Smartphone presentation

I don't normally post about technology, but on Saturday I spoke at a workshop run by my church for their yearly mens expo. The topic I spoke on was on smartphones. Someone dobbed me in as a mobile phone fanatic and they thought I could ramble on about them for an hour to a bunch of guys. Turns out they were right.

I only got six people in total to my workshop, which was a little sad, but there were lots of other things going on at the same time. The demographic really wasn't generation X or Y, so when a baby boomer is presented with an option to learn how to do some paving or painting to improve their home, or to listen to some computer nerd talk about smart phones, their choice wasn't really too hard.

Anyway, I enjoyed myself. Of the six people there, all but one had an android device, the other guy had a ten year old Nokia and was in the market for a tablet. Of the five android users, two didn't have a Google account, which goes to show that you can still use android without having to sell your soul to Google (although I think it helps). It could also be said that the lack of iPhone uses indicates that their phones are easier to use, or that their users are satisfied with what they have, or just don't want to explore their phone any further.

Anyway, because maybe someone out there might help from my presentation (and it costs me nothing to put it up for free), here it is. I first talked about the three main mobile phone operating systems out there and things you need to consider about each, and then I talked about some apps that might be useful. It comes across more formal than the discussions that took place, but you should get the idea. I was also using myMobiler which allowed me to show people what my phone was doing on a screen, so everyone didn't have to huddle around when showing them what the phone environments and apps look like (yes you can get your android to look like windows phone 7 and iOS if you really want to).

Two things that I did stress that you might not get from the slides, is the use of cloud based services so if you lose your phone, break it, or just get another one you do not lose any of your content and you are not stuck with typing in all your notes, contacts, calendar events etc... all over again.

The other thing I stressed was two step authentication. If you are giving all your content over to Google, Microsoft or whoever, then I think 2-step authentication is a must. If you can do it with your bank, you might as well do it with your phone/cloud based storage. See here for Google's information about setting up your account with two-step authentication, and see here for Microsoft's information about setting up your live/hotmail account.

Two people asked about how I learned to flash my phone. Pretty much the main site I visited was xda-developers and I trawled the forums that were about my particular device, as each device has a slightly different way of flashing.

Again, if you missed the link in my above ramblings, here is the presentation on smartphones. Free free to hit me a question in comments if you have any.