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Tech News & Commentary
Andrew in Phoenix, New York asked: “I just bought the iPhone 5 from Verizon. The battery life is terrible. I turn it on at 10am and by 4pm the battery is dying. it doesn’t last long. I would like to change my plan to unlimited everything for $50-$60. So if you know anything here in Phoenix, NY that has that, let me know.”
Before you jump ship and go to another carrier because of you battery life, you may want to check your phone.
I have been using the iPhone 5 since June and have found that the battery life – for me – is much better than the 4. And I think that generally, it is for most people. The increased battery life was one of the selling points of the 5.
Increasing battery life is a topic we’ve talked about a lot. There are many settings you can change that may extend the time you have between charges. One of the biggest battery hogs is the LCD backlight. One tip we tell people is to turn the brightness on your screen down to the lowest setting you can while still seeing the screen comfortably.
Another setting to look at is your Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. If you are not using either of those, turn them off. If you have done the new iOS update, those settings are much easier to get to to turn on and off as needed.
Another setting that many people don’t think of is e-mail. If your e-mail is set to constantly check, that will use your battery a lot faster. If your e-mail is set to “push”, it will get e-mail as it’s sent to you. If that setting is turned off, your phone will be in “fetch” mode, where it will check for new mail when you tell it to. You can set this time to every 15 minutes, 30 minutes, hourly or manually. The less often it fetches mail, the less battery it will use.
As far as “unlimited everything” plans, the good news is you can get unlimited plans on both T-Mobile and Sprint. The bad news is either one will cost you around $100 a month, so it looks like you’ll be about double what you’re looking for. And there’s no guarantee that you can use the same phone you had with Verizon on another carrier, so you may be stuck buying another new phone.
Upgrading to iOS 7, if you haven’t done it already, might help, also. iOS 7 offers more control than previous versions about background app refreshing. You can turn it off entirely, or just for selected apps. Shutting down background updates on things you don’t need will give you a real boost in your battery life. And my experience is the same as Chris’. The iPhone 5 battery life seems slightly better than an iPhone 4S. Also, turn off AirDrop and Bluetooth if you’re not using them. I found that shutting off AirDrop until I actually NEED to transfer a file using it made a BIG difference in my battery life. It’s clear that having that constantly scanning for other iPhones in the area is a big drain on battery life.
Keep in mind though, that the second most common complaint about iOS 7 behind the way it looks, is the negative effect it’s had on battery life.
Although that might simply be because users don’t understand iOS 7 well enough yet, and don’t know what to turn off.
For more information, tune in to Hour 2 of our podcast.
“This Week in Tech History” Weekly Feature with Chris Graveline
Joe in Hazelton, Pennsylvania listens online asked: “I’m in the market for a new computer I want something that has good audio. Unfortunately all my past computers if you listened to the motherboard audio, the microphone recording level was never loud enough even at 100%. Do I have to get a separate sound card to get good audio? And if so, what would you recommend? Or can you just get a computer with good onboard audio? The last computer I bought was 4 years ago and it just doesn’t have good audio. Also is celeron slower than a pentium processor?”
If you want a laptop with good audio in general, there are some made with better sound cards, and you can go with those, but if all you want is a better microphone no built in mic is gonna be better than a standalone USB microphone, and those are not that expensive, think around $100 for a BlueMic Yeti Pro USB Microphone.
If you’re not looking for a laptop, since you just said “computer,” then you can shop for a good standalone soundcard for your desktop, there are many good ones out there, several of which are made for music recording in particular and can capture extremely good sound. Most of those cards also won’t cost you a great deal of money, for example, an M-Audio Audiophile 192 will likely cost you around $70.
As for Celeron being slower than Pentium… it depends on what you’re talking about. An original Celeron chip was slower than a comparable Pentium 2 chip, but a current generation Sandy Bridge-based Celeron will likely outperform any old Pentium chips.
The thing here is that, Pentium processor are old, if you’re looking into buying a new computer Pentium won’t really be one of the choices anymore, you’ll likely be faced with Celeron vs a Core-i-something processor, whether that processor is a Core-i3, Core-i5 or Core-i7 they will all outperform a current generation Celeron, but that current generation Celeron will still definitely outperform most of, if not the entire, Pentium line.
For more information, tune in to Hour 2 of our podcast.
John in Wisconsin, Listening via the Tunein app told us: “I would like to develop a simple journal app. What would be the best steps to take? Where could I get a good quote? Is it safe and satisfactory to use web sites like oDesk to find developers or is there a better to way?”
Be very clear on what you want, what you don’t want, what you can offer and what needs to be done by someone else. If you want to get a good quote, the person giving you a number is gonna have to know what work they need to do, and in some cases, what work they’d have to subcontract.
As for sites like oDesk, sometimes they work out, sometimes they don’t. Talented people tend to stay away because most of the competition is on price only, so they tend to lose to random Bangladeshi people that can afford to do the job for pennies. The thing is, the job they do is rarely good.
If you want to give those sites a shot, go ahead, but keep your expectations very low, it doesn’t usually work out very well for any job that can be screwed up by a determined enough person.
For more information, tune in to Hour 2 of our podcast.
Michael in Montgomery, Alabama listening on NewsRadio 1440 WLWI told us: “I’m considering the changes in technology. How much sense do you think it makes to get a tablet. Now I’m not really into the idea of tablets, I’m more of a laptop guy because of the power and capabilities. I use computers for music production, video editing and stuff like that. Would I still be able to do work on a tablet similar to what I can do with a laptop?”
Even with the wide variety of Tablets, from android to iOS, they don’t come close to the video and audio work that you can do on a computer.
Take the iPad for example, apple offers the iLife suite, consisting of Garageband for music, iPhoto for photo work, and iMovie for, you guessed it, movie editing. But even with this apps that are very powerful at their purpose, you are still very limited to the actual amount of work you can do. Adobe has an iPad version of photoshop but again, you don’t nearly have the same features and efficiency as a PC.
While manufacturers and developers are trying to make tablets more and more content creation devices, they still stay for the most part, except for word processing, content consumption devices. No one has really found the secret ingredient necessary to make tablet devices suitable for content creation.
For any media production, whether it be photo, video or audio, tablets are not great at it, and for now at least, your better choice is to stick to full-fledged computers that can handle and run power intensive programs.
Which does not mean tablets are bad, or that we don’t like tablets. They are superior in almost every way when it comes to the consumption of content, and they’re getting better at the creation of content as well — but that is mostly as the apps improve. The proper tool for the job, we say!
For more information, tune in to Hour 2 of our podcast.
Guest Segment:
Francesco Baschieri, CEO – Spreaker
Facebook Participation:
SOUND OFF!!! Have you heard of Phone Stacking? What do you think of the new “game” where diners stack their phones in the center of the table and whoever touches theirs first pays the bill?
Do you use your phone when eating out with others? Does it bug you when others do?
Here are some of the responses that we got:
Mark in Anchorage, Alaska — who’s Friends with fellow broadcasterJim Bohannon says: If my phone was in THAT stack I’d have nerves of steel. But what if nobody’s phone ra–ng…never mind. We wouldn’t get so lucky.
Robert in Los Angeles, California posted: It would be fun to set them all to “vibrate” and arrange for somebody to call all of them at the same time.
Carl from Naples, FL said: Doesn’t seem to be a problem in the drive thru.
Mark in Fort Lauderdale, FL posted: Phone stacking?? Is this really a thing? Wow… I have clearly been missing out on all the fun games. Or, have I?
Eric who Lives in Kitchener, Ontario said: I’ve done this with friends for some time. You’d be surprised how much it improves conversation!
Sherrie in Alabama added: Yup! The first one to pick up their phone pays the tab for the entire table!
Juan in Miami Beach, Florida says: I’ll just put my secondary phone there… no problem.
George in Saint-Gervais, Limousin, France posted: What happens when one vibrates and they all fall over during dinner?!
Kamal in Erie, Pennsylvania Listening on 1450 WPSE asked: “When I’m using my laptop, I get on YouTube and try to play a song. It plays for a bit then the screen goes blank and the internet connection is disconnected. What can I do to fix this? It started doing this about a month ago.”
YouTube is likely not the cause — but perhaps the trigger. Videos move a lot of data, we’d be willing to bet that if you try to move a large file over WiFi the same will happen. Your network card is failing when it’s put under heavy use for some reason.
The reason could be hardware, which would be the worst case, that it would mean either replacing it, if that’s possible, or getting some kind of USB replacement. A USB WiFi adapter wouldn’t cost a lot though, so it may be an easy way out of the problem if it’s hardware based.
It could also be drivers, sometimes a faulty driver may, for lack of a better explanation, get overwhelmed under pressure and shut down or do something wrong. If you can reinstall the drivers and any software related to your WiFi adapter and see if that fixes the issue.
Some VAIO laptops in particular were having a problem like the one you’re describing that was due to drivers, but even if you’re not using a VAIO you may still be using the same faulty driver.
For more information, tune in to Hour 2 of our podcast.
This Week’s Prizes for Our Listeners
iolo: Copies of System Mechanic- Fix and speed up your PC Automatically.
TYLT: An assortment of Smartphone charging accessories and bluetooth speakers.
Nite Ize Innovation: Connect Case and Connect Cradle for iPhone – Hard case with belt clip, vehicle mount and desk stand.