iOS 6 is a marvellous operating system. There are many little tricks to make it even better to use. And what’s surprising is how many people haven’t even bothered to look at a certain menu in their tablets or iPhones.

So lets get started. We will use the iPhone as the example, but the principle is similar for your iPad, except for flashes.

First up, go to the settings app, select general, keyboards, add new keyboard. Scroll down til you get to Emoji. Select this. Whenever you go to use the iOS keyboard you will now have a globe icon bottom left. Tap this to switch between emoji and the standard keyboard.

Next go to settings app again, general , accessibility and turn on speak selection, scroll down a bit and turn on led flash for alerts.

So what do all these settings do in practice. Emoji icons allow you to do this “😄🏁🚲💉🍻⛄☕” now if you don’t have an apple device you won’t see them. Some android devices do have the emoji plugin or installed as a third party option, but it’s not standard yet in that system.

Problem is, what do some of the emoji icons actually mean. There are so many different facial expressions it can be tricky working out their meanings. Panic no more, simple hold and select them , and one of the new options is speak. Tap this, and Siri will read out all the emoji icons expressions in full. Speak all will read out any text highlighted. Siri is quite fun with this.

The led flash for alerts does exactly what it says, when the phone is asleep or screen off. The camera flashes briefly to alert you on a notification. On the iPhone 5 it is a powerful yet discreet alert. On older iPhone models like the 4S the flash is very bright.

So there we have a few tips for your today. If you have any other ones, feel free to share in the comments.