Steve Litchfield

Perhaps something a little niche, but one thing that has always bugged me about the iPhone is that, even though all my email is in Google/Gmail, and even though I'm using the Gmail app for iOS to get the full Google experience, every time I hit an email link in a web page, Apple's Mail client (which I don't use at all) got launched. I put up with it until this week, but after seeing that 'Mail' was listed under the iPhone's Settings/Battery as having used 10% of my battery power in the last 24 hours, I reckoned enough was enough. Time to knock Mail around a little… With that in mind, here are my two recommendations: 1. Stop Mail from grabbing email at all and thus duplicating what the Gmail app is doing Now, one has to be careful here, as 'Mail' in the context of a computer system of any kind in 2025 is what also brings along what is probably your main contact store and your main calendar. So in the case of an iPhone, we want Gmail to be accessed by iOS,...

Yes, it's iPhone leak season, but this year there's at least one major spec change that has me interested in upgrading from 'ye olde' iPhone 14 Pro Max, coming up to its third birthday! I’ve been doing some digging and making some educated guesses, based on leaks. You could almost call it research!  So... Here are the probable upgrades for the iPhone 17 Pro series, and most of this seems locked in now, all we need is someone to leave a prototype in a bar 😀 No titanium on the outside - this was just a coating anyway, and largely for marketing and bragging. This year it'll just be aluminium and that's... fine. Plus every single iPhone user, including me, will have the device in a case! The screen will have an anti-reflective coating, a on Samsung's S25 Ultra. Samsung makes the displays in iPhones anyway, so inheriting the best Samsung has to offer is both welcome and logical. There will be a facelifted back design with a Google Pixel-style 'ledge'. Co...

You'll be familiar with 'Whack-a-mole', a fairground game where you have to bash moles that 'pop up' with a mallet. As the game progresses, more and more moles appear, adding difficulty. All of which is brought to mind by app notifications on the modern smartphone. It's a real issue. Especially when starting out with a new phone (as opposed to cloning your old one, Apple-style, which often restores your settings, helpfully), every single application you install has its own ideas of what it wants to 'push' at you multiple times of day. Install 50 apps (a common average) and you are almost literally drowning in notifications, banners, toasts, and so on. The average phone user tends to roll with all this and simply accept the deluge of notifications as a fact of life, watching "Scar213 has liked your reply" or "eBay thinks you'll like this new plastic widget, 5% off" or "Bargain Promotions has emailed you with an ultra-exclusive...

Back in the day, a photo used to be a negative or print, a video would be an 8mm film or perhaps VHS tape - and then the digital age was upon us, with the advent, especially, of phones with cameras. Starting with, arguably the Nokia N93, in 2006, we had useable, focussed, 3MP photos, and useable 'DVD quality' video files - captured from a phone. A photo was, typically, a .JPG file and a video was, typically, a .MP4 file (I won't get into codecs here, to keep things simple). Each - literally - just a file. And then manufacturers started adding on information. Some of which could be contained within the original files, but mostly... not. Starting with Nokia's experiments with 'live' photos on their Lumia phones around 2012, where a small section of video (from before the shutter was pressed and after) was captured and stored with the JPG photo. Then, with the core of Nokia's imaging team being made redundant and moving to Apple, we had live photos making a wel...

It can't only be me who has scam phone calls come in. The most recent (and most common) is an Indian call centre voice saying that they're from my mobile phone operator, quoting (or guessing correctly) Three, in this case. They open up with 'We can offer you a 45% discount on your current mobile monthly bill'. Which, in itself, should raise alarm bells - what company ever contacts you to get you to pay them less money?? The scam itself is intended to get you to hand over all your details, of course, including payment, for the 'new contract' - and presumably your account then gets debited for a whole lot. But the point of this blog post is to point out that you should always interrupt their spiel and ask them to prove their identity. After all, it was them that called you, so the onus is on them - just as it would be if you called a company and wanted to change something in your own contract with them - they'd run you through security questions before doing ...

One of the annoyances of modern life is that adverts have crept into video streaming services - yes, you can pay more to get an 'ad free' tier, but if you do that for everything you watch then life gets quite expensive. Happily, I have found that many video streaming services support picture in picture (don't worry, I'll explain) and therefore, when an advert does hit, either before or in the middle of a programme, you can swipe the video to a screen corner and at least do something else productive during the enforced 30 second or 90 second ad. For example, answering an email or text or browsing your favourite social network. Then, when the advert ends, a single tap restores full screen playback of your programme. To illustrate this, I'll use Disney+, though this also works for BBC iPlayer, Prime Video, YouTube, and, I'm sure, several others - you'll have to experiment! So I'm watching a programme full-screen: And the ad starts, so I swipe up to go home,...

It occurs to me, browsing through my own extensive library of Shorts on YouTube (half 60 seconds long, and the other half, 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. [Updated May 2025] NB. The video lists are sorted in approximate chronological order in each section. NB2. I've gone back a year, 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: Wh...

Even though I maintain to this day (2025) that photo resolutions of over 12MP are 'over the top' for 99% of people's needs, I have to concede that Apple's implementation in 2024 of 24MP 'Fusion' images is impressive and does work well. If the extra file size doesn't bother you, then it does give enough resolution margin of error to downscale or crop or process later, as needed. (Note that this is all aside from my favoured technique for important shots on the iPhone 'Pro' models, which is to use ProRAW, giving all the HDR and texture intelligence but without sharpening and edge enhancement, at the expense of huge file sizes, over 20MB per image.) Apple's idea stemmed from looking at the two alternatives from its 48MP camera sensors: a pixel-binned 12MP shot, with lower digital noise and greater 'purity'. a full resolution 48MP shot, with higher native resolution but more noise and more uncertainty at the pixel level. So I guess someone at...

We've been hearing about the phone world 'plateauing' for years. I've been the one proclaiming the concept, since about 2020 - and I'm absolutely right. But 'plateau' is perhaps not what you thought it was. After all, a true plateau is just that - flat, whereas the meaning in the phone world is subtly different. What is DOES mean is that the days of significant year on year advances in phone technology are long gone.  Any phone from 2020 will work just fine today, whether iOS or Android-based. Its performance will be 'fine', its camera putting out photos that are 'fine', its speakers and microphones 'fine', its battery life 'fine'. And so forth. Whereas once (pre-2015, say), there would be compelling reasons to trade your phone in after even less than a year, in order to get the shiny new model that was evidently better at something important, in 2025 there's almost no reason. In fact, we've reached the point where it...

So I've been reviewing the Clicks keyboard for the iPhone for the last year and have done several videos showing its strengths and weaknesses (mainly size!): But then I tried to get too clever. The idea was to 'Enable full keyboard access' and then set custom keyboard shortcuts to trigger iOS Shortcuts. It sounded logical and it did work, as evidenced by the next video: However, there have been some side effects, not least with Apple upgrading iOS 18 and something clearly changing under the hood. What has been happening on simple, regular text input via Clicks, is that the space bar often gets missed and the fields and forms on-screen become highlighted with a neon outline. Clearly there was something screwy going on here, and it looked very much like an Accessibility 'thing'. Then I remembered that the shortcuts system above was part of Accessibility and I have discovered that turning off 'Enable full keyboard access' fixes the bogus text field highlighting...

This is probably a niche - but also common need in the tech world. At least for old-timers like me, capturing video back in the dawn of smartphones and, even before, with VHS tape capture (for example from camcorders) in the 1990s. What we've ended up with, in 2025, passed down from our old computers and, quite probably, the computers before those, on CDRs and old hard disks, a number of low resolution videos that look hopelessly out of place in the modern world. So, typically, there would be a family video captured at 288p. (240p and 320p are also common.) The 'p' is how we talk about lines of horizontal pixels in a video, and for comparison 'modern' (i.e. post 2000) DVD is 480p in the USA and 576p in the UK. While genuinely modern video content online in 2025 is almost all 1080p or above (e.g. 4K, at 1440p). Quite a jump. So what the heck do we do with all our old (e.g.) 288p home videos? I mean, they're priceless in that - usually - there's no way to reca...

The Surface Go, launched in 2018, is now seven years old. Never high end at the time (though do make sure you seek out the 8GB RAM version with the proper SSD), it is, nonetheless, a fabulous form factor.  A laptop which is also a tablet and, in form, passing for an iPad easily. Many is the time the family has headed off on a holiday and I've been 'banned from bringing a work laptop', yet I got away with it because I brought the Surface Go - everyone assumed it was an iPad that I'd brought along for a few games and some Netflix. Add in decent stereo speakers, microSD expansion, hot swappable Alcantara keyboards, Surface Pen compatibility, two better-than-expected cameras, and super build quality, and you can see the attraction. See also my original coverage of Surface Go over at (ye olde) AAWP ... (NB: There was a Surface Go 2, 3, and 4, though I've only ever played with the original, picking up two of them second hand at super-cheap bundle prices over the years. St...

There's something of a myth in the world of losing weight and getting fit - it all comes down, for many advisors, to simply 'doing more steps'. So targets of 10,000 steps a day etc. Now take this with a pinch of salt, since I'm not a doctor, but plodding along at (say) 2mph for 10,000 steps will burn off less calories (and thus weight) than you might think. Meanwhile, the most cardinal body functions, heart and lungs, won't see much extra action and you won't get significantly fitter. Apple (and other smartwatch makers) know this, of course. Which is why, looking at the fitness rings that their gadgets and software put out, the 'exercise' ring hardly triggers when you walk for a solid 90 minutes and put on those 10,000 steps.  A real world data point here: I've been out walking the dog with friends for an hour, and between wrestling with leads and dogs who want to chase squirrels(!), I feel significantly whacked by the end. Worn out, in fact. And yes...

It's an old, old story, of course. Boy meets girl, no wait... the OTHER old, old story. Android device manufacturer has a vision produces a genuinely different, stunning piece of hardware, then  gets swayed by misguided user complaints that "it's not close enough to all the boring stuff that's available elsewhere" and so compromises its vision in a redesigned version 2 that's nowhere near as 'pure' as the original. And, as a result, often gets abandoned or forgotten. I have some examples. I'll go chronologically. You may not have heard of the Planet Computers Gemini - an Android-powered landscape-first QWERTY clamshell phone that was simply stunning - I reviewed it here in Phone Show 340, so do go watch: Yes this was a full smartphone, despite not having an outside display - a system of LEDs told you who was calling. If ever that happened - 99% of my device use these days doesn't involve phone calls! The Gemini was opened for almost everything...