Steve Litchfield

I/you/someone decides to set up a phone museum. Well, I guess it depends on how many phones/smartphones we're talking about. Most of us have a batch of previous phones, sitting in a drawer, but it becomes a collection when you start organising them, cataloguing them, and then... maintaining them. For it to be notable, there has to be a point to such a collection, of course. I've been collecting, in a way, old smartphones since 2000, this being my work until I retired recently. But my passion was always for the Symbian OS-based devices, from Nokia Communicators through to the Nokia 808, via the likes of the Sony Ericsson P series.  So, ignoring other classics in my possession (e.g. Windows Phones), I settled on properly organising and cataloguing a ' Symbian museum '. For my own enjoyment and for others. Including a load of relevant background content, clear photos of all the devices in use , and with my own (ahem) expert comment on what made each phone so good or so bad...

There are two software suites I put onto every Windows PC I buy - one is Microsoft Office, now renamed annually and probably 365 CoPilot or similar by now - but you know the package I mean, and it comes with a Terabyte of cloud storage for a year, all for £60 (once you've said no to CoPilot!) Which I think is a decent deal and my family gets a lot from it. The other is Nero Platinum Suite 2026  - again the name has changed subtly over the years, (not least the year bit!) but the Nero bit is the important root - Nero is a German company and responsible for THE best 'burning' and 'media' software back in the day, by which I mean 20 years ago. Thankfully, it's not only still going, but has been updated regularly and expanded hugely, to the point where it has a tool for doing just about everything that Windows cannot. From upscaling images and videos , to video editing and transcoding, to removing photo duplicates, backing up your PC, screen recording, audio captur...

It occurs to me, browsing through my own extensive library of Shorts on YouTube (most now, since YouTube's expansion of the format, up to 3 minutes long), it's not trivial to find videos on a particular topic or of a particular type. Hence, I thought I'd try an index of sorts here. That I could point people towards and also refer back to myself when needed. NB. The video lists are sorted in approximate chronological order (i.e. oldest to newest) in each section. NB2. I've gone back only three years so as not to burden you with too much out of date or more primitive content. For the full set of videos, see my YouTube channel generally ! NB3. The lists below show just how much video content I've created in this format. If you'd like to show your appreciation via PayPal ? iPhone-related reviews and comment AirPods Pro 2nd gen: the best of three worlds? Clicks Keyboard review: part 1: Multi-tool, Multi-accessories Clicks Keyboard review: part 2: Why Clicks? Clicks ...

What's ultimately the point? People! It was trawling through my mother‘s 15,000 printed photographs a few years ago, after her death, that made me think about what a photo is and what it’s for. Alongside this, there are photographs of birds and planes (in my case) and general landscapes/scenes shot by others and submitted to social groups, and it has all made me think again about the point of taking a photo. For example, you’re in front of a robin in your garden. You use your skill and judgement and a good camera phone or camera to take a photograph of the robin, you crop in and zoom in, and you end up with a nice photograph of… a robin. Is this picture of a robin different from the literally tens of millions of other photographs of robins taken by other people in the past, in printed form and on the Internet? Effectively, it’s not.  Take planes, a passion of mine. An Airbus A380 is overhead, heading for (Heathrow), about a mile up. I use the lovely 8x telephoto in my high-end iP...

There are some questions I get a lot. One in recent days is "Why are you using iPhone?" A decade before that it was "Why are you using Windows Phone?". And around these there was Symbian, Palm OS, and Android, ALL of which have kept me in their clutch for multiple years between 1996 and 2026. So three decades! But what did I use when? And, perhaps more importantly, why?  (not my actual office!) 1996-2001 (EPOC and infrared) While not a smartphone per se, these four years introduced me to wireless comms, thanks to a smart OS, SIBO/EPOC on the Psion palmtops, and using their IrDA (infrared) capabilities to hook up to various 'dumb' phones which had infrared capabilities or dongles. My favourite was the Ericsson SH888, which was made of titanium and which had IrDA built-in, so I'd position it next to my Psion Series 5 (for example) and then be checking email. (You have to remember that in this time period, email was about all you could do online. There wer...

I 've discovered something wonderful about Bluetooth speakers and desktops... Listening to music while working on my laptop at my desk usually involves my Creative Pebble Pro v2 speakers - they connect to my MacBook via Bluetooth and generally work very well for glorious stereo either side of the screen. However, I recently picked up a Marshall Emberton II on PSC Classifieds and I love the meaty bass and rocky feel from this. Yet the stereo effect is minimal. Can I have both at once? The wide stereo from the Pebble Pros and the bass and oomph from the Marshall? Yes, as it turns out! I know this sounds geeky, awkward and clunky, but two sets of Bluetooth speakers can be hooked up at the same time ! On both Mac (the built-in Audio MIDI utility) and on Windows (with the third party VolumeMeeter freeware)! The latter can be studied by any Windows users, but for me on the Mac it involved: finding and starting the Audio MIDI app in the Utilities folder creating a new Multi-Output Devi...

32GB is quite a lot, really. 32,000 Megabytes, or 32,000,000,000 bytes of information. give or take some rounding errors. But it's actually a problem in the iPad world.  You see, iPads are kept far longer than iPhones. It's not unusual for someone's main iPad to be five or six years old, they just carry on doing the job they've done for so long. So keeping the software updated year on year is a larger project than on phones, where people normally upgrade after three or four years. Over The Air updates are wonderful, of course. No need to do anything except say 'Install' when Apple auto-downloads and offers the iPadOS update. Except in the modern era, when iPadOS 26 minor updates can still "need up to 12.5GB" in order to unpack and install in-place, on the iPad directly. With a modern iPad with 128GB or 256GB of storage, this isn't a problem. But for iPads of a certain age, in this case six years (2020), launched with a 32GB storage option, these la...