Tag: phone

Emergency+ app

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Generally I do not recommend any apps, but there is one app that I believe should be on every phone in Australia: the Emergency+ app.

“It is a free application developed by Australia’s emergency services and industry partners. It works across Australia, using GPS functionality built into smartphones to help a Triple Zero (000) caller provide critical location details required to mobilise emergency services.

​​Important – if there is no mobile coverage on any network, you will not be able to reach the Emergency Call Service via a mobile telephone​​.”

The app makes it easy to call ‘000’, the SES (132 500) or the Police(131 444), with large buttons prominently displayed. It also shows your location by address, by latitude and longitude, by map and by what3words – all on the one page (and you can increase the character size in the app settings).

On an second page there are other useful numbers like Crime Stoppers (1800 333 000), Health Direct (1800 022 222), Poisons Information Centre (131 126) and more. There are also videos showing how to administer CPR on adults, children and infants. And it includes a link to the various states’ fire alert websites.

The Emergency+ app is available for free download via the Apple AppStore (for iPhones) and the Google PlayStore (for Android phones like Samsung, Motorola, Nokia etc)

If you don’t have this on your phone already, go download it now – you never know when you might need it.

Once the app is installed on your phone, open it and allow location access. This permission is required for the app to display your location in an emergency. Explore the features and understand how to use the app in an emergency situation.

I hope you will never need it, but is is good to have when you do.

​



Moving your photos around

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Photos – we seem to have more now than ever with every phone also being a camera and we are
happily photographing all and sundry, but how do we get them onto our computer?


As always there are many ways to accomplish this, but here is one way to get your photos from
your phone to your windows computer (on Apple devices, iPhone and Mac computers it happens
automatically over iCloud) :

Use your charge cable for the phone and plug it into your phone and into your Windows computer
and make sure your phone is unlocked. If your Photo app has been set up to import from the
phone, it will open automatically once connected. If nothing happens, go into your Photos app,
and find the Import tab on the top right of the app, then click import from a connected device. It
should now find your phone and will scan it for photos.

At this stage they have NOT been copied to your computer, you can now select ALL, NEW ONLY or
NONE to choose which photos to copy. Make sure you click ‘Import’ at the bottom to get things
going.

If you have an iPhone, the procedure is the same, but the Computer might identify your phone as
a USB Device, that’s OK.

If Windows cannot find your phone, your cable might only be a charge cable not a file transfer
cable, try another cable if you have one. Or, the USB settings on your phone are not set up for file
transfer. In either case you might need some more help.

Other ways to copy your photos could be using Google Photos, which will upload your photos to
the cloud, similar to the iPhone and you can then access and download them again on your
computer from your Google account. Or you could get real fancy and use Bluetooth or Nearby
Sharing, but that is easier explained in person.

Is your phone really backed up?

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Recently, a friend of mine had to send in her phone to be repaired and was told to back it up. She
thought she did, but when it came back it was factory reset and the backups she thought she took were
very limited. We did eventually get most of her things back, but it reminded me that automatic backups might not do all that you require.


Both Android (Samsung, Nokia etc) and iPhones generally are set up to backup your contacts, photos
and files to the cloud (Google Drive, iCloud), so you can then download them again when something
happens to your phone, BUT and this is a big but, it might not always work correctly. The main problems are:

  • You are not connected to the internet often or long enough to actually upload (send to the
    cloud) these files
  • Your cloud storage is full and will not accept any new files
  • Your backups are not set up correctly

You should go into ‘Settings’ on your phone and search for ‘Backup’ and check what is actually
happening. It should tell you which things are backed up and if there have been any problems with
backing up. The minimum should be contacts and photos. But anything you do not want to lose (perhaps you use calendar for your appointments) should be included.
If you want to be extra sure that everything is backed up, you can always connect your phone to a
computer with the USB (charge) cable and copy all the files from the phone to the computer.
Now go and check if your backups are working 🙂