Smart Phone Tips Archives - Page 48 of 65

Caution: Having your iPhone 6 repaired by an independent repair shop could permanently brick it

Posted on February 8, 2016

iphone-6-plus Do you own an iPhone 6? If so, I have a warning for you: Think twice before you decide to have it repaired by an independent repair shop.

If your iPhone 6 is running iOS 9, having anyone besides Apple make a repair involving the Home button assembly will likely cause the phone to lock up and display an “Error 53”. And let me tell you, Error 53 is bad.

In short, Error 53 will “brick” your phone, and your only recourse will be to buy a new one. And no, you won’t be able to retrieve your photos or other important files from the phone’s flash memory. [Read more…]

Q&A: How do I disable my ‘Frequently Visited Sites’ in Safari?

Posted on February 1, 2016

Question from Amanda: My 7 year old son frequently uses my iPad to get on his school’s website, and every time he loads Safari it lists the sites I’ve been visiting on the “Frequently Visited Sites” page.

I’d really like to turn that off because I’d rather not have him seeing which websites I visit. Can you tell me how to prevent the “Frequently Visited Sites” from showing up?

Rick’s answer: Amanda, iOS 9 makes it very easy to prevent Safari from showing your frequently visited sites. Just follow the steps below: [Read more…]

How to enable Two-Factor authentication on your LastPass account

Posted on January 17, 2016

Regular readers of this blog know I’m not a huge fan of password managers, but many folks seem to to love them. And that’s fine – to each his/her own as they say.

If you happen to use a password manager, there’s a good chance that you us LastPass, the most popular password manager out there by far.

If so, I strongly recommend that you enable two-factor authentication to prevent crooks and hackers from breaking in to your account and stealing all of your important passwords.

Follow the steps below to set up two-factor authentication on your LastPass account: [Read more…]

Skip the Yellow Pages and use 1-800-FREE411 instead

Posted on December 7, 2015

In a previous post I explained how much faster and easier it is to use Google instead of the Yellow Pages to find a business telephone number.

And yep, I still believe that Google is the best “Yellow Pages” around.

That being said, there are times when using Google from a mobile phone can be a bit difficult, and “Googling” from a landline phone is pretty much impossible. You can always dial 411, but that would almost certainly result in a fee of $1 or more per directory assistance call.

Luckily, you can easily get that number for free, even without using a search engine or having to dial 411. [Read more…]

Make your Android phone’s battery last longer with the free ‘Doze’ app

Posted on November 30, 2015

Update: This is is no longer available.

——————————————————————

Your Android phone has a wonderful power-saving feature called “Doze”, and it’s really pretty amazing.

In a nutshell, Doze puts your phone into a deep sleep when it’s idle, preventing non-critical apps from transferring data in the background during the times when your phone isn’t being used.

Don’t worry, your phone will still ring when someone calls you and you’ll still receive incoming text messages, but pretty much everything else is placed in a holding pattern. And that helps your phone’s battery lost a lot longer than it would otherwise. [Read more…]