Great tricks for your cellphone

You’re a relationship manager for a multinational bank. You’re feeling jubilant. This afternoon you just made a great pitch to a prospective big account. And you promised your client that he will get your proposal by next morning.

When you get home, your wife asks if you haven’t forgotten to buy the paper plates for your outing. You’re leaving in half an hour and you don’t have time to go back to the office to revise your letter, connect to the Internet and e-mail the proposal. In your excitement with the impending sale, you have completely forgotten about the trip!

However, did we manage without cellphones before? Calling ahead to tell people you’ll be late while on the road or getting separated from your family at the mall – there was no way we could have managed all these challenges before cellphones.

Instant person-to-person communication is great but that’s plain vanilla compared to the myriad exciting new things you can do with your cell-phone.

Going back to the situation. You don’t panic at all. Before reaching Pampanga, you have finished typing your proposal on your laptop. You connect to the Internet by using your Bluetooth phone as a modem (as opposed to a landline). You shoot your proposal to your client. Early the next morning, he finds the letter and is impressed with the fact that you worked late into the night for his account.

Sending e-mail using your cellphone is old hat. Five years ago, you could have connected your phone using a cable or infrared. Both procedures would have been unwieldy. Cables get tangled or terminals bent out of shape. Infrared requires that you precisely align the phone with the laptop. Not a very easy feat when you’re on the road.

And that’s what’s great about Bluetooth technology. With a Bluetooth phone, you don’t even have to take out your cellphone from your pocket or purse. Named after a Danish king, Bluetooth was established as a standard for communication between devices in 1998 by several companies, some of them direct competitors.

What’s Great About Bluetooth

Today, there are more than 2,000 companies which have adopted Bluetooth as a standard and conceivably several thousand Bluetooth devices available in the market. It’s not only in phones and computers. It’s also creeping into medical instruments and kitchen appliances. Imagine clicking your cellphone to defrost your ref in the morning as you rush out the door!

Going back to cellphones, my favorite application is using my handset to remotely control my presentation slides. I first heard about it when Apple founder Steve Jobs used a cellphone to control his slide presentation during one of the company’s annual product launchings.

My cellphone has replaced my obsolescent and expensive slide remote control (they’re not easy to find in Manila). I am no longer tethered to my laptop. I walk around the room, approach the audience, point out bullet points in the projected slide – all while controlling the presentation from my cellphone. This little trick always leaves my audience very impressed. I always have a handful approaching me after my presentation to confirm whether, indeed, it was a cellphone I was using to control my slides.

The technology gets even more fascinating. The particular program I use allows me to check the hidden notes in my slides. Imagine the possibilities. "Make your audience laugh here" would be a good annotation to a boring slide, or perhaps "the answer to this question (presented in the slide) is 525,600 minutes."

During a break, I click on my cellphone and power up the music player in my computer. If I have a particular song in mind, I can search my hard drive using my phone by keying in the title on my cellphone!

After the break, I resume the presentation with two clicks on my phone. The music stops and the presentation program comes up again. If you think that’s a neat trick, here’s something even more useful.

Using The Phone Calendar

Have you ever wished that you could really use the calendar on your phone? However, it’s just too much work programming the dozens of appointments you have for the month using those tiny cellphone buttons.

Here’s the solution. Using the software that usually comes with your Bluetooth phone (or a third-party software), you can synchronize your computer and your phone. In a minute or so, all of the appointments which you have inputted in your laptop are transferred to your cellphone. Most programs allow you to limit the amount of information to be transferred. That way, you don’t quickly run out of memory on your phone.

Or perhaps you’re in a meeting and a client asks you if you can meet again Tuesday next week. You pull out your cellphone, check your schedule and see that you’re free. You then input the details of the meeting on your phone. When you get back to your desk later that day, you sync your phone with the computer and the new meeting on the phone is transferred automatically to the PC.

And as I’ve said earlier, the great thing about this procedure is that it’s all done without wires! Unlike the PDAs of old where you had to pull out your unit and rest it on the cradle which was connected to the PC, Bluetooth allows you to sync without even taking your phone out of your bag.

And if you’re really up to it, you can even upload your schedule on the Web. The next time your secretary or assistant needs to check your availability for a meeting, she can just pull up this website. It’s password-driven so you can give access only to a select few.

Backing Up Phone Numbers

And surely, one of the most practical applications for careless people like me is the ability to regularly back up all your friends’ phone numbers from your phone to a computer. So next time you lose or damage your cellphone, you don’t panic. You simply synchronize your new cellphone with your laptop and download all your contact information. Of course, it eases the pain a bit more if you have cellphone insurance.

Some computer programs go a step further. You can click the name on your personal information management system (PIMS or address book in layman’s terms) and quickly type a message ON YOUR PC. The message is immediately sent to your cellphone. Your friends will be amazed at how quickly you text back (of course, they don’t know that you’re using the computer’s keyboard).

Once a friend called and asked what the "Seven Wonders of the Ancient World" are. Apparently, she was in a quiz show. I pulled the info from the Web, pasted it on the window using this program and sent her the info – all in under two minutes. She was impressed with my encyclopedic knowledge (as well as my typing speed).

Conversely, you can receive messages on your computer using this feature. Incoming messages pop up on top of all the open applications and you can edit, cut and paste, forward or file people’s text messages to you. You can thus store all the sugary text messages you receive from your sweetie on your laptop (and again save space in your phone for her new messages!).

Unlike using Internet websites providing SMS service, you don’t have to be connected to the Internet while you’re doing this. Moreover, the message on the recipient’s phone will still be your regular number. Thus, you still get charged the regular rates for the SMS.

To be a road warrior these days, you don’t want just a regular cellphone and PC. You would like to have them both armed with Bluetooth as well.

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E-mail the author at [email protected] if you want more information on the wonders of Bluetooth technology. Bluetooth is a trademark owned by the Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG).