Let Your Smartphone Make You Smarter
Smartphone Basics
The release of the original PDAs (Personal Digital Assistants) in the early 1990s revolutionized the way executives and business owners worked. No longer were they chained to their offices; PDAs gave them the ability to access and manage contacts, documents, and work from any place at any time. Although revolutionary, those first devices offered limited functionality.
Today, the classic PDA has been replaced with the smartphone, which is a mobile phone that includes advanced functionality like email, internet capabilities, media applications, built-in GPS, and a wide variety of applications. These new phones are basically miniature computers with phone capability, making your business life and your personal life much easier (and more fun) to manage. Here are just a few of the many ways you can use your smartphone to manage your life:
- Stay in touch: Smartphones not only offer voicemail, but text messaging and email, too. Many also have “push email” capabilities so you can send and receive messages from your mobile phone in real time. This means that whether you’re traveling to a meeting or attending your child’s soccer game, you’re never out of touch with the office. The reverse is also true. For the busy professional, balancing family life with work is often difficult. Whether travelling out of town, or busy with a client, you no longer have to miss out on what’s going on at home. Many smartphones have built-in cameras and multimedia capabilities allowing you to send and receive photos and video from just about anywhere.
- Scheduling and calendars: One of the biggest challenges for anyone managing business and family is schedules. Our lives are filled with business meetings, travel, conferences, baseball games, dance recitals, and doctor appointments — and keeping them all straight can be a challenge. A smartphone comes equipped with calendars that allow you to input all events (both work and personal), set alarms, and sync everything with your web-based email and desktop organizer software so you’ll never miss a meeting or family function again.
- Mobile Office: Staying in touch with the office is one thing, but being productive away from the office is yet another. With some smartphones, you can view email attachments including PDF, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and more. Many smartphones even have applications that allow you to edit and create documents. How great would it be to be able to finish a presentation while stuck at an airport? With a smartphone and Microsoft Office for Mobile, you can do just that!
- Targeted Business Applications: Today’s smartphones are so advanced that companies are creating business-specific applications making them a must-have for busy professionals. There are applications available for almost every industry. Whether you’re a real estate agent, pharmacist, investor, or sport horse enthusiast, there’s a mobile application out there to help you do your job while you’re on the go.
- Other Applications: Smartphones are becoming as essential to many people as laptop computers, and applications are available for almost anything imaginable. From games to maps to fitness to social networking, there’s a smartphone application for just about everything.
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