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...