Picture the scene: you can do this easily, because you've done it in real life too. It's late at night, your iPhone has bleeped, and you reach out to pick it up and read the screen. Exactly as you manage to get your eyes open and focused, the screen moves. It rotates away from you, so that maybe you can't read everything, and definitely you can't reach the reply button.
That may be your iPhone's way of helping you: do not ever reply to emails when half-asleep and, yes, that's aching embarrassment you hear in our voice. Making you twist the phone to get the screen back the right way around, though, is not helping you -- and neither is forcing you to get up out of bed to read the damn thing.
You can stop this ever happening again, and you can do it with one swipe and one tap. If you're on an iPad, you can do it with one flick of a switch -- if you've set that up first. So it's not like it's a big problem, either in the sense of hard to fix, or in the sense of being damaging to your very existence. Yet it is a pain, and also there is one element of it that just does not work the way you'd expect.
This was tested on an iPhone 6 and an iPad Air running the latest iOS 8.
Swipe and tap
On your iPhone's home screen, swipe up from the bottom to get the Control Center. You need to do this on the home screen, because while it will work in most applications, calling it up elsewhere is fiddlier: swiping up gets you a grab handle instead of the full Center, and you'll be tapping at it like mad to get it to work. Plus, it regularly does not work in games, but then games are a law to themselves, and they will ignore your portrait and landscape preferences at will.
When you've got the Control Center up, tap on the icon at top right. It's a picture of a lock with an arrow circling around it. That's your portrait lock, and once you've tapped it, the phone will stay permanently in portrait mode. Tap it again to undo that.
What you can't do, and what you would expect would be obvious, is the opposite. You can't lock your iPhone into landscape. Turn it to landscape, bring up Control Center, and you get the same lock button but it does the same thing: locks the phone to portait.
It's different on the iPad
There's no such button in the Control Center on iPad. However, there is a physical switch: the button you may know more for being how you mute the sound of your iPad can be changed to be the one that locks the screen into portrait or landscape.
This time, it does either: whichever way you're looking at your iPad screen, that switch can lock it. To set this up, go to Settings, General and look for a section called Use Side Switch To... That lets you decide between muting and locking the orientation. Pick locking, and from here on in you can lock the screen by flicking that switch.
You can't mute, though. It's one or the other, and that's where you decide.
Again, your world isn't changed. Yet we've had the reaching for email problem a lot. We've also been engrossed in reading a book on our iPads while in bed, and found that shuffling to get comfy means the pages rotate around. Nothing takes you out of a book than it physically running away from you like that.
-- William Gallagher (
@WGallagher)
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