Steve Litchfield

It's new phone time! Typically a couple (or three) years after you bought the last one. And, happily, the transfer of your data to your new iPhone or Android device went well, using the manufacturer's suggested method (e.g. wirelessly, using a cable, or via the Internet). Most things came across, your homescreen is back to your preferred normal, and all that's left to do is sign into the likes of WhatsApp and any banking apps again. Phew! All done, so you put your old phone on eBay or sell it in some other way. Wrong!  Or at least that's my contention.  Because however well the transfer process (iPhone to iPhone Samsung to Samsung, with Smart Switch, or just things restored from the cloud via your Google account) went, it will only have transferred 99% of your data at best. There are ALWAYS things that get missed. Trust me. In my case, this very year, I was two weeks into my new phone (iPhone 17 Pro Max) ownership when I realised that over 100 photos hadn't come acr...

NB: With my web site being deprecated - or at least moved - at the end of 2026, I wanted to get this information up on my blog too, for easy linking, and passing on to others. I have no plans to stop offering the service below! Now that COVID-19 lockdown is lifted, have you had your eyes opened to a whole new world where your computers and other technology will play a larger part in your working and home life going forwards? The Internet means that all of us have a chance to at least step back partly from the rat race and work from home. Or perhaps it's your life-line to distant family and it needs to be smoother and more reliable?   Which is where I offer my computer help services in the  Reading ,  Woodley ,  Earley ,  Twyford, Caversham , and  Wokingham  areas.  If you've ever thought: 'that's not right, surely?' or  'I wish someone could sit beside me and show me how to do this properly!' or  'do I need a faster laptop or phone ...

This might just be me. Or it might be something you've been wondering about as well. Over the last 25 years or so, I've amassed a number of folders of audio book MP3s. Some bought by me, some grabbed during special offers, some acquired by - well, I'll don't always know(!) But I do know that they're on my laptop's (in this case a MacBook) internal disk and what I really want is them on my phone, to listen to on long journeys over Bluetooth headphones or car speakers. The quick and dirty solution here does work - but it's not elegant or intuitive. What I'd done in the past was drag and drop all the MP3s into Music (née iTunes) and hey, presto, they're listed under the author's name in amongst all my music artists. Messy, but at least they get synced over to my iPhone and I'm done.  Or am I? It's a real pain, not just to find these audio books (having to remember the author's name, for a start), but also because Music on the phone or la...

Well, almost free. You will need a piece of paper (e.g. printed, as here, from your printer) and some blu-tac (or similar - other brands are available).  What started as a 'what if' idea ended up on my wall only a minute or so later. Having found an inspirational bible verse that I wanted on my wall, I racked my brains to see if I could remember where there was a spare picture frame. And then I wondered... Here's the final result: It seems to float off the wall, is held securely, and is - literally - just a piece of paper. And, yes, takes 60 seconds to make: Print off the artwork or photo you want onto A4 paper, ideally sizing it to be about 60-70% the width of the paper. The exact size and aspect ratio isn't critical. Turn the paper over and fold in the two shorter ends, as shown, so that the fold is roughly a centimetre from the top and bottom of your artwork, which you can hopefully roughly see through the paper. Similarly, and again as shown, fold in the left and ri...

From 2013 until, arguably, today (2025), Google had a solution for every home without a fancy Internet-connected TV. So that's most people.  The idea was that you could 'cast' a video streaming app from your smartphone - Netflix, YouTube, BBC iPlayer, Prime Video, and so on, and Google's Chromecast gadget, plugged into an HDMI port on your otherwise 'dumb' TV, would handle the content and let you watch things on your much larger screen. On the face of it, users would think that it was their phone's app directly streaming the video content to the TV, and it's here that the misunderstanding occurred. You see, Chromecast was in fact a tiny Internet-connected and media-savvy computer in its own right and all the user phone/app was doing was passing a specific playback/streaming URL to the Chromecast, for it to handle playback from then on. So the user could then do other things on the phone, or even wander off for a walk and leave someone else watching, eve...

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. [Updated September 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: Why Clicks? Clicks Keyboard ...

Just to announce that, after 17 years and 864 shows(!), I’m stepping down from the Phones Show Chat podcast and retiring. This very week has seen my wife retire and it seems right that I spend time with her, my daughter, my home (and dog!), rather than scrabbling around week after week to gather guests, gadgets, and stories. I'd planned to stop at show 1000, but I don't feel it's right to carry on for almost another three years. So, the obvious questions. Will PSC continue as an audio podcast? Quite possibly, but under Ted’s capable management, either under the current or a new name/form. I’ll put out a short audio form of this on the feed next weekend, for podcatcher subscribers who might not catch the ‘news’. Will I continue in the tech space? I’ll carry on with Phones Show Shorts on YouTube as and when I have something to say. Will the PSC MeWe forums continue? Absolutely. Ted is their creator and they are in his hands. Again, with possible name tweaks if needed. The ...

Following my longer-than-expected ' how I came to iPhone in the 2020s story ' last week, I wanted to list the reasons why its human interface, iOS software and applications also play a part in keeping me from looking too hard at the Android competition... I should preface this list by saying that both iOS and Android operating systems have copied the best features from each other - and from other previous OS, including Windows Phone, Meego, Blackberry OS 10, and Web OS. For 90% of practical use, iOS and Android are now interchangeable and you can certainly set up your home screens and applications to mirror a setup that you might have had on the competing OS.  However that does leave the interesting 10%. So, away from mundanities like launching a web browser, running PIM and social media apps, watching YouTube and Netflix (etc), all of which are nigh identical on each OS, here are some of the reasons why, in 2025, I stay on the iPhone and iOS: 1. Face ID It's easy to say t...

I do get it in the neck from other geeks occasionally for using an Apple iPhone rather than, as many geeks do, an Android-powered smartphone. Now, in truth, I also own several Android phones too, but they're more playthings these days and keeping up with what Google is doing in the phone world, that being (or used to be, seeing as I'm now semi-retired!) my primary trade.  Now, between 2007 and 2015, I was a bit scornful of Apple's iPhones. They were either too small, too limited, too locked down (in terms of apps and files), had too poor a camera (certainly relative to my Nokia Series smartphones), or all of the above. And I maintain that I was right, compared to the competition, and despite the ambition of iOS in aiming for desktop-class performance.  But 2016 saw the ultra-cheap original iPhone SE and I bought one second hand to play around with and was rather impressed by how fast it was and by how well things just... worked. I set it up with my main accounts and had it...

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 ...