PDair Blog

Read the title and ask yourself if it is possible? BlackBerry think it is with their new operating system, but when something is within a tap or two it is hard to ignore. Say for example you have a very busy and stressful job that involves receiving many urgent emails and messages- they are hard to ignore and knowing that they are on your phone makes them almost impossible to put to the back of your mind.

There are two ways to separate work and play in the digital era. Either use two phones and turn the work phone off when not at work (if your employer allows you to) or generate some willpower and ignore the work messages that keep flying in. It is sadly likely, however, that most people cannot achieve the second option for a number of reasons and so the first option seems more likely.

Also, some phone work better for business and others for your life outside of work. The older BlackBerry’s are ideal for work and iPhones and Android are ideal for play. If you are lucky enough to be able to own both, you will have all the bases covered.

PDair website: http://www.pdair.com/

Imagine if you lost your phone today. What would you do? It is likely that you would report it to the police, try to track it and get the hardware back. But, what about the software?

How much data is on your phone that is irreplaceable and how much of it is backed up either online or on a desktop PC at home. Text messages, contacts, files, application data and everything else- it can be lost forever so easily and for no good reason. Provided you backup your data every day you should be fine, but a double backup would make even more sense. There are times, very occasionally, when your collection of data and apps simply do not work on your favoured platform because of reasons unknown, that even support centres cannot fix, and so you should consider ‘how’ you backup your data.

Try to keep it online, with a service as widely compatible as Google, and make sure that it will work with any mobile platform that you expect to use in the future. Hardware can be replaced in minutes, your data can potentially never be replace so think carefully and keep it protected.

PDair website: http://www.pdair.com/

Google has achieved something quite special with the Chromebooks and that is the removal of a physical operating system on hardware. The advantages to this are clear; no need for a large hard drive, continual updates that are invisible to the user and no viruses. The main disadvantage is that you mostly need to be connected to the internet to use it, but this is not as bad as it seems.

When you consider what you do with your current laptop, chances are that the majority of your tasks need an internet connection anyway and that most of what you do is browser based. All Google has done is tailor the experience to make it more interactive and flexible than before which makes the hardware incredibly cheap in comparison to laptops that run a full operating system.

It is possible that the dream many people spoke of some time ago will come true. We will all own (or rent) our small part of the internet and only use dumb terminals to connect to it. And those terminals could be phones, laptops, desktops, watches or anything else. The time may have come for hardware to give way to connected software.

PDdair website: http://www.pdair.com/

Smartphones cost a lot to run on a monthly basis. There is the upfront cost which is usually subsidized and then the monthly bills over a 24 month contract term. For a high-end phone you could be looking at £200 upfront plus 24 x £36 which brings a total of £1,064. This is just one example, but +£1,000 to spend over the life of a smartphone contract is not unusual.

The questions remains though as to how much you actually need to pay to keep your mobile communications working? It is likely that £700 is perfectly possible for most people over 2 years which represents a decent saving. Consider how much data you use outside of Wi-Fi usage and how many texts and voice calls you make, and then compare the reality to the allowance you pay for. Chances are that you have 1,000′s of texts included and 100′s of voice calls. You may also have more than 1GB of data available each month and of course you will pay a handsome price for such mobile extravagance.

If you are using only 20% of your allowance, why are you paying 100% of the contract? Shop around, change to Pay As You Go or even a SIM free plan. You could potentially save yourself a LOT of money and still enjoy all of the benefits of voice, text and data usage that you have now.

PDdair website: http://www.pdair.com/

The rise of multi-featured smartphones that can do everything from navigate you to manage your life is something that is unlikely to end soon. No matter what you need to do these days, your smartphone can help you do it; navigation, calls, games, eBooks, news, web, music, movies etc. etc. etc. It is a never ending process of squeezing more features into smaller spaces and it is remarkably impressive on every level.

The advantages are numerous, but there is one that is hard to ignore. When you have a major fault, you lose everything. To repeat the sentence above, if for example the antennas broken on your phone or the operating system completely crashed you would lose the ‘navigation, calls, games, eBooks, news, web, music, movies etc. etc. etc.’ If you had a standalone GPS and a separate mobile phone you would still be able to navigate and the same applies to an MP3 player, camera or anything else.

The big question remains, however, in deciding if the advantages outweigh this potentially big disadvantage. OF COURSE THEY DO! Enjoy your multitasking pocket assistant and all of the benefits it brings to you.

PDdair website: http://www.pdair.com/

How do you pay for the online services you use every day? Your first answer may be financially, but when you look deeper you will realise that you pay in all sorts of hidden and varied ways.

Google is the obvious example of not paying for a variety of services financially. From email to online storage to search, you never pay a penny yet the company still makes a fortune in profit. How is this possible? It is possible by curating your information and by reading your emails so that adverts can be targeted directly for your needs. It sounds so simple, but this method of dealing with information that would otherwise be hidden is extremely valuable to any company that uses it in an effective manner.

The other option is to charge for a service like Apple does if you require a decent amount of space in iCloud. Web hosts do the same thing and with these companies there is a clear business plan that comes with a reasonable expectation that your personal data will not be used in a stealth manner. You have to choose how important your privacy is and how much you are willing to pay for the software and services on offer. Ironically, Google offers some of the very best online solutions for no charge and many people are happy to give their information for the privilege of using them.

PDdair website: http://www.pdair.com/

Phone are getting thinner, tougher and more pristine than ever, but are they becoming more delicate in the process? For all of the talk of Gorilla Glass, toughened bodies and the care that goes in to making new smartphone as practical as possible, there are countless examples of phones being dropped and even slightly mis-handled where damage occurs.

Phones are of course designed to be carried around and with this comes the natural dangers as they are put in and out of pockets and bags, dumped on the car seat and generally dragged around through a variety of weather conditions. The fact of the matter is that the high-end smartphones are not rugged enough to cope with daily life and the focus on thinness and good looks means that they never will be until the manufacturers decide to change that.

Of course there is an obvious and very good value solution- www.pdair.com

In our last article we discussed variations on a theme and how apps that are released today can tend to be similar to what has come before. However, the exact same argument could be raised for mobile hardware.

When you look at the latest and greatest smartphones being released today, the HTC One and Galaxy S4 are good examples, they are building on what is already available. They increase the performance levels and specifications and also add some new software features, but ultimately we are looking at smartphones that are very similar to what has come before.

We have reached the point where so much technology and trickery is built in to each device that there is only so much that the manufacturers can do to being truly new features to their users. A phone is a phone is a phone and until we have either completely new ways of interacting with them or completely new shapes, they will remain very similar to what we are using now.

PDdair website: http://www.pdair.com/

There is a growing consensus that the apps being released for iOS and Android are too similar to previous offerings. This is a natural conclusion given that many of the new releases do appear to be very similar to what has come before, but it is also a natural state for developers and the industry to find themselves in. There is only so much variation that can be brought to the party and variation is the word that sums up what we see now.

Think about how many games there are available for these two platforms. Racing, board, card, adventure, strategy and so on. There are countless games available in every genre with more being released every single day. And then think about apps; task managers, utilities, calendars, entertainment and project managers. The list is endless and growing all of the time.

The main point of this article is to think of this in a positive way. There have been so many good quality releases to date, and in huge numbers, that the variation on these themes is a natural consequence of this varied ingenuity. And all it means is that we have more apps and games to play with that we could ever have dreamed of.

PDdair website: http://www.pdair.com/