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You DON’T need to buy the iPhone Duo. You really don’t…

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Three weeks ago I compared the upcoming Apple iPhone Duo to the old Microsoft Surface Duo , pointing out a lot of similarities in design and intent - and that the iPhone Duo is more tablet than phone - it’s designed to be used open. Explaining a lot of the compromises in the new Duo. But I keep eyeing it up in the Apple Store anyway - and I suspect I’m not alone. But here is why you should save your £2000 and not buy it. If you’ve been an Apple enthusiast for a while then you already have an iPhone - probably a 16 or 17 Pro, knowing my audience. Which is already way more capable than the iPhone Duo in many ways: better cameras (including a superb telephoto), better speakers, Face ID, which works so well to authenticate, better use of screen space, way better selfie camera quality when on a video call, longer battery life on a charge. And so on. And you almost certainly own an iPad. Mine’s a humble 10th gen, but it does everything I ever ask of it. Compared to the upcoming iPhon...
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Drained 12V Battery in a hybrid or EV? The Physics of Parasitic Drain - and what to do about it!

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I was contacted by ITV and subsequently filmed on this subject, but the final footage was cut massively short by time, so I thought my notes would be helpful to others in full.The trigger point for recording was instances of people being locked out of or locked into hybrids or EVs when their car's 12V battery had run too low. I did a video on 12V battery drain a couple of years ago and it had come to the attention of the ITV reporting team. My response   Despite the concern, there really shouldn’t be any alarm from a safety standpoint. All car makers put in place failsafes for such an eventuality. E.g. when electronic door latches don’t work on a Toyota or Lexus hybrid, from the inside you can pull the door opening handle twice. The first pull unlocks a mechanism and the second pull physically opens the door latch.  And from the outside, you can use the (usually hidden) mechanical key included in every key fob. This fits into the keyway on one of the front two doors. O...
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Maintaining a phone museum... it's harder than it looks!

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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...
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Review: Nero Platinum Suite 2026

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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...
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Steve's Phones Show Shorts, sorted and indexed, 2024-2026!

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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 ...
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Birds, planes, landscapes, and… the point of taking photos

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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...
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Smartphone platforms - my personal journey and rationale!

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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...
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