iPhone: The Missing Manual, 3rd Edition

The Wireless iTunes Store

It's freaky but true: The iPhone lets you shop Apple's iTunes Store, browsing, buying, and downloading songs wirelessly. Any songs you buy (from 80 cents to $1.30 each) get auto-synced back to your computer's copy of iTunes when you get home. Whenever you hear somebody mention a buy-worthy song, for example, you can have it within a minute.

In the bad old days, you could shop the store only when you were on a Wi-Fi network. Now, however, you can also buy songs over AT&T's cellular network, for instant gratification that the you of 1995 never would have believed.

To begin, tap iTunes on the Home screen. The icons at the bottom of the screen include Music, Videos, Podcasts, and Search.

When you tap Music, Videos, or Podcasts, the top of the screen offers further drilling-down buttons like New Releases, Top Tens (meaning "most popular"), and Genres; under Videos, you get Movies, TV Shows, and Music Videos.

Tip

In theory, you can even buy videos on the cellular network (and not just WiFi hot spots). In practice, you're limited to certain music videos. If you try to buy a TV show or movie, an the error message says: "This item is over 10MB." Which is AT&T's way of saying, "We don't want you jamming up our precious cellular network with your hefty video downloads, bucko."

Note, by the way, that you can rent movies from the store instead of buying them outright. You pay only $3, $4, or $5 to rent (vs. $10 to $16 to buy). But once you start watching, you have only 24 ...