LetsMoveToTheMoon

God, Technology, and Things That Make Us Want to Move to the Moon

Little Known iPhone Feature: Zoom

November 24, 2009

Bet you never knew this existed. I just discovered it today when looking around in the Settings application for a preference that I’m going to talk about in a later post. Here, though, I’m talking about the iPhone’s zooming capabilities.

Standard on all iPhone 3GS’s are a set of Accessibility features, including the more popular VoiceOver (not to be confused with VoiceControl; VoiceOver is for the blind). Among these features is Zoom, the aptly-titled ability to zoom in and out using three fingers.

To enable Zoom to try it for yourself, in the Settings application, select General, then Accessibility. Click Zoom, then move the slider to the On position.

You’ll see instructions there for how to use it, but all you’ll need to do is double-tap the screen with three fingers. If you want to zoom further in than the default 200%, you simply double-tap with three fingers then without releasing your fingers scroll up, to a maximum of 500%.

All in all, I’d say it’s a pretty cool feature. I’ve thought in the past that it would be cool to have this ability, but I didn’t realize it’s been sitting under my nose for so long.

One final note: if you’ve got VoiceOver turned on, you won’t be able to use Zoom. The two features use the same gestures, and the iPhone will force you to choose one over the other.

I’d be interested to hear if any of you have heard of this feature before, especially if I’m the last one to know.