Q.I have a new iPhone, which I love, but the screen keeps rotating into the horizontal view if I’m laying down and trying to read. Is there a way to make the screen stop automatically flipping around?
You can lock the iPhone 4 screen orientation on the to the vertical “portrait mode” to keep it from changing. To do so, double-click the iPhone’s Home button to open up the bottom panel of apps.
In the app panel, swipe your finger from left to right until you get to the first icon, which has a circular arrow in the middle. Tap this circular arrow icon — known as the “portrait orientation lock” — to lock the screen into the vertical orientation so it won’t move, even if you do. To free up your screen and let it rotate freely again, reverse the process. (Shortcut controls for the iPhone’s iPod functions are also down in the app panel in case you want to skip, repeat or pause currently playing music without having to burrow into the iPod app on the Home screen.)
When the portrait orientation lock is on, a small version of the circular-arrow icon appears at the top of the iPhone screen. Even when you have the phone locked in the portrait mode, some apps like YouTube videos or the Street Views feature of the Google Maps app still appear in the horizontal landscape mode.
Although there’s no official lock mode for the landscape view in the current version of the iOS software, you can often get the screen to hold still when you want to recline and read by turning the iPhone 90 degrees so it jumps to landscape mode — and then turning it another 90 degrees in the same direction until the dock connector port is facing up.
[Thanks: http://gadgetwise.blogs.nytimes.com]
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