This week I have helped a several people with issues with their iPhones and I got a new iPhone gadget.
iPhone hints and tips
I have found an interesting page of iPhone hints and tips.
Things you didn’t know your iPhone could do?
I was particularly pleased to find out about holding down the dash key (it also works on the /, £, &, “, ‘, !, ?, and . keys).
iPhone Camera
I use my iPhone as a camera nearly as much as I use it as a phone – in fact I upgraded to an iPhone 5 from a 4 because it had a better camera. Everyday I take and post a photograph on my blog and when I am walking and camping I create photo essays of my trips, often posting from my tent or from the hillside in the rain (have a look at the video here).
I used to have a tripod bracket for my old iPhone but it took me a while to find this good quality bracket for my current phone.
My iPhone and tripod – see the full article here
Auto-correct
This week I was looking for a fix for a client, because the auto-correct on their iPhone was offering ridiculous suggestions for some words they were using regularly. Many search results were blogs by Apple/iPhone experts who were suggesting turning off the function. I am sorry “experts” that is not a solution.
I did eventually find this blog, which had a fix – there is setting in iOS 7 to reset your dictionary – and offered two ways of controlling the auto-correct/dictionary.
Most weeks, and this was no exception, we get questions and jobs related to using email on mobile phones or tablets. One of the persistent things we have to deal with is managing email over multiple devices. Many of us have our email on our phones, tablets and computers and unless things are configured correctly they can quickly get out of hand.
POP or IMAP?
POP email tends to be the default way to manage email – this is not the best way if you use multiple devices.
IMAP manages your email by synchronising any of your devices with your master database of email which is kept on your online email server. This means that changes you make on your phone, emails your have read, sent and deleted, will be synchronised to your PC or tablet next time you access your email from those devices. The down side to IMAP is often online storage – people have a huge store of email, both messages and sent items, and IMAP servers can have relatively small storage quotas. To deal with this you will need to manage your email on your PC by creating archives.
Exchange Server
At Octagon Technology we use (and supply) a hosted Exchange Server solution. This has the advantages of IMAP with a very large storage quota (10GB+), as well as offering multiple calendars and address books which you can share with others.
We used to have our own Exchange server in an office in Lincoln. However it was on a single (shared) internet connection and Octagon needed to invest time and money into maintaining and backing up the hardware and software. Obviously we did this “in house” but whilst our team were working on our IT, they could not be out helping clients. By moving to a hosted solution we have reduced our “total cost of ownership” and expanded the reliability and functionality. Our email, calendars and contacts are available on a very fast internet connection and our provider has multiple servers on several sites so the back ups and reliability is far beyond what we had before. They do all the updates and upgrades
Even for geeks, when we swapped to this system we were excited by it and are constantly finding new ways it can help us with the support business.
If you would like some more information about whether you could use a hosted exchange solution please give me a call.
Android or iPhone
These hints and tips are for iPhones (and iPads) but at Octagon Technology we also use and support Android tablets and phones – it is Martin’s speciality. So whatever mobile questions or issues you have, we can help.
