Hold tight
Smartphone owners accidentally broke more than 50 million phone screens last year (that’s nearly two every second), and replacing those screens cost them $3.4 billion, according to SquareTrade, an Allstate company and protection plan provider. A study found that 66 percent of smartphone owners damaged their phones in the past year, with cracked screens leading the way as the most common type of damage (29 percent). Scratched screens (27 percent) and nonworking batteries (22 percent) took second and third place, respectively, with touchscreen issues and chipped corners/sides tying at 16 percent each. By far, the most common cause of smartphone damage is dropping a phone on the ground (74 percent). Others are the phone falling out of a pocket (49 percent), being dropped in water (39 percent), being knocked off a table or counter (38 percent), being dropped in the toilet (26 percent) or falling out of a bag (22 percent).
Up your Wi-Fi!
Now’s a good time to upgrade your home Wi-Fi, says D-Link Systems, a computer networking company. Newer routers can connect more devices without slowing down, because they have features such as MU-MIMO, QoS, and 4×4 streaming, according to the company. For homes with multiple smart devices, including voice assistants, the key is whole-home coverage. Better Wi-Fi is especially important for devices that work with voice assistants, like D-Link Wi-Fi cameras, which feature voice casting. With voice casting, you can ask Alexa or Google Assistant to cast feeds from compatible D-Link cameras onto your TV.
Ain’t no way to hide those pryin’ eyes
Spy Associates’ SpyFinder® PRO, a security and privacy tool to help find and stop hidden cameras from recording private moments, has been funded by over 375 percent on Kickstarter and is gaining momentum. The SpyFinder® PRO Hidden Camera Detector will locate and expose any hidden camera lens within any room, whether the cameras are powered on or off and not recording. Every day more stories emerge about Airbnb rentals, gyms, dressing rooms, apartments, hotels, and locker rooms where people thought they were safe and weren’t, says the company.
Best laptop charger
The editors at The Wirecutter, a New York Times company, spent 15 hours researching and 41 hours testing five top portable laptop chargers, and concluded that the Mophie Powerstation AC is the best option if you want the ability to charge your computer and smaller devices while traveling, in an emergency, or whenever power outlets are out of reach. It can power laptops as robust as the 15-inch MacBook Pro, it’s compact and lightweight, and it charges via USB-C — an increasingly ubiquitous standard. The AC outlet can power over 100 W, plus it has USB-C and USB-A ports for charging smaller devices. It’s the smallest and most stylish option, too, according to the editors. It slips easily into a backpack, briefcase, or carry-on bag.
Can you trust a public Wi-Fi network?
As you travel, bouncing from airport to airplane to hotel, you’ll likely find yourself facing a familiar quandary: Do I really trust this random public Wi-Fi network? As recently as a couple of years ago, the answer was almost certainly a resounding “no,” according to the editors at Wired. But in 2018? “Friend, go for it,” they say. “This advice comes with plenty of qualifiers. If you’re planning to commit crimes online at the Holiday Inn Express, or to visit websites that you’d rather people not know you frequented, you need to take precautionary steps. Likewise, if you’re a high-value target of a sophisticated nation state, stay off of public Wi-Fi at all costs. But for the rest of us? You’re probably OK. That’s not because hotel and airport Wi-Fi networks have necessarily gotten that much more secure. The web itself has.”
Stop the name-calling
Devices such as Alexa are great. They can play music and add items to your cart. But as the editors of The New York Times point out, it’s annoying to start every single request with “Alexa” or “O.K. Google.” Thankfully, Amazon and Google realized this. On the Google Home, the “Continued Conversation” feature allows you to ask your device a question, and the microphone stays on for eight additional seconds to see if you’ll ask a follow-up. (You do need to enable this in the settings of the Google Home app, as the feature is turned off by default.) The Amazon Echo also has the feature, except Amazon calls it “Follow-up mode” and you also have to turn it on in the app before using it. Once it’s on, you can ask questions like “Who sang ‘In My Feelings?,’” and once your device responds with “Drake,” you can ask “How old is he?” and the device will not only know who “he” refers to but also answer without missing a beat. This feature has also paved the way to ask the device to do multiple things in one command, reports the Times. For example, with “multiple actions” on Google Home devices, you can say something like “Hey Google, turn up the thermostat and tell me the weather.” On the Echo, you can’t do it in a single sentence, but with follow-up mode you can just ask the two different commands one after the other.