Smart Phone Tips Archives - Page 46 of 47

Prey – A great free app for recovering your lost or stolen laptop or mobile device

Posted on February 21, 2013

prey Every day thousands of laptops, tablets and smart phones are lost or stolen, and relatively few of them are ever recovered and returned to their rightful owners. But a free app called Prey can tilt the odds greatly in your favor.

Prey is a small, discrete app that “hides” on your laptop or mobile device and lies dormant until you need it. Then if the device is ever lost or stolen you can easily “wake it up” with a remote signal sent by you either through the Internet or via an SMS message. Once activated, Prey gets right down to business by performing the following actions: [Read more…]

How to close all active apps on your Android phone at once

Posted on February 8, 2013

android-phone Smart phone users love their apps, and many of us have several apps running in the background at any given time. Occasionally a glitch with one of those active apps will cause the phone to freeze up and the only way to unfreeze it is to close the problem app.

But which app is the one that’s causing the problem? It’s often the one that you’re actually using at the time the freeze-up occurs, but not always.

The fastest way to clear up such a problem is to simply close all open apps at once, then reload them. Here’s how to quickly close all active apps: [Read more…]

Google Goggles – Get instant information on virtually anything by taking its picture!

Posted on February 1, 2013

Imagine that you’re walking through your favorite store and an item catches your eye. You pull out your smart phone and take a picture of it and a description pops up with details on the manufacturer, retail pricing and more.

Or perhaps you’re walking through Paris and you come upon an interesting looking building, statue or other landmark. You snap a picture of it with your phone and you’re immediately presented with the details of what you’re looking at.

A bit farther down the street you see a sign written in French (of course), so you photograph it and your phone provides you with the English translation.

Sound like something out of a science fiction movie? Well, it isn’t. This technology is available right now, and it’s absolutely free. Just download a free app called Google Goggles and you’ll be doing just this type of thing in minutes! You can download Google Goggles for free from the Google Play Store.

textPlus – Slash your cell phone bill by texting for free

Posted on January 31, 2013

text-plus If you send thousands of text messages every month but rarely actually talk on the phone, you can use a free app called textPlus to send and receive all the text messages you want for free.

textPlus works great with Andoid phones, iPhones and even iPads and iPod touch devices. This is a great way to downgrade your cell phone plan in order to save money, yet still have the ability to send unlimited texts.

There is one caveat to consider though. Whenever you aren’t connected via Wi-Fi, your text messages will be sent and received via your phone’s data pipe so you’ll need to keep an eye on your data usage. This shouldn’t really be a problem though unless you already max out your data usage each month.

Depending on your phone type, you can download textPlus for free from iTunes or the Google Play Store.

How to reset your smart phone to the factory default settings

Posted on January 29, 2013

android-factory-reset Although it can be a hassle, It sometimes becomes necessary to reset our smart phones back to the factory default settings.

Let’s face it, sometimes the operating system or an app gets so messed up that a factory reset is the only viable option for fixing the problem without sending the phone off or hiring a tech to fix it for us.

It’s also a good idea to reset your phone before giving it away or selling it to a third party, even if the recipient is someone you trust.

It’s not difficult at all to reset an Android phone or iPhone back to its factory default settings. Here’s how to do it: [Read more…]