IPhone Best Practices - A Work In Progress

Question

Hello all. I've been tasked with introducing my coworkers into the inner workings of the iPhone, and there are a good number of pointers that I find myself saying over and over again. I'd like to share my best practices with everyone, as well as collect more pointers and opinions from the community at large.
Care and Handling:
First - wash your hands, often. Now I know we all do this often anyway, but I'd like to point out that a healthy amount of hand washing will really go a long way to keep your iPhone screen smudge free. The worst offender, unfortunately, is doughnuts. A small layer of sugar will render that area un-tappable, without any real indication that it has done so. If you are frantically tapping the screen on the iPod button and nothing is happening, clean your phone before you do a hard reset.
Second - Pockets. Keeping your phone in your front pocket is natural and what most of us do. In these summer months, however, keeping your phone in a sweaty front pocket can do a good deal to the dirt level of the screen. If you find yourself cleaning your phone constantly, try a belt clip.
Lastly - Battery Life. Your iPhone's battery life is in your hands, literally. Being aware of your power consumption and planning accordingly is going to be infinitely more important that the battery's native charge-holding ability. This goes especially for the day of purchase - as tempting as it may be to open the box and activate, immediately running around the house watching YouTube, it is best to let the phone charge for 12 hours before use. Charging the phone every night is an absolute must, skipping a day will kill the battery life as your ride the bottom edge the following day. Most of us have access to a USB port while we're at work, best idea will be to plug in your phone when you sit down at your desk.
iPod:
Large Libraries: In the opening weekend, I got many complaints that you cannot manually manage your music. There is a workaround that has made me change the way I work with all of my iPods: the iPhone specific playlist. Simply create a playlist with all of the music you wish to put on your phone and sync that one playlist. This also helps with sync time - you have a start sync and an end sync, not a constant sync all throughout your music management, slowing your computer down in the process.
TV Shows: I watch a lot of MST3K, which I have organized into iTunes as TV shows, split into seasons, the works. The problem that has arisen, therefore, is the one of selective synchronization - you cannot specifically select the TV show you want to sync to the device, instead getting the choices to sync all, unwatched, or latest shows. This is problematic when each show is 700MB large. Here's the work around - select all of the episodes of a specific show and right click, selecting "Mark as Not New", removing all of the little blue dots from the episodes. Select the one, three, or five episodes, and right click them, selecting "Mark as New", then sync the last one, three, or five unwatched episodes. The shows you selected will sync.
iPhoto:
Many users are complaining that iPhoto opens whenever the phone is connected. This is not a preference of the phone, but rather iPhoto. Remember when you first launched iPhoto and it asked you if you wanted to use iPhoto whenever your camera was attached? iPhoto is detecting that your phone is a camera and launching, just as you told it to do.
Mail:
POP accounts - too many unread messages: When first adding a POP account, all of the messages downloaded to the phone arrive as unread. Tapping a message, tapping back, and then tapping the next message can get tedious. Here's the workaround - tap the small down arrow to the upper right hand side of the screen, watching closely to the number next to Inbox. When that number goes down by one, tap the arrow again. If that number hasn't gone down yet, wait a sec, and do not try to tap tap tap tap tap, you'll flood the input queue and crash Mail.
Syncing Mail accounts - All too often people blame the iPhone when their mail does not work. A perfect test is sync you accounts from Mail. If they work in mail, they'll work on the phone, if they are unreliable in Mail, they will also be unreliable on the phone. The Mail client on the iPhone is just as powerful as any other mail client in terms of how it connects to mail servers, if you are having problems you need to check your settings before blaming the hardware. If you prefer to leave your install of Mail.app alone, create a new user account on your Mac, set up all of the accounts you want there, and use iTunes to sync that data to the phone. Make sure to remove that portion of sync from your actual user account's instance of iTunes, however, or it will all sync back.
This message has not been downloaded from the server: This message has snagged a couple users, but upon investigation, these users have filled their iPhones to the absolute brim with music and video. It hasn't been downloaded from the server because there is no space to download to - this also applies to the Camera application dumping to the Home screen. Because there is no space, it can't add any new data. Make some room, then be patient as the mail client gets to that message in cleanup (often a sync or reboot will clear it up).
Safari:
Safari and iPod: Many users have reported iPod stopping in the middle of browsing, often pouting and pursing their lips crying, "This is terrible, I can't even browse the web and listen to music at the same time?". I then check their phone, and lo and behold they have upwards of eight separate pages open at the same time. This device (like every other computer out there) has a finite amount of memory, each page taking up a significant portion depending on how busy the page is. I've routinely gotten through entire albums while browsing through Safari, but I've got one page open in total, and it's usually mostly text. Keep it to one or two pages open and iPod will run forever if you let it.
Web Apps: "This web app is terrible, it keeps booting me to Home!" When was your last reboot? How many other pages are open? In the same vein as Safari and iPod, Web Apps need a good deal of breathing room - give it to them. Close down other pages, stop iPod, or even reboot. Give the app a clean slate and it will perform, every time. iPhoneRemote users will attest to this.
iCal:
Multiple Calendars - Default Calendar: When adding a new appointment, it adds to the default calendar. Appointments can't be shunted to the correct calendar until after sync anyway, so create an "iPhone" calendar and make that the default. Because it's in that calendar, you'll know enough to move it to the appropriate calendar after sync.
Please feel free to add your own best practices, and ask questions, too.

Answer 1

is there any application you can get for the iphone to enlarge text and phone numbers ?
If included with an email or on a website, yes with no application needed.
If you are referring to the text size for your iPhone's contact list, no.
can you insert a phone number from your contact list into a text message ?
No.
i cant seem to figure it out, does the alarm clock work if you turn off the phone at night,
No - powered off with the iPhone means powered off. Any phone that provides for this is not powered off - it is in deep sleep or deep standby mode, which the iPhone does not support. If you don't want your phone ringing or don't want to receive SMS at night but you want to use the iPhone's alarm feature as a wake-up alarm, you can turn on Airplane Mode before going to bed, which will also conserve the battery if your iPhone is not plugged in at night.
can you send a multi media text message ?
No.