iPhone bedtime reading – the auto-rotating conundrum
By Will Park on Wednesday, February 20th, 2008 at 1:37 PM PST In iPhone
For me, bedtime usually means iPhone-time. Whether its browsing through my RSS feeds, keeping up to date with my favorite forums, or reading an eBook through Safari, the iPhone is critical to my bedroom experience (well, there are other things too).
The one problem is that I usually read whilst lying on my side, and that means I usually want my iPhone to do the same. Unfortunately, when I rotate my iPhone 90 degrees (to stay in line with my head’s orientation), the screen automatically rotates and leaves me out of sync with my iPhone’s display. The slick auto-rotate feature that I love so much during the day becomes the bane of my nighttime reading. So, what’s an iPhone-user to do?
Well, iPhone Central mentioned a way to get the iPhone to behave during sideways bedtime reading, so I thought I’d offer iPhone users my own solution to using the iPhone in bed.
Let’s start off by assuming that you are reading in bed in a seated position. We will keep our iPhone in the horizontal/landscape orientation. It’s important to have your iPhone orientated so the home-button is to the right of the display. Now, lay on your side and rotate the speaker side (left-side) of the iPhone toward the bed – another way to think about this is to rotate the home-button side of the iPhone (the right-side) toward the ceiling. The iPhone will not rotate the display into portrait orientation with the home-button on top, so your iPhone’s screen will remain in landscape-view to keep in line with your head.
Enjoy reading on your iPhone in bed!
Wow! That is such a simple solution… but it really does work. Thank you.
That is so funny, I do the same thing and have the same problem. Thanks for the advice, now I can read tweets to my hearts delight before going to sleep.
Did you really mean that you read in Landscape? If so – weird
When I brought this up to anyone interested in the iPhone before it came out, everyone said I was stupid for even worrying about it. Isn’t that just funny.
That’s why RotateMe keeps getting uninstalled off the N95.
Still not good enough, I sleep on my right side, some apps don’t work that way. We need a universal lock orientation button.