, bright, colorful album covers for your song files. If you purchased your music from the iTunes Store or another online music emporium, the album art came with it. If you ripped the tracks yourself and didn’t add any album artwork, you probably see a boring old gray music note. If you find this aesthetically unap-pealing, flip to Replace Album Covers Manually for art lessons.

THE NOW PLAYING SCREEN is more than just a pretty face for your music. You can also manage current-song playback from this screen. Here’s what the various icons mean, starting with that strip along the bottom of the screen:

If you have an Apple TV or an AirPort Express that you’ve connected to your TV, home-entertainment sound system, stereo, or set of powered speakers (Stream Music and Video from iTunes), you also see the AirPlay icon ( ) on the playback control bar. Tap it and choose an output source from the list on the screen.

But wait, there’s more to the Now Playing screen! It’s just not real obvious until you tap the screen again to call up another layer of playback controls—the ones that like to stay out of the way unless you really want them. (Tap the screen again to hide them when you’re done.) Here they are:

WHEN YOU’RE NEAR A WiFi hot spot, the Touch is a traveling email machine that lets you read, write, and send messages. And just as there are two ways to get apps on the Touch, there are two ways to set up your email accounts.

MAIL ON THE TOUCH looks and works pretty much like any other email program. You can:

On the Edit screen, you can also move messages to another mail folder, tap the Mark button to flag messages () for later, or mark them as unread.

AS MENTIONED EARLIER IN this chapter, you can have up to 11 Home-screen pages on your Touch and flick across them to find the apps you want. But some app-loving folk can quickly fill up all 11 screens with icons. Also, some people would prefer a tidier way to group their apps than dragging them around to different pages.

This is where Home screen folders can make everything better. You can have up to 12 apps in a single folder—which looks like an icon with little icons nestled inside it (right). Putting apps in folders saves screen space and keeps them corralled. By default, most new Touches come with one folder from the start: the Utilities folder, which contains the Contacts, Calculator, and Voice Memos apps.

To create a folder, press and hold an icon until it wiggles, and then drag that icon on top of one you want to put in the same folder. When you do, you automatically create a folder and see a bar with a generic name for it, like “Games.” You can keep this name or replace it with one of your own. Once you set up a folder, you can drag up to 10 more apps in to fill it up. Tap the screen to close the folder.

To launch an app inside a folder, tap the folder to open it, and then tap the app you want to use.

If you change your mind and want to pull an app out of a folder, open the folder and press and hold the app’s icon to start the Wiggle Dance. Now you can drag it out of the folder and back to its place on the Home screen proper.

To get rid of a folder altogether, press an icon to get them all wiggling. Drag all the apps out of the folder and back to the Home screen. When the last app is out, the folder disappears.

PUTTING APPS IN FOLDERS helps you organize your Touch screen more precisely, but it doesn’t save you a lot of time when you’re in the middle of one thing and want to switch over to use another app real quickly—like if you’re reading email and want to nip out and turn on your Pandora radio app to hear some tunes as you shovel out your Inbox. Who wants to go all the way out to the Home screen for that?

Fortunately, the Touch has a shortcut. When you’re in an app, click the Home button twice. A row of four icons sprouts from the bottom of the screen, shoving the app you’re currently using up to the top of the screen (top-right).

These four icons represent the apps you’ve recently used. Tap one to quickly switch to it. Turn on Pandora, check your sports scores, do whatever it is you wanted to do. When you finish, double-click the Home button again. When the row of icons appears, tap the icon of the app you were previously using to return to it.

If the app you want isn’t in this initial row of four, flick the icons from right to left until you find the one you want.

To kill apps in the hidden row that you haven’t used in forever (because they may be hogging memory), press down on an icon until the symbol appears. Tap it to remove the app from the recently used list—but not from the Touch itself. Press the Home button when you’re done.

In addition to your most recent apps list, the Home button double-click offers another time-saver. Instead of flicking right to left to see the recent apps, flick left to right to see the Music playback controls (bottom right). These can save you the trouble of going all the way back to the Now Playing screen to skip a playlist track. And if you get agitated when the Touch reorients itself into landscape view when you try to read an eBook or write a message in bed, tap the first icon, the circular arrow in the left corner. This locks the Touch into portrait mode no matter which way you hold it—until you tap this icon again to unlock the screen.