Tuesday, July 17, 2012

What Does Airplane Mode Do?

Heard the horror stories of people who go on a vacation or travel for work only to find a massive phone bill waiting for them when they get home? Sometimes the people don't even actually leave the country, but get close enough to a border that their phone connects to a cellphone tower on the other side. This happened recently when I took my family to see Niagara Falls. We were close enough to Canada, and far away enough from any cell towers on the US side that our phones connected to Rogers, a Canadian cell phone provider.

What if you don't want to turn your phone totally off, but want to ensure that you don't use the phone or data services? Maybe you're travelling abroad, going into a hospital, or boarding a plane. Simply go to the settings in your smartphone (airplane mode is for smartphones only), and, usually on the main settings screen, you'll see a little switch for Airplane Mode. Just turn it on and voila! It's like turning the phone part of your smartphone off. For iPhone users, I describe Airplane Mode as turning your iPhone into an iPod Touch.

You'll still be able to connect to wifi, but no calls, texts or voice-mails will be sent to your phone while in this mode. As soon as you turn it off, all the above mentioned things you missed will flood in, so don't worry!

Practical Tip of the Day:
When traveling, be careful which wifi networks you connect to. While most are legitimate, some may be monitored by hackers who can watch what you do and even connect to your computer through their network. If you see multiple possible networks, ask an employee of where you are which network is theirs. It's not uncommon to see fake wifi networks with seemingly proper names.

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