Most of us have smartphones these days, and it is pretty normal to carry it everywhere you go. Part of this is that they are also becoming more and more a part of what we do in daily lives, and gradually an increasing number of tasks and situations call for the smartphone to be pulled out of the pocket and utilised.
Because of that, it’s good if you can get to a point where your smartphone is truly ready for anything. Are you doing all you can to make this happen? In this post, we are going to take a look at some of the best ways to ensure you are getting the most out of your smartphone.
Safe To Use
One of the most basic and essential things of all is that your smartphone is safe to use by whoever is going to be using it. If you are due to use it yourself, then there might not be much to consider here. But if, on the other hand, your young child is going to be using a smartphone, you need to think about how you are going to make it as safe as possible, especially given the fact that they can access anything at all online through that device these days.
There are a lot of procedures to go through here in order to make a smartphone safer to use. First of all, consider installing basic parental blockage apps, so that you can control what content they see. You might also want to think about using a tracking app to ensure that you always know where your child is at all times. In this way, the smartphone can be made not just safe, but it can actually turn into a kind of safety device all of its own.
This is not just something that you have to think about for children. When you are using a smartphone, you need to make sure that you are protecting yourself and not putting yourself in danger’s way. There are a lot of ways in which a smartphone can expose you – for instance, if you carry out internet banking on your phone, then you are going to want to ensure that those apps are well protected, and you’ll also want to protect the phone itself by having a lock that nobody can get through.
These days, most new smartphones come with a suite of security and protection options. Some of the most powerful are those where you have to literally be you in order to unlock the phone at all, such as fingerprint scanning to unlock or face unlock, or even both at once. Be sure to use all these features, and you can be secure in the knowledge that your phone is safe to use. That then means you can focus on some of the other elements that can help to make your phone ready for any situation that you might find yourself in.
Speedy
Over time, smartphones can become a little slow and sluggish, just like any piece of technological equipment. No matter what brand your phone is, or how well-designed and produced it may be, you are always going to find that this is a possibility, and after a couple of years you might start to notice a considerable change in how slow the phone actually goes.
Of course, the good news there is that there are many ways to speed up your phone, even if it is a particularly old one and you feel like it might be on its last legs. It may well be, and you might want to upgrade the entire phone at some near point in the future, but you should also consider some of the following tips and tricks to help speed up your sluggish phone.
Occasionally, make sure that you completely power off your phone. Just doing this is going to mean that you are clearing the phone of its temporary memory banks. Then, when the phone starts up again, it has all of that RAM to use, which means that it will perform all tasks much more quickly. You might be surprised at what a profound difference this can make, so it’s definitely something that you are going to want to think about.
Next up, try to make a habit of deleting any files that you don’t actually have any need for. It can be all too easy to allow your photos, music and other files to pick up along the way, especially if you use a messaging app like WhatsApp, where you might end up with more than one copy of an image. You need to go through regularly and delete everything you can as necessary, and use any features that the phone has to do this automatically if possible too.
At the same time, make sure that you are deleting any apps that you are not using, as these only take up a huge amount of space. The less storage space you are using, the quicker the phone will run, so this is really something that you will want to focus on as best as you can.
One last note on storage: simply using the cloud can alleviate much of this trouble, as in this case it is going to be stored online, rather than on your phone. Of course, that means you will need internet access to be able to access those files, so this is a problem if you ever find yourself without mobile data or wi-fi.
Finally: one of the strongest ways to speed up an old phone is to take a look at what processes are running in the background and remove any that might be deemed unnecessary. This is going to help speed up your processing considerably, so it is something that you will really want to bear in mind. If you are not sure whether a process is necessary or not, you can generally look it up online and find out that way.
Data Access
Most people with a smartphone use it primarily for accessing the internet, so you need to make sure that your phone is truly ready for this as well. There are a few things that might impede your phone’s ability to easily and readily connect to the web, and it’s something that you might want to look into if you are keen to get the most out of your phone. As it happens, it is normally quite easy to troubleshoot internet problems, and usually just changing something simple can make all the difference in the world.
First of all, take a look at your contract for data, as it might be that this is causing you to cut out unnecessarily. You need to have a good idea of how much data you are likely to use, and then make sure that you have a contract which is actually providing that for you as best as possible. There are many unlimited data plans that you might want to seek out, especially if you rely on the internet on your phone quite a lot. Alternatively, you can go for a lower-data plan, but make sure that you have enough to be getting on with each month. You can always start low and work up.
It’s not just about the data plan you have, however – you also need to make sure that you are setting up your phone so that it accesses data as easily as possible. It’s amazing what a difference it can make to make this change, and it’s something that you are probably going to find is surprisingly easy to do as well. Mostly this is about ensuring that you are not having too many internet-using apps in the background, as if you are then this will use up more of your monthly data, but it will also mean that your bandwidth is being used, and your experience of the internet will be that it is much slower.
To improve your data experience, you might also want to remember to use wi-fi wherever possible. This saves your data, which is important if you don’t have unlimited data, and it also means that you are going to be able to have faster internet a lot of the time. Set up your phone so that it is automatically connecting to high-quality wi-fi networks, and you’ll find that you get a lot more out of your internet usage on the whole.
Do all that, and your phone’s data access will be greatly improved, and that will contribute a lot towards the phone being ready for anything.
We only looked at a few things here, but each of them is important, and if you want your phone to be truly ready for anything, then these are the main ones that you are going to want to focus on. Be sure to consider all of this in turn, and remember that sometimes you do just need to upgrade to a new phone. But in the meantime, don’t be afraid to do this.
