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Inside Apple iPhones, Windows phones, Samsung Android phones & more!
CBN83 2014
Welcome
Everything you need to know to choose the right smartphone and get the best from it! ccording to the latest figures from the UK telecoms regulator, Ofcom, 93% of adults in the UK use a mobile phone. In the US, according to Pew Research, the figure is near enough identical at 91%. Among older adults, however, a separate Pew Research report reveals, only 77% have a cell phone of some kind. And while more than half of all Americans now have a smartphone, only 18% of older adults do. Are you among that 82% and now thinking about getting a smartphone? We have all the advice and information you need. We’ll help you understand what makes a smartphone “smart” and what getting one could do for you. We’ll guide you through the maze of models and platforms and price plans, and help you choose the right smartphone for you. We’ll introduce the essentials of iPhone, Android, Windows Phone, BlackBerry and Amazon Fire Phone, and then show you step-by-step how to get to grips with each major platform. You’ll find out how to use your smartphone to browse the web, take and share photos, manage your appointments and emails, and much more. Whatever your level of experience, we’ll make choosing and using your smartphone child’s play!
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Contents
Your complete guide to choosing and using a smartphone
Introduction
Android
Get to know the various types of smartphones and how they work
Your introduction to the range of smartphones running Google’s OS
6 14 18 20 22 28 34 36 40 46 52 56
96 Set up your Android phone 98 Get a better keyboard 100 Get more from your browser 102 Stay found with Google Maps
What is a smartphone and why would I want one? How to choose a smartphone Using gestures Comparing platforms Smartphone photography Use Facebook on your phone Get to know the iPhone Your basic guide to iPhone Explore your Android phone Your Windows Phone handset Considering a BlackBerry? Amazon Fire Phone
iPhone Get to grips with Apple’s stylish smartphones 62 64 66 68 70 72 74 75 76 78 79 80 82 84 86 88 89 90 92
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Setting up your iPhone Master the Home button The Lock Screen and security Touch ID fingerprint recognition Use Siri voice control Master the iPhone keyboard QuickType predictive text Save tickets with Passbook Keeping in touch Web browsing on the iPhone Read and send email Read e-books and PDFs Master the Maps app The iPhone’s Calendar app Organise your life Video calls with FaceTime Locate a lost iPhone Locate your friends Look after yourself
104 Get info with Google Now 106 Stay organised 108 Get started with Kindle 110 Track data usage on 3G 112 Protect your Android phone 114 Encrypt your Android phone 116 Free antivirus for your phone 118 Stop ads invading your phone 120 Find and install new apps
Windows Phone
All you need to know about Microsoft’s smartphone operating system 126 Get to know Windows Phone 130 Manage your life 132 Quick and easy texting 134 In-car navigation
136 The power of mobile email 138 Secure your Windows Phone 142 Make calls and keep in touch 145 Adding new apps
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What is a
smartphone and why would I want one? Thinkstock
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Smartphones | INTROduction
Smartphones must be better than ordinary phones, right? They sound like useful things you should know more about. But what exactly is a smartphone and what can you do with one? And why should you spend your money on one? Let’s find out… hat makes a smartphone “smart”? Computer experts – and phone sales staff – will probably give you a long and complicated answer, but in a nutshell, a smartphone is a modern, fancy version of the mobile phones we’ve been using for the last two or three decades, with two main differences. First, they can access the internet (which opens them up to all sorts of amazing new abilities beyond just looking at websites); and second, they can do much more than just make phone calls and send text messages. As a rule, modern smartphones all look pretty much the same, too – most don’t have physical buttons or keyboards (though a few do), and instead you use them by tapping the screen with your finger. That might sound tricky, but smartphones can actually be really easy to use – far easier, in some ways, than laptops or traditional computers that sit on a desk – and they are true modern marvels that will help keep you in touch with your friends, family and the world around you like nothing most of us could ever have imagined.
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showing you where you are in the world, taking and sharing photographs, and even some more advanced things, such as keeping in touch with people using Facebook. You don’t have to get too hung up on picking one kind of smartphone over another, then, but there are different kinds. For most people, the choice is between Apple’s iPhone and so-called Android phones, which are made by a range of different companies including Samsung, HTC and LG but all work much the same (though with some differences). There are other kinds of smartphones (or “platforms”) too – Amazon’s Fire Phone technically operates using a version of Android; Microsoft makes Windows Phone
A smartphone is a mobile phone that can access the internet and do more than make calls or send texts you might choose one over the other, it doesn’t really matter which you buy (at least not unless you’re deeply into cars and perhaps clock up 80,000 miles a year). In fact, we’ll stretch the analogy further: if you’re deciding between a diesel and a petrol car and you pick the petrol one not because of the kind of fuel it uses but because you just like the colour, it won’t be a disaster. In the same way, if you simply like how a Samsung Galaxy S5 looks, for example, unless you have solid reasons to pick an iPhone instead and lots of ambitions about using it, you should be fine to buy it.
Choices to make Many different companies make smartphones (“smartphone” is just a generic term to describe them all), and while there are differences between the various families and models of smartphone, you don’t really need to worry too much about those differences; they tend to matter more if you’re planning to use your smartphone a lot and in some quite advanced ways. Every smartphone can do the core things most people would want one to do – sending and receiving emails and messages, viewing web pages,
handsets; and the venerable BlackBerry, whose devices could be said to have kick-started the smartphone trend, is still making phones – but it bears repeating: picking one kind of smartphone is much less important than your more tech-savvy friends and relatives might have you believe. You can think of it as a little like choosing between a petrol and a diesel car: both perform the same basic function and use the same roads, and while there are definitely reasons why
The basics and beyond
Some smartphone features – such as Apple’s Find My Friends app – work only within the same platform: iPhone to iPhone, Android to Android, and so on.
Once you’ve bought a smartphone – be it an iPhone, an Android phone, a Windows Phone or a BlackBerry model – it is a lot like committing to either petrol or diesel fuel, in the sense that you can’t use Android apps on an iPhone (see page 8). But you could switch later if you find that your choice doesn’t work for you. How much of a pain this will be
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INTROduction | Smartphones Smartphones can do amazing things, such as giving you step-by-step directions for getting from A to B.
depends on whether you’ve been using features that are exclusive to the kind of phone you first bought. It’s hard to be definitive because it varies so much from person to person, but it’s broadly safe to say that if you just do a few pretty basic things (or at least, basic as far as a smartphone is concerned), such as text messaging, phone calls, email and the internet, mapping, photos and listening to music, then switching between, say, Android and iPhone should be comparatively painless. One thing to throw into the mix when you’re choosing what smartphone to buy (see page 14) is whether your friends and family favour a particular smartphone platform. This is partly because some features on an iPhone, for example, work best when contacting other iPhones, but also because you might be able to help each other if you get stuck. (Be warned, mind you, that although we’ve blithely lumped devices that use Android into one big group, different manufacturers can introduce
Smartphones enable you to read and send emails wherever you are – and if you find it difficult to type or don’t want to bother, they even take dictation. differences between them, so even if you have, say, an Android phone made by Samsung and your friend has an
A smartphone can do lots of things as soon as you take it out of the box – such as showing you driving directions, checking your email and browsing the web, as well as the usual phone tasks, such as making calls and
sending text messages – but you can make it do many, many more things by adding apps. But what is an app? If you use a computer, you’re probably already familiar with the concept of apps, although
you might not realise it. Another – slightly older – word for apps is software, and there’s really no difference between the two. Internet Explorer on a PC, for example, is an app, as is Microsoft Word. So are Safari
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Wi nd ow s
What is an app? In short, a way to do more things…
Pretty much all smartphones have an app store, where you can find ways to extend their abilities. Here’s Apple’s App Store.
Android’s Play Store offers a pretty closely comparable range of apps to enable you to do even more with your Android phone.
Like other app stores, the Windows Phone Store has free as well as paid-for apps, so you might not need to splash out to do more.
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and Pages on a Mac, and so on. In practical terms, an app is one of the little pictures (called icons) that you see on your smartphone’s home screen, which you tap to start doing something with it. Indeed, all those things that a smartphone can do as soon as you switch it on use apps – apps such as Browser or Internet on an Android device, or Safari on an iPhone – but these are what’s called “built-in” apps. If your smartphone were a vacuum cleaner, each app would be one of the attachments you use to perform a specific task; many come with it, and you can add more to perform more tasks. In other words, you can add new apps in order to add new abilities to your smartphone, ranging from useful, practical things such as powerful weather forecasts to silly, fun things such as games and puzzles. One of the apps you’ll find on your smartphone is a kind of virtual shop, which you can open to
Smartphones | INTROduction
Any mobile phone enables you to keep in touch with family and friends through phone calls and text messages, and of course a smartphone can do those things, too. Anywhere you can get a
browse all the different extra things you can do with the device: it’s called App Store on iPhones, Play Store on most Android phones, App World on BlackBerry phones, Appstore on Amazon Fire Phones, and simply Store on Windows Phones. Some of the apps you can add are completely free, while some cost (usually small amounts of) money, and some are free but require you to subscribe to a service or pay fees to unlock certain functions. Be aware that the choice can be overwhelming, but you can use reviews and best-sellers charts on the app store to help you decide which apps are worth getting. Of course, you might never add any new apps at all to your smartphone, and that’s completely fine. But if you have a few minutes spare one day, it’s worth browsing your phone’s app store to see what’s available – you might be amazed to discover all the new things you can use your smartphone for.
To start doing something with a smartphone, just tap it with your finger.
read and write emails, and search and browse the web. Having the whole internet in your pocket is very handy indeed, and it makes it easy to search for an answer – anything from “Tesco opening hours” to medical information – wherever you are. These days, of course, a lot of younger folk use social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter to keep other people up to date with what they’re doing. You might have (quite legitimate)
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Keep in touch
mobile signal, you can be in touch to share news, ask for help, or just let someone know you’re thinking of them. A smartphone, though, can do much more besides, and one of the most exciting things is video calling. Using this feature, you can connect to someone else’s smartphone (or another kind of computer), and they can see and hear you at the same time as you can see and hear them. The quality can actually be very good (especially if you’re somewhere where you can connect to a Wi-Fi network). iPhones use a system called FaceTime that can talk only to other Apple devices, and Android devices use an app called Hangouts, which you can also get for iPhone and PCs/Macs but not Windows Phones. But the good news is that you can almost certainly do video calls using an app called Skype on whatever smartphone you have, and use it to talk to anyone on iPhone, Android, Windows Phone, PC or Mac. What’s more, video calls are free, though you should make sure your price plan allows enough data if you’re going to be making video calls over the mobile network, because it uses a lot of data; if you’re calling on Wi-Fi, you should be fine. It’s an astonishing way of keeping in touch with friends and family all over the world. Even if you can’t make it out to Australia to visit grandchildren, for example, you could see them every day with a video chat. A smartphone also enables you to
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Android phone made by HTC, they still do certain things slightly differently.) So why get a smartphone? First, smartphones connect us with friends and family all over the world, not just by phone or text but in amazing ways, and they enable you to do hundreds of fun and useful things pretty much wherever you are. What’s more, smartphones are “do-anything” devices: not only can they do loads of things out-of-the-box, but you can extend their abilities by adding apps (see below) and other accessories to them (see page 12). For some people, a smartphone could be the last gadget they ever need to buy! Let’s dig into just a few of the things you can do with smartphones to give you a flavour of their abilities.
Although there are differences between smartphones, they all do the same basic things, and broadly in the same way. Here, for example, is the BBC News website on both an iPhone and an Android device – can you even tell them apart?
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INTROduction | Smartphones
Naturally, as well as doing all sort of other whizzy things, a smartphone can make normal phone calls.
concerns about privacy, or find such sites quite complex (younger people do, too!), but they can be a great way of seeing what friends and families have been up to. People write letters increasingly rarely these days, so sites like these are worth linking up with people on, if only to see photos and hear news of friends and family all over the world – and you can do it all from your smartphone, wherever you are. Don’t forget either that a smartphone can take photos and video, so you can share your own pictures and movies to let people know what and how you’re doing – see page 22 for more.
Getting around Using a combination of different technical tricks (including the kind of GPS system you might be familiar with from sat-navs), your smartphone knows where it is in the world at all times. You can use this for all sorts of clever things, but one of the most useful is showing you where you are, informing you about what attractions and services are nearby, and helping you get where you want to
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You can talk to your children, grandchildren and friends all over the world using video calls, normally free of charge.
go. All modern smartphones can give you this kind of routing information, showing you detailed instructions for driving, walking or, in some cases, public transport. What’s more, they don’t just show you the route but guide you along the way as you move, rerouting you back if you take a wrong turning. Most even have live traffic updates, helping you avoid delays caused by accidents along your route, for example. All you have to do is search for where you want to go, then tap a button to get shown directions. Perhaps even more usefully, if you have an iPhone or an Android phone, you can share your current location with others who are using the same platform, and see theirs in return, making it easy to keep track of when the family are actually going to arrive for Sunday lunch, for example. Further afield, your smartphone is an essential travelling companion. Add the right apps and it can show live delays on the train network or tell you when the next bus will come along. You can store electronic tickets and boarding passes, and use just your smartphone to check in rather than having another piece of paper to worry about. If you’re abroad, you can use your smartphone for everything from checking currency conversions to translating signs and menus for you. Talk to your phone
Lots of people, especially youngsters, regularly update their pages on sites such as Facebook, enabling you to see what they’ve been up to. network provider before you go, though, to make sure you’re not going to get stung with a huge bill for your data use when you get back home; you want to ask what their charges are for “roaming” (see page 14 for more).
Entertainment on tap We said a smartphone might be the last gadget you ever have to buy, and this is partly because it can do so many different things. Some smartphones, for example, have an FM radio built in, but even if they don’t, you can still listen to radio streamed over the internet anywhere you can get a mobile signal. Not only can you listen to familiar stations such as Radio 2 and Radio 4 using the BBC iPlayer app but, using an app such as TuneIn Radio, you can listen to tens of thousands of stations from all over the world. You can watch TV, too, either by plugging a TV tuner such as those made by Elgato into your smartphone and tuning into the regular TV broadcast transmissions, or again by watching using the internet. iPlayer is an obvious one here again, but ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5 all have catch-up apps, too, which also enable you to watch live broadcasts, or you could use an app such as TVCatchup to watch a wide range of live channels. You can also watch movies and TV box-sets, either by buying or renting individual titles, or by subscribing to
Smartphones | INTROduction
Accessibility options One important smartphone feature that’s often overlooked is accessibility. This is the name given to different ways that the device can benefit people with a range of physical or learning difficulties. You might not think you need such features if you’re lucky enough to find yourself generally able-bodied, but it’s likely that, especially as we get a little older, we might find some of them useful. To enable a smartphone’s accessibility settings or configure them, in most cases you first open its Settings app. On iPhones you then tap on General and then Accessibility; on Android, find Accessibility in the main Settings menu; and on Windows Phone you need to look for Ease of Access in the main Settings menu. One of the key accessibility features helps those of us who don’t see as well as we once did, and one of the simplest parts of that is changing the size of on-screen text to make it easier to read. In most cases, you can make the text bigger in every app on your smartphone by adjusting a single setting (Larger Text on an iPhone, Font Size on Android and Text Size on Windows Phone). This is
a service such as Netflix or Amazon Instant Video (although only the former is currently supported on Windows Phone). For a small monthly fee, these services enable you to watch as many TV shows and movies as you like; they’re not exhaustive, of course, but the range should be broad enough that most people should always be able to find something interesting or entertaining to watch. Even better, both have free trials, so if you’ve never tried them before (or just want to take a closer look at the range of shows and films on offer), you can give them a whirl without spending a penny. What’s more, if you have a modern smart TV, it’s likely you’ll have one or both of these services on there, too, so if you sign up for them on your
especially useful if you chose a smartphone that doesn’t have an especially large screen to start with – though, of course, be aware that if you increase the size of the letters in this way, you’ll fit less text on the screen at a time.
Take a closer look If that’s not enough, or if you don’t want to change the size of every piece of text on your phone but instead want to peek more closely just at some things, all smartphones should enable you to zoom in, making everything temporarily bigger, a little like holding a magnifying glass above the screen. You might need to enable this ability in Settings, but once you’ve done so, then triggering it is a simple matter of tapping in a particular way on the screen (your phone will tell you precisely what this should be – see page 18), and then panning around to see everything that’s on the screen. If you find the screen hard to make out, an iPhone or a Windows Phone will enable you to bump up the contrast to make everything more distinct, and an iPhone can go further, optionally inverting the screen
A smartphone can adjust itself to make it easier for you to use – for example, you can make text bigger and increase contrast. or removing all the colours to make it black-and-white. If even that might not be enough, most smartphones can read aloud anything that’s on the screen, so even someone who is completely blind is able to use a smartphone. If you’re hearing-impaired, again a smartphone can help. Both iPhones and Windows Phones have explicit support for hearing aids, and in some cases you’ll be able to have
smartphone, then you can use the same account to watch shows on either your TV or your smartphone – and they’re usually smart enough to let you start watching something on one and then finish watching it on the other. It doesn’t all have to be high-tech entertainment, of course: you can also read books on your smartphone. There are a few different options for doing this (Apple’s iBooks app on iPhones, say, or the Barnes & Noble Nook app) but by far the most famous and popular is Amazon’s Kindle system. The great news is that if you’ve already got a Kindle, you can simply download the free Kindle app on to your smartphone (it’s available for essentially all platforms) and then, when you tap on it and sign in, all the books that you’ve already
subtitles displayed when watching movies. In some cases you can also choose to have a light flash when something needs your attention, such as alerts or incoming messages. It’s not only in getting information out of your phone that accessibility features can help, either: iPhones, Android devices and Windows Phones can turn your speech input into text in any place where you would usually type, such as an email or text message. It might seem odd dictating to your smartphone, but it’s remarkably accurate – and you can always make corrections using the regular keyboard, so it’s well worth considering if you find it a chore to peck out words on small on-screen keyboards. Indeed, you can even use your voice to instruct your smartphone do things for you, such as set an alarm. On iPhone, this feature is called Siri; it’s Cortana on Windows Phones; and it’s called Google Now on Android. There are lots more accessibility features too – explore and you’ll be sure to find something that will make using your smartphone easier and help you do more with it.
bought will be there ready for you to read on your smartphone. It gets even better than that, in fact, because if you’ve got your Kindle connected to the internet (either via Wi-Fi at home or, with some Kindles, over the mobile network), then Amazon
A smartphone might be the last gadget you ever need to buy, because it can do so many things syncs where you are in your books between devices. This means that you could, for example, start reading a book on your Kindle in bed at night and then, the next day, if you find yourself with a few minutes to kill in a doctor’s waiting room or somewhere, you could pull out
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INTROduction | Smartphones Watch live and catch-up TV on your phone wherever you are! You can watch movies and box-sets, too.
your smartphone and take up reading again from exactly the point at which you stopped. You could then pick up your Kindle again at bedtime – all without missing a single word. If you don’t have a Kindle, you can sign up on your smartphone itself and start buying ebooks. In fact, ebooks on your smartphone can be even better (and certainly cheaper) than real books,
especially if your eyesight isn’t what it once was, because you can increase the size of the text to make it easier to read, or change the background colour to something less glaring than paperwhite. Alternatively, you could buy audiobooks (from iTunes or Audible, for example), and listen to books on your smartphone instead of reading them. This brings us to music, and it’s easy to forget that smartphones can hold huge numbers of albums. You might have used an iPod or MP3 player in the past, and your smartphone can work in the same basic way, with the added advantage that you don’t have to carry a separate device. To get your CDs onto your smartphone, you’ll have to use a computer to convert them to digital files and them copy them across, but you could just buy digital music on your phone itself, usually from the iTunes Store (iPhone) or Google Play (Android). There is another option, which is that rather than buying individual tracks or albums, you could subscribe to a service such as Spotify (an app for which is available for iPhone, Android and Windows Phone). With Spotify, you
Ebooks on your smartphone can be even better (and certainly cheaper) than real books never actually own any of the music (so if you stop paying, you can’t listen to it any more) but it does mean you can listen to pretty much anything you like
Reading books on a smartphone can be wonderful because you can make the text bigger to suit your eyesight, change the “paper” colour, and so on. whenever you like and wherever you are (connection permitting), much like subscribing to a radio station but being able to choose what music it plays. You can even play games on your smartphone. These don’t have to be the big, complicated video games that people play on PlayStations and the like – although those kinds of games are available – but they can be fun little puzzle games to keep you entertained, or brain-stretching traditional pastimes such as crosswords or sudoku.
Stop the presses! There’s so much more, too. Thanks to their connectivity, smartphones are
Add some accessories Keep your fitness regime on track with an activity tracker from the likes of Withings.
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As we’ve seen, your smartphone can do a huge range of things, either using its built-in features or when you add new apps to extend what it can do. Apps aren’t the only things you can add to your smartphone, though – you can also buy physical accessories that can make your phone even more capable, more fun and ultimately more useful to you. Don’t worry, everything here is entirely optional, and you don’t have to spend a penny more after splashing out
on an expensive smartphone. This is just to give you a taste of what’s available if you decide you want your investment to be better protected, say, or decide that want to try doing even more with it…
Cases Unsurprisingly, there are thousands of protective and decorative cases available for your smartphone, especially if it’s a popular model. Some are luxury items, some offer heavy protection (even waterproofing), and some even have extra
features such as a built-in battery to extend the usefulness of your phone on the road.
Speakers & headphones If you like listening to music, you should consider investing in a speaker dock for your desk or bedside table – simply plug in your smartphone and, as well as charging the phone, it plays your music through a more powerful speaker. If you listen to music on the move, there are much better headphones available to replace the ones that came with your phone.