As smartphone are packed with extra features and technology which we considered as a luxuries in the past, people now tends to relying on smartphone for a long period of time. However, if you own a smartphone and never properly maintain or manage it, you could face some serious consequences that could affect your life. Here we listed out the top 7 bad habits of using your smartphone and how to manage them.
1. Never set a Password/Pin code lockscreen
If you ever felt that passcode protection lockscreen is annoying and useless, then you are completely wrong. While your privacy matters, people could sneak up onto your phone and read some forbidden text messages or contact information. Worse come to worse, some malicious user may sneak into your phone and steal up your confidential data such as banking account, payment and credit card information or even your company details and portfolio. Although you might think that you rely lesser on smartphone when it comes to finance, your contact list could be the other part of the victim once they have access to your device.
2. Scanning QR code wherever you go
QR code was originally developed for a much more convenience and eco-friendly in transversing the data to different people. However, you might not know what is the real intend of the specific QR code that is pasted randomly on the wall or advertisement. Since most smartphone today can comes with functional application that can decodes QR code, randomly scanning QR code around the street could get your phone infected. This is because QR codes can contains link that can be opened when it is scanned directly from the application. Malicious user then use this as an golden opportunity to keep their prey on their hands.
3. Connecting Free WiFi hotspot wherever you go
As most of the smartphone comes with Wifi capability, people now tends to rely on internet more for social networking and interaction with people, or just downloading software and playing games. However, bundled data plan in Malaysia could be relatively expensive if compared to unlimited quota wifi network. Thus, people has high preference in going onto cafe and hopping in for a free Wi-Fi.
Although this seems like a central dogma of an heavy networking user, this act could put your personal privacy and security safety to the highest risk. As computer attacks being more common in each day, you wont know there is another attack sitting in the cafe with just their mobile turned on and capturing every single flow of the data and password that passed the router. Since most public router aren’t encrypted, it is not advisable to use them for business or confidential stuffs.
4. Click on random links
As stated before, opening up random link could be either suprising or deadly. If you seen similar text above where the content and link could be different while the third party is trying to offer you a ‘great deal’, dont not press the link on the message and delete it immediately. Pressing the link or replying the message could either get your smartphone infected or getting charged for premium rate messages.
5. Too much Background application left running behind
No matter you are an iOS or an Android user, housekeeping of your smartphone is essential to have a longer battery life and device durability. With many background process running behind, the smartphone processor started to consumes more power in order to have those application running on the background while you are not actually using it. Thus, you felt that a single charge of your smartphone is not sufficient to run for a day, or you felt your devices started behave slowly or overheat.
Dont worry, we have an ideal solution for you. iOS user can double click their home button to launch the multitasking panel and remove the unnecessary application by swiping up the device. Whereas in Android, you should be ditching all those so called power management/ battery saving app if you are a true Android geek and power user. However, some third party application such as “Greenify” also saves you the time by closing those hidden background application that are slowly hoggling your processor. You can also turn off application manually by going into the settings and clearing RAM.
6. No backup on your photos or important files
We tend to take of pictures in precious moment or save some important documents due to the portability of a smartphone. However, when the smartphone has been stolen or decided to stop working, chances of getting your files back are near zero percent. Thus, it is important to back up your files constantly to avoid those situation above.
7. Charge your smartphone during the last 1%
Many years ago we were given an advice on maintaining battery life is to allow the battery to be completely discharged before charging it. This advice is particularly useful in those old battery that used in devices during grandparents time. Now most of the equipment out there is using lithium ion battery which comes with enhanced durability and battery life. The lithium battery does not requires a complete discharge in order to retain its maximum capacity. Thus, it is generally not encouraged to charge your phone in the last 1% of battery to avoid wasting unnecessary time draining the battery and wasting resources.
