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Create Contact-Specific Custom Vibrations

If your phone spends most of the day in your pocket, on vibrate, contact-specific vibration patterns allow you to identify who's calling without taking the phone out of your pocket.

To create and enable a contact-specific vibration, you first need to make sure custom vibrations are enabled in Settings > General > Accessibility > Custom Vibrations. Then just fire up your Phone app, select a contact, tap Edit > vibration > Create New Vibration. Tap out your custom cadence (I started with the always-original "Shave and a haircut"), then tap Stop when you're done. You can test your rhythm by replaying the pattern, then save and name it. Piece of cake.

If you feel like you've created a vibratory masterpiece, you can set it as your phone's default vibration in Settings > Sounds > Vibration. (Note that you can also record new patterns here as well.)

Android users: Check out previously mentioned WhoIsIt for a handy companion app for creating contact-specific custom notifications.

Enable LED Notifications

A lot of phones allow you to flash an LED for a more visual alert. To enable LED notifications in iOS 5, you've got to dig down into the Accessibility menu in Settings > General > Accessibility, then enable LED Flash for Alerts. There's a pretty big catch to this one, though: It only works when your phone is in silent mode (that is, vibration turned off in Settings > Sounds and the vibrate/silence hardware switch toggled on.

You should also keep in mind that it's not a persistent flash; as far as I can tell, it emanates one showy series of flashes and then goes away.

Previously when responding to a text message, you had to go back to the message list view and then tap back into the message to hide the keyboard. You can now swipe down in the conversation view to "swipe away" the keyboard. It's hard to explain, but try it: open a text (or iMessage) with the keyboard open and then tap the top conversation area and swipe down to drag the keyboard down off the screen. AWESOME.