Tagged #mobile

There's a particular kind of tired that comes from having eleven apps that all do roughly the same thing. Three places your notes might be. Two to-do apps, one you abandoned and one you're about to. A photo backup service, plus the one that came with your phone, plus a folder on your laptop that's sort of a backup. Every new app promised to make life simpler. Together they made it more complicated. Digital minimalism, at least the way I think about it, isn't about owning a flip phone or deleting everything. It's about choosing a small number of tools on purpose and letting them do the work,…

Bluetooth has a reputation, and it earned it. Headphones that connect to the wrong device. A speaker that cuts out when you walk to the fridge. A mic that makes you sound like you're calling from a submarine. It's tempting to assume it's just bad technology, but it's more that Bluetooth has been asked to do a very hard job with very little to work with. Start with the radio. Bluetooth uses the 2.4 GHz band, the same one used by a lot of Wi-Fi, wireless mice and keyboards, baby monitors, and your microwave. It's an unlicensed band, so anyone can use it, and everyone does. Bluetooth copes by…

The marketing around 5G promised self-driving cars, remote surgery and smart cities. What most people noticed was a different icon in the corner of their phone. Both of those things are kind of true, and the gap between them is worth understanding, because it tells you what to actually expect. 5G is the next generation of the standard your phone uses to talk to cell towers. Like 4G before it, it's a set of rules for how radio signals carry data. The big improvements are more capacity (a tower can serve more people at once without slowing to a crawl), higher peak speeds, and lower latency,…

You don't need a new phone, a special app, or a paranoid mindset to get a lot more privacy out of the device you already carry. Most of it is sitting in Settings, defaulted to whatever was most convenient for app makers. Here's what I'd change, roughly in order of payoff. Menu names shift a bit between iPhone and Android versions (and between Android brands), so if something isn't exactly where I say, the search bar at the top of Settings will find it. Location access, app by app This is the big one. Go to the location permissions list (Privacy & Security > Location Services on iPhone,…