3D Touch is without doubt the most exciting new feature in the iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus. It's largely the same pressure-sensitive screen technology that appears in the Apple Watch (under the name Force Touch), but whereas your watch can distinguish between two degrees of pressure - a standard tap and a harder Force Tap - the 3D Touch-equipped 6s offers three. This opens up considerable potential for new interface features.
See also: How to use 3D Touch
In this feature we're going to look at the most useful 3D Touch-enabled tricks, tips and new features that iPhone 6s owners can now enjoy.
But bear in mind that this is a living list: Apple itself is sure to add new 3D Touch features in future iOS updates, but more importantly most third-party app developers have only just been given access to the technology and we anticipate an avalanche of updates in the coming weeks and months. If you spot a 3D Touch trick we've not listed here, feel free to add it in the comments, and we'll update the article periodically to add new 3D Touch tricks that have been announced or discovered.
3D Touch will be activated by default on your new iPhone 6s or 6s Plus, but you can fiddle with a few settings or even turn it off (madness!) by going to Settings > General > Accessibility, swiping down to the unlabelled fourth group of options and tapping 3D Touch. The adjust your sensitivity and once you're ready, turn to the next slide and we'll start exploring this new suite of features.
Go to your Home screen and do a harder press on the icon for the Phone app (not just a normal tap/press - firmly push into the screen). You'll see that a useful little mini-menu pops up, offering the ability to call one of your more frequently called contacts, or to create a new contact.
Do a 3D Touch press on the FaceTime or Messages app icons and you'll see similar quick-jumps to recently or frequently contacted friends - a very helpful means by which you can go straight to a call with a loved one without going into the app, searching through contacts and so on.
The three main Apple communication apps (we're leaving aside Mail for the time being, but we'll come back to it in a moment) offer the most basic execution of the 3D Touch shortcut feature, but many other Apple apps have their own equivalents. The camera app's version of this may be the most useful.
It has a mini menu that lets you jump straight to a normal photo, a video or a selfie, or even a slow-mo video. You'll never miss that important shot again.
(This is particularly useful because Touch ID has been sped up so much that we rarely see the lock screen any more. In the olden days, if you wanted to take a quick photo you would swipe up on the camera icon on the lock screen and access the camera that way.)
There are lots more shortcut menus to discover.
The App Store icon lets you go straight to an app search, and the iBooks app does something similar. (The iTunes Store currently doesn't offer this, oddly, but hopefully this is just a matter of time.) Mail, rather than offering shortcuts to specific contacts, lets you jump to individual inboxes (or start a new message). Safari lets you open a new tab, or a new Private tab, or jump to your Reading List.
There are more to find - try a force-press on any app icon to see if it has a 3D Touch-activated mini menu - but my favourite is probably Apple Maps, whose shortcut menu includes an option to get directions home. Google Maps presently doesn't have a 3D Touch menu, which might conceivably give Apple Maps a slight advantage for a while.
By the way, a few non-Apple apps have 3D Touch shortcuts - Twitter, Fantastical and Instagram are the obvious examples, but a few others such as the CARROT weather app have included this feature too - but most do not. We look forward to seeing what YouTube, Facebook, Google Maps and others come up with.
The aspect of 3D Touch that was most extensively covered at Apple's iPhone 6s launch was a linked pair of features called Peek and Pop. These allow you to preview the contents of an email, document, web page, map direction or other link, without transferring to the app involved. You can then choose to 'Pop' the item open in its relevant app if you want to know more.
The primary example given was in Mail. If you're in the Mail app and do a firmer press on an email, a preview of the message will spring up and let you check out the email without actually opening it in full. You can then do a still firmer press to make the email 'Pop' open fully, or you can release your thumb or finger to close the preview and go back to the screen you were on previously. Alternatively, you can swipe upwards and see a menu of quick actions.
Peek and Pop might not seem like a huge benefit when you're working within one app, but when we start working between multiple apps you'll see the added convenience.
Take directions, for instance. If somebody sends you an address in an email, for instance, you can tap it to jump to Maps and see directions. But if you do a harder press on that address, a handy map preview will appear without whisking you out of the Mail app. You can then swipe up, press harder still to go to Maps, or release to go back. (Making it easy to go back to the app you were in previously is a bit of an Apple theme at the moment, of course. iOS 9 added back buttons all over the place.)
The same principle applies with clickable web links (although only in Apple apps at the moment, as far as I can tell - it will be useful to do this with Twitter links but that's not possible right now). If you deep-press a URL in an email, say, a preview of the web page loads and then appears, and you can see what's there before (or instead of) opening it in full Safari.
There are similar preview options for lots of the Apple apps, and we imagine there will be similar features in non-Apple apps too fairly soon. Try force-pressing links and see what you can find.
Any time you've got the system keyboard up - in Mail, in Messages, even in third-party apps like Twitter - you can do a hard press anywhere on the keyboard and (while the individual keys grey out) you'll take control of a cursor, and can move it about pretty easily.
A simple one this, but very useful for precise text editing. (We advise you to do this with a fingertip, not a thumb. With a thumb we always find that the cursor gets a little jog out of position while we're lifting what is evidently our clumsiest digit off the screen.)
Another quick tip. Do a hard-press close to the lefthand edge of the screen - you can do this from the Home screen or from a lot of apps. You'll see the screen edges of some previously used apps. Press harder still or swipe across to the right and you'll find yourself in the app switcher, from where you can easily jump to a recently open app.
Hey, it's slightly quicker than doing a double-press on the Home button.
The fact that the 3D Touch screen can distinguish between different degrees of pressure is a godsend for makers of illustration and drawing apps: it unlocks the ability to create proper art.
With 3D Touch, you can draw a line across the screen and have a compatible app create a thin line if you're pressing gently and a thicker one if you're using more force: a small but fundamental step forward in touchscreen sketching. (In the past it's been possible to achieve these effects but only crudely - by using the larger area of contact when pressing harder - or by depending on a pressure-sensitive stylus bought separately.)
At the moment we've only seen this in Notes' new sketch feature, but we're sure it's only a matter of time before the big names in the art-software world get involved.
This feature would be even more appealing on a tablet, which is the natural form factor for digital artists, but the implementation of 3D Touch on an iPad screen seems unlikely to happen before the launch of the iPad Pro 2, if it even happens then. Apple will hardly release an iPad Air 3 with a feature that's not available on its flagship tablet. The Pro offers a similar feature provided you buy the (pressure-sensitive) Apple Pencil stylus, but it doesn't have 3D Touch
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