Tag Archives: smartphones

The introduction of the Smartphone has greatly increased the quality of access to many of our lives and no where has this point rang truer than in the world of small business. With the introduction of the various card processing systems for Smartphones such as Square and ROAMpay. The average small business owner now has the opportunity to accept credit card transaction and potentially widely increase their sales growth.

What Does This Mean for the Average Entrepreneur?

Obtaining a merchant account has not always been a easy task and for those just starting out in the open market the ability to offer alternative forms of payment, beside just cash transactions, can make all the difference. Whether the business be retail, culinary, artistic or other. Having an attachment for one’ s Smartphone (or in some cases iPad) for credit card processing alleviates the hassle of bulky point of sale terminals and worst yet, the old fashion “knuckle buster” manual imprinters. All in all presenting their customers with a smooth and convenient shopping experience which often results in repeat business.

Caring For Your Business By Caring For Your Smartphone

Having a Smartphone as a small business owner is a “no brainer” whether it be for credit card processing or simple day-to-day activities. Therefore, the protection and maintenance of such a vital tool is paramount. At iFixYouri, you can rest assured that if your Smartphone happened to be involved in an accident, be it water damage, a cracked screen or simple battery replacement issues, you are certainly in good hands. Because, when it comes to nurturing your business there’s no sense in faulty equipment stunting its growth.

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Best Smartphone Apps of August 2013

August 21, 2013 Staff Leave a comment

Here are some of the best smartphone apps — for iPhone and Android phones — that we’ve come across in the last week. Check them out, and share!

Zagat (Free)

The famous reviewer guide Zagat is back as a free iPhone app, right now for only nine cities in the United States, but with more cities on the way. Zagat is well-known as a service that gives insightful reviews for restaurants, bars, and all other hot spots in your town. Of smartphone apps, this is my favorite.

Blux Camera Pro

Blux Camera Pro is a great new camera app that automatically retrieves data like your location, the amount of available light, local weather, and on-screen analysis to suggest the best possible settings for your shots, and suggests settings that may improve your shot, with an automated voice to boot. It comes with a lot of different lighting presets and shooting modes. Finally, it has a setting to get rid of the lens flare.

Google Keyboard (Android)

Google has released its keyboard as an app. Google Keyboard has some good new functionality like gesture typing, was typing, word prediction etc. Now you don’t have to wait for the OS update to use the new functionality of the Google keyboard.

Musaic (Free)

Musaic is a music discovery app that allows you re-discover your iTunes selection while selecting new songs “you might like,” which are then purchasable through the app. What’s more, it has a slick “mosaic” of album cover art (it automatically finds the art from your music titles) and places them in an easy-to-use interface.

Double Twist with Magic Radio

Developed by Double Twist, Magic Radio is a music-streaming subscription service add-on. It allows access for over 13 million songs and users to sync to iTunes. If you want to hear something new, create a new station and the tracks you want to listen to. MagicRadio is free for 7 days, Once it expires you can subscribe it for only $3.99. Download it From Google Play

Documents by Readdle

Readdle makes some of our favorite productivity apps for iOS, including Printer Pro (very useful if your printer doesn’t support AirPrint) and Scanner Pro (which turns an iPad into a scanner of sorts). Documents by Readdle is its entry into the document viewer segment dominated by the likes of GoodReader. As well as simply viewing documents of various kinds, you can open archives, annotate PDFs and play media files. It has a web browser to allow you to download files from various sources and you can set the ‘user agent’ to make the browser impersonate a variety of different web clients, so the site you like that blocks mobile Safari is no longer an issue. Its great strength is its connectivity to various cloud-based storage services such as Box.net, Dropbox and iCloud — just about any service you could name. With iCloud, you can even set up subfolders to hold documents of different kinds — that’s right, a file system, right there in iCloud. Now that the app is on the iPhone as well as iPad, that means you can keep documents from apps that don’t necessarily support iCloud natively synced across your devices. If Documents By Readdle were to cost you money we’d say it was worth the price for that alone. As it’s free, we don’t understand why you haven’t downloaded it yet.

Quip (Free)

Quip claims to be a “modern word processor” designed for collaboration across different devices. Aimed at workplaces as well as domestic use, it presents documents in “chat-like” update threads, showing which users are online and using Twitter-like @mentions to link to people and documents.

Office Mobile for Office 365 (Free)

Microsoft’s Office Mobile app is finally available — however, only in the US for Android smartphones (Apple version coming soon). While it requires an Office 365 subscription. it allows you view and edit Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents, including email attachments.

Google AdSense (Free)

For those already using Adsense, you’ll be able to browse how much money you’re making, analytics of top custom and URL channels, and get individual payment alerts. More features are planned for the coming months.

Color Zen

Color Zen is a puzzle game. It is developed by Large Animal Games. Very addictive game, the players have to discover a path through an abstract world of colors and shapes. The object of the game is to fill the screen so that it matches the border without leaving any colors behind.

Tablets

LTE vs WiMAX: Battle of the Networks

October 6, 2012 Staff 7 Comments

Other than knowing what differentiates 3G and 4G in the wireless data world, choosing the network provider should be done after some careful analysis. Most carriers in the United States just have WiMAX; however, there are some networks that are upgrading from WiMAX to LTE.

For starters, the term “4G’ does not reveal much details; it is a much broader field. Both WiMAX and LTE are part of the 4G technology, with WiMAX being the first technology from the world of 4G. Though WiMAX has its roots from Wi-Fi, it does has some similarities with LTE, another mobile network technology standard.

A Bit of History

WiMAX started its journey by offering broadband connections to users at home. In most parts of America, wireless ISPs still use WiMAX to deliver broadband services. With WiMAX, the need to route expensive cables to every household is negated, thereby making it a fairly cost-efficient option.

LTE is another network technology that is being offered by the same people who gave GSM and who have promised much better speeds and compatibility with mobile devices. The LTE technology got its approval in December 2008, with MetroPCS being the first network to offer LTE services in America in October 2010.

Performance

As far as speed delivery is concerned, WiMAX can offer speeds in the range of 30-40Mbps, whereas LTE can offer network speeds close to 100Mbps. However, these numbers are only for the papers and they are not even close to offering such remarkable speeds in the real sense. This is due to the fact that a network’s speed depends more on its build, rather than just its specifications.

In most speed tests, LTE always tends to outperform WiMAX with its speed. In reality, WiMAX caps at an average of 3Mbps, whereas LTE clocks in at 10Mbps, making it as quick as most of the home broadband networks. However, the network speed also depends on the network provider. For instance, LTE speed offered by MetroPCS may not necessarily reflect Verizon or other network provider’s LTE speed numbers.

Coverage

LTE seems to defeat WiMAX in the coverage department as well, with most network providers expecting better network coverages with LTE, when compared to WiMAX. The WiMAX system is good at supporting multiple users simultaneously; however, it fails to make its impact felt with wall penetration and increased distance. This being said, LTE does not have an unfair advantage and it uses the same network towers that are being used by WiMAX.

Phone Options

WiMAX has several options for smartphones; however, most of them are already in the market and there is nothing new erupting from the WiMAX stable, as far as phones are concerned. LTE has quite an impressive list of phones and other portable devices to be released in the future by different network carriers.

Choosing Between the Two?

To be honest, it is a very subjective question, with preferences differing across individuals. If the user is happy with his WiMAX phone and does not plan to buy a new one in the next few years, then WiMAX should probably suffice. However, for users with a more futuristic perspective, LTE should be the way to go! If you’ve got a device that you’d like to get fixed so it can be used for either of these networks, get in touch with iFixYouri so you can bring faster mobile capabilities to your smartphone.

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