When I upgraded to a new iPhone 3G from my first gen iPhone, I was magnanimous enough to pass my old iPhone down to my wife. Since she had seen me using the iPhone for the past year, I sort of took for granted that she knew what do to with it and I didn’t really go too crazy with the tutorials. However, the other night she was listening to music on her iPhone and I began babbling on about some geeky thing or another, and I noticed she unlocked her iPhone to pause it before pretending to care what I was talking about (she’s good like that).

“You know, if you squeeze that microphone on the cord, it will pause the track for you,” I said. “Really?” “Yep. And if hit click it twice, it will skip to the next track“. Well, her eyes lit up, as if she’d suddenly regained some of her missing iPod clickwheel functionality.

It then occurred to me that there may be others out there who are technologically savvy enough to know they WANT the iPhone, but not nerdy enough to read the manual, or perhaps they are inheriting it as my wife did and don’t even know what questions to ask. To that end, I present our first Newbie Tip: Get the most out of your iPhone’s Ear Buds. Here’s what you can do with them (besides listen to music).

If music is playing, click the microphone once to pause a track, twice to skip to the next track. (As of the 2.1 update, pressing 3 times will skip BACKWARDS to the previous track)

If music is playing, and a call comes in, click once to answer the call, click and hold to send the call into your voicemail

Many iPhone games will pause your music when they launch, but in many cases you can get around this if you have the Apple earbuds. If a game pauses your music, simply wait a moment or two, then click the earbud microphone to resume playback. Games with heavy sound effects may not allow for this, but many do. If this does not work, try seeing if the game has an audio switch in its settings menu, and if so, turn off the games audio, and relaunch. You should be good to go.