Smartphone Integration: Connecting your devices
Smartphones, tablets and game consoles are nerdy luxuries that can make life a little bit easier and much more entertaining. Here’s the thing though. These devices take a bit of work to set up properly, especially when it comes to hooking them up to the Internet. It’s one thing to get them configured to access basic online content. It’s another thing to do it well!
Nerds On Call offers a smartphone, tablet and game console integration service which will let you take full advantage of their online capabilities. In this article, we’ll give you a taste of some of the amazing things you can do when your devices have received that nerdy magic touch.
If you need help getting your devices online and working to their full potential, just give us a call at 1-800-919-6373 or fill out our handy contact form.
Putting the “smart” in smartphone
1. Print to your home computer
A lot of our customers struggle with phones and printing. Many will end up emailing themselves from their phone and printing from their home computer out of pure frustration! While this is a workaround, it’s a lot of extra work and hassle you can easily avoid. We can configure your phone so that it will print directly to your printer. No cables, no complicated steps.
2. Check who’s at your front door
Another great thing you can do is use your phone to communicate with security devices. For example, imagine receiving video footage of whoever is at your front door, even when you’re out. You can even use your phone to communicate directly with visitors! It brings peace of mind and it means you’ll never miss that important delivery. We can help install the hardware (which is surprisingly affordable, FYI) and configure your smartphone to make that happen.
3. Make your calendar and contacts work everywhere
This is one of the most common frustrations we hear from smartphone users: “How do I get my calendar and contacts to sync up on my phone and my home computer?” We get it! It’s incredibly annoying to add an appointment on your phone only to find it doesn’t appear on your desktop calendar. We can integrate your devices so that your data is shared properly and you’ll always have an up-to-date schedule at your fingertips.
Cool tablet tricks
1. Access all your home photos from anywhere
Most people end up accumulating a huge collection of photos on their home computer. The problem is if they’re all stored on your hard drive at home, how do you share your pictures when you’re out of the house? Sure, you could manually copy across a choice selection of holiday snaps to your tablet every time you plan on doing a bit of family show-and-tell, but that’s so much unnecessary work! We can configure your tablet so that it has constant access to your entire photo library at home. You’d just fire up your cloud software, tap on the photos category and voila! All your pictures are there waiting for you.
2. Watch cable TV and Netflix in bed
Sure, you could get up and sit on the sofa to binge watch your favorite series on Netflix. But did you realize that with just a little bit of nerd magic, you can watch cable TV and Netflix anywhere using your trusty tablet? These days, all major cable and video streaming services have an app which can be used to access their content. This means you can kick back and watch your shows from anywhere you can access WiFi: in bed, at the airport and yes… even in the bathroom.
3. Have a kid-friendly setting
Kids tend to gravitate toward tablets like a moth to the proverbial flame. The problem is, tablets have access to the Internet and not all the content out there is kid-friendly! We can solve that by setting your tablet up with a content filter setting so that the content they can access is age-appropriate.
If you’d like to learn more about our full parental content control service, check out this page.
Getting more out of your gaming console
1. Play online games
Game consoles are a blast. While gaming on your own is fun, it’s a whole new world once your game console is connected to the Internet. You can compete or cooperate with people from all over the world. There’s nothing quite like it! We’ll connect your console so that it’s configured correctly for online gaming.
2. Control your bandwidth resources
While online gaming is fun, it can also chew up a lot of your bandwidth (meaning it can slow down your Internet connection for other people). We can fix this by configuring your console so that it uses a manageable slice of your home bandwidth. For example, you might want your gaming console to use a smaller amount of bandwidth during the day when people are more active online. However, at night, when fewer users are using the Internet, you may want to increase the console’s resource allocation. We can make that happen. A well-configured console can eliminate a lot of headaches and tension in the home!
Nerds On Call offers a complete home network integration service where we get all your devices working together efficiently. Click here to learn more.
Smartphones, tablets and gaming consoles come into their own once they’re online. We can come to your home and configure your devices to take full advantage of the Internet.
