THESE are from my archive of tips and tricks to get the most out of your gadgets.
Free up space
One great way of freeing up space in your mobile phone is to off load your photos and videos to somewhere. Just this one step will free up probably half of your device’s capacity. There are lots of ways to do this. One, you can off load them all to an external hard drive so you don’t compromise quality. Another would be to upload to the cloud. This method though might force you to contend with downsized photos and videos.
If you’re uploading to Google Photos, you can upload unlimited for free but only if you’re okay with settling down with resized photos and videos. Google Photos will let you backup to it photos up to 16MP in size and videos up to 1080p in quality. Honestly, that’s good enough quality for everybody. If you want to keep the original quality and size, you’ll have to pony up for extra storage once you use up your free 15GB of space. And if you’re on the Apple ecosystem, here are the prices for upgrading your free 5GB of iCloud storage.
Airplane mode; save battery
If you’re out and about in places where cellular reception is spotty at best, switch to airplane mode to conserve your battery. Letting your phone hunt for cellular reception every time, eats up a lot of juice. Your phone’s radio modems are constantly hunting for a cellular reception to make sure that your device is always connected even if it’s just regular cell service.
Sure, you’ll see that your phone doesn’t have reception and the signal bars are absent or marked with an “x”. Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean that the modem inside isn’t powered and keeps on powering itself up to try and get a signal. And that’s just for cellular service. There’s wifi and bluetooth too. Switching over to airplane mode will basically turn off all your radio modems in your device -- cellular, wifi and bluetooth. And without those radio modems eating up precious battery life, you can have snap more selfies for your IG feed.
Update your OS
Sure, there’s always a risk of running into bugs when you update to the latest version of your phone’s operating system. My general tip here is that you update a week or two after the initial release of the update. Based on my experience, that’s more than enough time for bugs to come out and get patched especially if those are critical bugs.
Also, that one or two weeks before updating, will give you the opportunity to let your friends be on the bleeding edge. That’s also enough time for you to crawl around tech news sites and forums for whatever are the latest updates on that recent update.
Running your phone on the latest operating system also ensures that your phone’s inner systems are running on the most optimal version which may lead to better security, better features, better battery life.