k_Street Consulting, LLC Blog

For the longest time, smartphone manufacturers looked to develop devices that came with unique features in all different manners of form factors. Nowadays, however, there are very few phone manufacturers and those that are left have pretty much decided, for now, what the smartphone would look like. Even the ones that fold in half look and function pretty much the same. In this week’s blog, we will take a look at the declining innovation in the smartphone market and why it may not be a bad thing.

If you are like many of the rest of us, the thought of losing your phone is a situation that brings on anger and fear. If your phone has been stolen, there are several steps you have to take to mitigate potential risks and increase the chances of recovering your device. Here's a general guide.

The smartphone has become the go-to device for most people’s personal computing. With the aid of well-developed mobile applications, people are able to manage their digital lives, while also accessing resources that make managing all other aspects of their lives easier. Below are four tips to help you make the most of your smartphone.

In April 2023, Google made a statement claiming that the Android platform would be able to archive unused applications with the intention of preserving storage space on the device. This came with a caveat: it would only do so if the device was almost out of available space. This auto-archiving feature, however, was released to a pleasant little surprise; it is available to all users, regardless of how much storage space is left on the device.

It’s natural for your mobile device’s battery to drain over time, especially as it gets a bit on the older side, but there are also applications that are notorious for causing faster battery drainage than you might prefer. Today, we’re going to help you identify the problem apps on your devices and provide opportunities to address them.

Autocorrect is one of those things that you either love or hate, depending on how many times it has saved you from embarrassment or been a source of embarrassment. Without appropriate context, it can sometimes struggle to offer you appropriate suggestions. Thankfully, you can make autocorrect work a bit better for you, and if you are just sick of it altogether, you can disable it.

With a global market share of 71.9 percent, the Android operating system that Google provides is well and away the most utilized there is today. Despite the fact that different phone manufacturers will fiddle with the OS to fit into the devices they create, Android tends to be pretty stable—which is part of the reason why many users were surprised around March 22nd, 2021. This is when these users discovered that their applications were crashing incessantly.

In our last blog we gave you some advice on what to do if your phone has gone missing, but if it has been stolen or lost for good, there are more pressing issues than the anger and loss you feel; you need to ensure that you and the people you do business with are protected. Let’s take a look at what you need to do to make that happen.

Imagine for a second you are out to a socially distant dinner date with the friends that you barely get to see. You wrap up dinner and say your goodbyes and when you get to your car you realize that you don’t have your phone. COMPLETE PANIC! Your whole life is on your phone. Now imagine that when you went back to the restaurant to get your phone, it wasn't anywhere to be found. We’ll talk you through how to proceed. 

While the Android platform is a highly capable mobile platform, there are a few oddities baked in that can create some annoyances for the user. To help you out, we’ve assembled a few tips to help you prevent these annoyances from impacting your use of your mobile device.

The concept of remote work is closely tied to mobility, which means that solutions and strategies that promote this mobility are particularly important for businesses to adopt if they are interested in benefiting from remote operations. Mobile device management is one such solution.

With mobile devices so ingrained into modern culture, the fact is that your employees are going to bring them to work. Most of them will use them for work. This can be beneficial, of course, but it can also cause problems. This month we’ll discuss what your company’s mobile policy should cover.

Smartphones now come with a variety of ways that users can elect to unlock their device, from biometrics to tactile patterns to good, relatively old-fashioned personal identification numbers. Of course, not all these authentication measures secure your phone equally well. Let’s consider some of these measures to determine which one is best for your device’s security.

If you’re the average business user today, you probably rely on a smartphone to manage much of your life, both personally and in the professional sense. As our phones have become so central to our lives, hackers now have the opportunity to attack through malicious applications. For this week’s tip, we wanted to go over a few ways to tell that an app might be an attack in disguise.

If you’re like most people nowadays, your mobile phone is currently well within your reach (and that’s assuming you aren’t reading this blog on it). The fact that most people keep their phone on them at all times has greatly contributed to these devices becoming a part of any given work-related process. One major way is the implementation of two-factor authentication, which we’ll discuss as a part of this week’s tip.

The great thing about smartphones, in a business sense, is how portable they are - you can literally be productive almost anywhere. Unfortunately, this also means that they can be lost almost anywhere. Luckily, there just so happens to be a feature built into Android that can help you find yours.

With the new innovations made to smartphones every year, you’d be hard-pressed to understand how the global smartphone has hit the skid. While Apple and Samsung sit pretty with large market shares, manufacturers that we’ve come to expect near the top of the smartphone market: Blackberry, HTC, and Nokia are but bit players. Their largest competition is now coming from Chinese companies Xiaomi, Huawei, and OnePlus.

While many of us rely on phones to remain productive during the day, too often are we now picking up the phone to a spammer’s snake-oil sale: “Hello, we are reaching out to inform you that there has been an issue with your account” or similar nonsense. While this is enough of an irritant in our daily lives, it isn’t as though a business can wait for a call to go to voicemail to find out if it was legitimate or not.

Smartphones are very convenient technologies, but with a couple of improvements to your device repertoire, you can drastically improve both your user experience and the value of your device. Here are four smartphone accessories that can enhance the way you use your mobile device.

Smartphones have proven to be excellent devices for enhancing an employee’s ability to be productive while mobile. However, this approach often means that company work is now on an employee’s mobile device, instead of on your network. This issue can be easily resolved if the mobile device in question runs the Android OS. We’ll go over how for this week’s tip.

It should come as no surprise that hackers are always trying to get ahead of security developers, just as it should be no surprise that these hackers often target the Android operating system. After all, the Android OS is used on mobile devices all over the world. If your business leverages these devices, there are quite a few security considerations you need to keep in mind.

There is little that is more satisfying than obtaining a new phone. However, this sense of satisfaction is often undermined by the need to get your applications and data to ensure that your new device has everything you normally use installed. For this week’s tip, we’ll go over a method of making this process easier on an Android phone.

These days everyone has a smartphone; and, they can do some pretty incredible things. One place that the average smartphone may seem to be a little loose is in the arena of data security. Today’s smartphones do, in fact, come with encryption by default, so there is some semblance of device security on every device. What does this mean? We’ll break it down.

You may feel like you’re familiarized with everything your smartphone can do; yet, there are still some little-known things about smartphones that may surprise you. Take for example these four smartphone facts from List25.

If someone asked you to throw your expensive smartphone high up into the air and risk dropping it, just for the fun of it, you would probably say no. However, for the hundreds of thousands of smartphone users who have downloaded an app designed to do just that, they may have fallen for one of the best (or dumbest) technology pranks of all time.

One experience shared by every mobile device user is batteries losing power faster than they’d like. Until someone invents a battery that never again needs to be recharged, this struggle will always be real. Here are seven ways to make your mobile device's battery last longer.

There’s no doubt that smartphones are one of the greatest achievements in modern technology. Compared to computers from several years ago, the average smartphone is vastly more powerful. Coupled with mobility, the smartphone is a productivity machine that helps you get more done in your day. Despite these advantages, you might be a little too attached to your device.

Mobile technology has become so integrated into society that some people can’t even leave their smartphone at home for a few moments. As a business owner, you in particular know the value that mobile technology brings to your industry. You should know that there are plenty of common misconceptions surrounding how to get the most power from your mobile battery.

Got a smartphone? Then you’ve probably snapped a selfie before, or, depending on the expectations of your social circles, you may have taken a few hundred of them... in one day. Today, selfies are all the rage and people are coming up with creative ways to take them, like these three exciting selfie technologies.

Those who believe that smartphones are secure from threats are in for a rude awakening. Modern businesses need to apply adequate security practices to maximize the protection of mobile devices, or risk everything.

The Apple iPhone 6 and 6+ are here! Are you enough of an Apple fan to have waited in line for hours to get your very own? To date, the new iPhone is so popular that it's on backorder and difficult to get a hold of. Is the latest iPhone worth the hype? Let's take a look at the specs and find out.

Have you ever noticed that your mobile device may run a little hot after a heavy day of use? In normal circumstances, a warm smartphone is no big deal. Although, on rare occasions, a perfectly good smartphone has gotten too hot and caught on fire!