iPhone 5 Portable Genius

Customizing the Home Screen

The Home screen is your starting point for all things iPhone, and what could be simpler? Just tap the icon you want, and the app loads lickety-split. Ah, but things are never so simple, are they? In fact, there are a couple of hairs in the Home screen soup:

The icons in the top row are a bit easier to find and a bit easier to tap.

If you have more than 20 icons on the iPhone 5 (or 16 on earlier iPhones), they extend onto a second (or third or fourth) Home screen. If the app you want isn’t on the main Home screen, you must first flick to the screen that has the app’s icon (or tap its dot) and then tap the icon.

If your icons extend onto multiple Home screens, the four icons in the iPhone Dock appear on every Home screen, so they’re always available.

You can make the Home screen more efficient by moving your four most-used icons to the iPhone Dock and by moving four other often-used icons to the top row of the main Home screen. You can do all this by rearranging the Home screen icons as follows:

1. Display the Home screen.

2. Tap and hold any Home screen icon. When you see the icons wiggling, release your finger.

3. Tap and drag the icons into the positions ...