Category: Devices & Gadgets

Everyone in the house keeps the remote close during a film. Loud in the action scenes, and then nobody can make out a word. The volume is not the problem. Why can I not make out the dialogue? Sound needs …

The same model is listed twice on the same page. One is new, the other is noticeably cheaper and carries a word like Renewed beside it. You have wondered what that word is hiding. Usually less than you fear, but …

Take your watch off at night and look at the back of it. Two or three tiny green lights are still blinking in the dark. They have been doing that against your skin all day. That is how your watch …

You compared three televisions for a week and brought one home. It does not look like the showroom. Nothing is wrong with it. The room it now sits in is doing most of the work. How high and how far …

You and a friend walk the same lane, side by side. At the gate you compare wrists. The numbers are hundreds apart. One of you feels cheated and the other feels smug. Neither device is broken. They simply disagree about …

The television works perfectly. But the apps on it have stopped updating, and one has vanished altogether. The shop says the answer is a new television. Very often the answer costs a fraction of that. What does a streaming stick …

You search for the thing you want to buy and read six reviews about it. All six praise the same three features. All six admit the same one tiny flaw. By the sixth you feel informed, and you have learned …

The box is open and the band is on your wrist. You want to start walking, not sit through setup screens. Give that first hour anyway. Almost every number you see for the next year rests on what you enter …

The picture is lovely. But pressing the home button takes three seconds to do anything. Apps open slowly, the grid stutters, and the set was bought only last year. Nothing is broken. This is simply how most affordable smart TVs …

At the bottom of every product page there is a long table of technical rows. You scroll through it and understand a handful. Then you assume the one with more rows must be the better product. That assumption is exactly …

You have decided to buy something for your wrist. Then forty options appear in the shopping app. They all promise the same things. The listing shouts about features you will never open. It stays quiet about the two or three …

The sticker on a new television carries more numbers than a school report card. 4K, hertz, contrast ratios with far too many zeros. Only a couple of them change what you see from your sofa. What does 4K actually mean? …

The school has started sending homework as links, and someone has to open them. Suddenly the family is one device short every evening. Which device is enough for schoolwork? Start with what the school actually asks for, not with what …

The laptop is a few years old and something about it has started to annoy you. So you open a shopping app and begin scrolling. An hour later you have twelve tabs open and no decision. The problem is that …

Someone in your family wears a fitness band. It tells them they slept badly, or that they did not walk enough. Most of us take those numbers at face value. But a band does not measure most of what it …

You walk into the showroom to buy one television. You walk out confused by three sets of letters. Every sticker says LED, QLED or OLED, and the salesman says the expensive one is better. Let us take the words apart, …

Everything is on the new phone. Photos, chats, apps, all of it across. A few steps remain before the old phone is safe to hand over. This is the last of the five steps in a switch. The first four …

Your new phone arrives tomorrow and the old one still works fine. That old phone is quietly doing something important. It is holding the only copy of years of your life. The most common way people lose data when switching …

The box is open and the new phone is charging. You want to start using it right now. That is exactly when people lose things they can never get back. A phone switch is not one job, it is five …

Sometimes the phone is not tired of you. Its battery is just tired. This is the last piece of the puzzle, and it is the one almost nobody checks. Why does a worn battery slow the phone down? A battery …

The moment the Wi-Fi router acts up, we switch it off and on. The phone we just suffer. That is odd. Two boring little steps fix more slowdowns than any "cleaner" app ever will. Better still, the speed fixes are …

Your phone is doing chores all day that you never asked for. The setting responsible is called Background App Refresh. It lets apps update themselves quietly, around the clock. Even the ones you open once a week. That is a …

Before you spend thirty thousand rupees on a new phone, check this first. Most "slow phone" problems are really "full phone" problems. Free up the space and the speed comes right back. For free. Where does all my space actually …

Before you blame your phone, read this. That sluggish, laggy handset in your hand is almost never worn out. It is usually just full and cluttered, and the slowdown is fixable. Often for free. Here is what is actually going …

Before you spend thirty thousand rupees on a new phone, wait. That laggy, sluggish handset in your hand is almost never finished. It is usually just full and cluttered. A handful of free tweaks can bring back most of its …

You have just handed a phone to a parent or a grandparent. Soon enough, the calls start. The text is too small, and apps have gone missing. Neither is their fault. The phone arrived set up for someone with perfect …

Your phone can do a handful of things that nobody ever told you about. They are not in any manual and they do not appear on any menu. You either get shown them by a friend, or you go years …

You picked up the phone to check one small thing before bed. It is now past midnight and you are still scrolling. The light, the colour, the endless feed. Your phone is practically engineered to keep you awake. A few …

You are in a meeting and a group chat lights up your screen. You are at dinner and work email arrives. Your phone has no idea whether you are working, eating or sleeping. So it treats every moment exactly the …

You unlock your phone to check the time. Four minutes later you are inside an app you never meant to open. Your home screen is the first thing you see every time you pick the phone up. That happens dozens …

Your phone is about to die at the airport. There's a free USB charging point right there, and a boarding gate you can't leave. Tempting. It's still worth a second thought. What could go wrong with a charging port? That …

You locked your phone. You set a password on your laptop. But your Wi-Fi router — the one device every bit of your home internet passes through — is probably still on its factory settings. That's the front door left …

That smart speaker in the living room. The security camera pointed at the gate, and the video doorbell you set up for convenience. None of them ever switch off. They're listening, watching and quietly uploading to someone's cloud — all …

Every September, Apple puts on a keynote and we all quietly start doing sums. By the end of it, the perfectly good phone in your pocket suddenly feels old. Let us be honest about this one first. Do I need …

Someone at dinner asks whether you have seen the show everybody is talking about. You hunt for it on your set-top box and it simply is not there. That is because it lives on the internet now, not on a …