10 top Smartphone tips that can help make your working day easier…
If you are out of the office a lot then here are some handy tips of how your smartphone could make life easier.
1. Digitise your documents
Thanks to the increasing quality of smartphone cameras, you no longer need to wait until you are in the office to scan important documents. Apps such as Evernote, Google Drive and CamScanner allow you to take pictures of documents and save them to the cloud.
- Get automatic weather alerts
Set up a recipe on IFTTT (or the accompanying mobile apps) and you can get alerts sent straight to your phone if the weather’s looking bad – this is a great tool if you are often on the road visiting customers.
- Control your Wi-Fi with your voice
Siri, Google Now and Cortana all let you turn off Wi-Fi with your voice. Just launch your app of choice and say, “turn off Wi-Fi” to achieve the desired result. This works with Bluetooth as well.
- Email huge files from your iPhone (iOS)
Emailing large files can often be a problem, especially if you are out of the office. However, Apple have found a good solution to this problem. Since iOS 9.2, Mail Drop has been added to iPhone, so when you email a large file from your phone you’ll get a prompt to use it. Instead of attaching the file, Mail uploads it to iCloud, with the download link valid for 30 days.
- Control your computer with your phone
There are multiple apps out there that have some kind of remote control functionality built in, for example Spotify and YouTube. Yet if you want complete control of your laptop or desktop you can use apps such as Unified Remote which allows you to control a number of things from your smartphone such as the mouse, files and also screen mirroring.
- Use aeroplane mode to speed up charging
Running out of battery while out of the office can be so frustrating, so for a quick charge while out and about put it in aeroplane mode. Your phone will use much less battery life and thus charge more quickly.
- Get back home with one a button tap (android)
Google Maps for Android offers a one-icon widget that instantly directs you to the address of your choosing – that means you can create a home screen shortcut that takes you home from anywhere with one finger tap. Great for getting home after a busy day of meetings!
- Set your alarm to get louder and louder (android)
We all understand the struggle of trying to get out of bed for work. The Android alarm allows you to select an ascending alarm tone, making it more and more difficult to ignore!
- Record screencasts on your phone (Android and iOS)
You can record phone screencasts pretty easily: either via the YouTube Gaming app on Android, or by plugging your iOS device into a Mac computer and selecting it as the recording input source in QuickTime.
- Back-up your data
iOS and Android both have their own versions of the Cloud which will keep a backup of the data on your phone. Make sure you activate these to avoid losing documents, photos and contacts.
