It’s rather hard to overstate the importance of backing up personal files and data for the sake of their protection. In the digital age of today, the content stored on our PCs, smartphones, tablets etc., is perhaps more valuable to some than their lives. While some people worry too much for trivial items like holiday photos (and I repeat, I do not downplay their importance – I just don’t consider them a matter of life and death), others might have much more sensitive information that could differentiate between the success and failure of their businesses. Data security is the top most priority for most users of digital forms of storage, and hence, backup solutions are a must have to be of the safe side.
The three major mobile operating systems are all very advanced, but they are certainly far from perfect, and still lack some quite standard features many users would like to see. The ability to block calls and text at will, for instance, is something we shouldn't have to request or pine for - it should just be there - however, developer Cristiano Tagliamonte has come through with a noteworthy solution in the form of an app called Sanity.
Our smartphones play such an important role in our day-to-day lives that it is extremely easy to think of them as a digital companion that is there for us whenever we need them. Having that reliance on technology brings with it a set of pros and cons, but just like any real-world companion it isn't feasible to expect that we can have access to our phones 24 hours a day to accept and reply to incoming messages. The developer of SMS Replier has obviously given that issue some thought and has developed his own solution for Android owners.
Whenever manufacturers make the decision to go through the upgrade process and release a new version of one of their devices into the wild, they always put extra effort into attempting to make sure they get the maximum possible life out of the battery. They may not admit it, but hardware producers like Samsung, Apple and especially Motorola would trade-in a number of features on their phones if they could guarantee exceptional power performance, as it is just so important to users. With that said, we've all been in the situation where our smartphone dies just at the wrong time.
Although floating apps are an integral part of the desktop computing experience, their presence on mobile devices is a relatively new phenomenon. Still, an app commanding only a fraction of the total display, and which can be moved around at will, is infinitely more useful, and while the likes of Samsung and Sony have both shown signs of implementing floating apps to mobile space, XDA-Developers member pidio1 has swopped the Samsung Galaxy Tab 2’s native browser with a resizable, floating one.
Mobile smartphones and tablets are often thought of as living in their own protected bubble in the consumer electronics world, with users believing that those devices exist in their own class. Whilst there isn't isn't anything fundamentally wrong with that thought process, it is also extremely important to treat our mobile hardware as a portable computer and therefore protecting them and locking them down as such. Android smartphone users can now drastically enhance the protection afforded to their devices by using the relatively new SecDroid app.
It’s true that Apple made tablets – portable computers with a slate design – a mainstream gadget with their iPad, even though there existed a lot of similar devices before that. Not only did they make it more accessible by selling the iPad at a price point that was agreeable to the masses, but the support from the Cupertino giant’s iTunes App Store with its massive number of iPad specific apps also helped the device’s popularity. Even though competitive manufacturers jumped onto the bandwagon with their similar Android based offerings, even today, the iOS App Store sports a much larger number of tablet-optimized apps in comparison to Google Play Store.
If you're constrained by a data plan, or just plain curious about how much traffic you're running through, you may find Network Traffic Monitor for Android to be of use. As it name quite openly entails, it allows you to keep a close eye on the amount data use in real-time, ensuring you don't use excessive amounts of data, and helping you source the main points of your network use.
Personalizing your mobile device to your liking is still one popular idea, and a lot of people spend quite a good amount of time setting their phones up with the right wallpapers, themes, graphics and audio effects. Of course, as the smartphones have evolved, so have the customization means, but that still doesn’t mean that the old things have lost their touch. I remember back in the day of Nokia devices when monochord ringtones were the rage, and being able to compose your own ringtone was the height of customization that you could’ve gotten on your phone (along side the funky carrier logo on the monochrome screen of the Nokia 3310).
Smartphones these days are not mere communication devices, and I’ve said so many times before as well. What they’ve turned into is an all-in-one solution for portable media playback, internet surfing, managing personal information, manipulating documents, spreadsheets, presentations on the go, and so much more. Not to miss out on one of the key uses that a capable smartphone is put through, is photography. The powerful camera units being mounted atop these devices nowadays have practically redefined the whole digital photography frontier, and spawned an entirely new breed of photographers who have a reasonable quality capturing unit for every moment, right there in their pockets.
