After an ill-advised (the site is somewhat dysfunctional even in desktop Safari) visit to a local book seller's web site on my iPhone crashed Safari, I found that I could no longer use Safari. Every time I opened it, it would be unresponsive for a few seconds, then crash, taking me back to the iPhone's home screen. Since Safari attempts to re-load the last visited site, it would attempt to reload the book seller's site upon launch and just crash again. Catch-22.

So I opened Mail, went to a message with a URL in the body and clicked that. That caused Safari to launch and open the URL passed by Mail. Problem solved!

I've been frustrated by the way we change the volume on the iPhone. The side button makes too large of a change, for my taste, with a single tap. But when I try to use the on-screen slider, I find I also have a hard time because my finger covers up the slider knob, so I can't see when I try to make small changes. I've discovered a way around this. If you put your finger on the slider knob and start to move it, you can then move your finger (keep it in contact with the screen) quite far away -- I move my finger up into the main screen area -- and the slider will still move. Now I can make the small changes I want and watch the slider knob move without my finger blocking my view.

I'm often frustrated by the fact that the ".com" key exists for entering URLs, but not when entering an email address in a form on web pages.

Now instead of pressing the ".?123" key to get the period (.), I just hit the space bar twice followed by the delete key, then type com. I know it's the same number of taps, but this technique is certainly faster. Note that this will only work on iPhones that have been upgraded to version 1.1.1.