Articles about Know Your Mobile

Despite planning to stick with my iPhone 6s for another year, I ended up upgrading to the iPhone 7, and I’m pleased that I did. If you were lucky enough to get an iPhone 7 for Christmas, or an iPhone 7 Plus for that matter, you’re no doubt going to be as happy with the latest Apple smartphone as I am.

Getting started is straightforward, as once the phone is turned on you’ll be walked through the set up process, how to configure the Touch ID fingerprint scanner, and set up a PIN. Once you've set up the basics, it's time to explore what you can do with your new device.

Continue reading →

If Santa brought you a Galaxy S7 or Galaxy S7 edge, you are in for a treat. Samsung's flagships are, without question, two of the best high-end smartphones available right now, featuring an amazing camera, a gorgeous display, fantastic performance, impressive battery life, powerful software, a waterproof rating, and a premium design. Impressive, indeed.

To help you get comfortable with your new Galaxy S7 or Galaxy S7 edge, we have prepared this guide with tips on how to get started, set it up and what accessories to buy. So, without further ado, here is what you need to know.

Continue reading →

Consider yourself extremely lucky: Santa just brought you one of the hottest smartphones of the year. The OnePlus 3T is the latest and greatest in OnePlus' line of flagship killers, packing really powerful hardware, a nice, big screen, solid camera, lovely software and a sleek design. It is also terrific value for money, but, hey, who cares about that right now?

If you are like me, all you can think about is taking it out of the box, setting it up and starting to use it right away. Here is what you need to know.

Continue reading →

In addition to news and reviews, we also regularly publish 'How to' guides here on BetaNews.

These are often very popular and cover a range of topics, software, and services. Taking a look back, as is the tradition at this time of year, I thought it would be good to revisit the most popular guides published in the past 12 months.

Continue reading →

If you have an unlimited mobile data plan -- or a very generous one at least -- then you don’t have to worry about apps going crazy, and gobbling up data when you’re out and about.

If, however, you’re on a more limited plan, you probably want to save data where you can. Facebook is one of the worst apps for consuming data rather unnecessarily, but you can rein it in.

Continue reading →

While most smartphones can backup photos and other content to the cloud on a regular basis, there are downsides -- backups handled by third-party apps might not always happen, free storage can quickly become full (I’m looking at you, iCloud) and of course cloud services could be compromised.

MEEM memory cable offers a low cost solution to all of those problems -- automatically, and securely backing up your iPhone or Android device every time you charge it.

Continue reading →

Occasionally in the past I’ve tried to zoom further into a photo on my phone than is allowed by iOS. It’s usually to try and read some text, or identify a particular object in the background.

I’ve often wished there was a way to go beyond the fixed zoom set in the Photos app, and it turns out there is. It’s not a feature, but rather a bug that gives you the ability to zoom into infinity (and beyond!), but it works well and it's easy to do.

Continue reading →

I know plenty of people who -- literally -- spend their lives on Facebook, sharing everything they do, and obsessively reading and reacting to every post made by their friends.

But here’s the thing. Despite all of the hours they put into being on the site, they probably only know a fraction of what it has to offer. There are a lot of features tucked away that they -- and you -- might never encounter. Think you know Facebook? Think again...

Continue reading →

I have to apologize upfront for employing such a well-known clickbait-style headline, but I’m genuinely about to show you how to immediately reclaim a lot of free space on a nearly full Apple iPhone using a weird trick. It’s not an April Fool’s either.

If you have an iPhone that’s close to running out of space, you can use this method to free up a sizable amount of storage. On my iPhone, which was filled to bursting with vacation photos, music and apps I managed to claw back a couple of gigabytes, which is some going.

Continue reading →

Once people have made the decision to go with a particular mobile operating system, they tend to stick with it. Moving all of your data from one device to another can be a bit of a pain, and it’s made even harder if you’re also switching operating systems, and have to find and re-buy all of your favorite apps.

If you’re thinking of making the move from Android to Windows Phone -- perhaps in anticipation of Windows 10 Mobile later in the year -- the process doesn’t have to be stressful. Here’s what you need to do.

Continue reading →

There was a time when phones only contained text messages and contacts that the value of your device had been more important than what it stores. But that period is now long gone. In today’s age of smartphones, information has become more valuable than the device itself, which is why having a PIN on your smartphone has become more important than ever.

Tons of information -- such as your social media accounts, email messages and bank details -- can be accessed from your phone and we all know that security is not something to be ignored in this day and age. Setting up a passcode is an easy task on both Android and iOS smartphones and here’s how it’s done.

Continue reading →

Remember the halcyon days of your HTC One/LG G3/Samsung Galaxy S5? How you ran your fingers across the screen and marveled as it transitioned smoothly between apps? You were together, taking on the world in ergonomic bliss.

Now though, with a few scratches to the screen and some scuff marks to the casing, your beloved phone has become sluggish and as you browse the web, your eyes guiltily move towards the gleaming fascias of the latest models.

Continue reading →

A friend of mine bought a new iPhone 5s recently, used it for just over a week, and then 'lost it'. It might have been stolen or simply misplaced, she has no idea. All she knows for certain is she no longer has it in her possession. That’s bad enough, but she spent much of the first week copying over photos and other personal data to it from her old phone, but didn’t devote any time -- at all -- to protecting the device.

So in other words, if someone else has her iPhone now -- which it’s pretty safe to assume is the case -- they also have access to everything on it, which could be potentially catastrophic for her. The thing is, it’s so easy to protect a smartphone these days it amazes me so many people don’t bother to take the following simple steps:

Continue reading →

Windows Phone handsets don't get more advanced than the Nokia Lumia 930. Its large screen and top-notch features make it a leading light, and it is the current flagship Nokia Lumia smartphone.

The Lumia 930 comes pre-loaded with Windows Phone 8.1, the latest version of Microsoft's mobile OS, and so there is plenty of good stuff for new owners to get their teeth into. I've teased out some of the key features here, so read on to learn more.

Continue reading →

Photos give us a window to the world -- our own experiences can only show us so much. Photos give us a richness of experience and perspective that we would otherwise be devoid of. The sudden existence of billions of smart phones, which take trillions of photos and videos per year, has given us the biggest increase we’ve seen yet in rich user data -- and now we have the technology to start to make sense of that data.

With this new technology, it’s now possible to analyze photos for myriad applications. For example, at Jetpac we use 100s of millions of travel photos shared on Instagram to develop the Jetpac City Guides app, and do object recognition on the photos to be able to recommend places such as restaurants with patios (from the blue skies in the photos), hipster bars (by the unusually high number of mustaches we spot in photos), and the best coffee shops (from the highest proportion of latte art in photos). We've also now developed deep learning AI technology to broaden our ability to be able to recognize all objects in photos. Putting deep learning on the iPhone (Spotter by Jetpac) means we can now recognize many objects from the iPhone's real-time video feed, locally on the phone. Having minimized the technology significantly, we also have room to allow you to train the phone to recognize a specific object (Deep Belief by Jetpac).

Continue reading →