How to make the most of your smartphone amidst the lockdown?
The lockdown, because of the deadly Coronavirus has brought the world to a standstill. There has been a lockdown in India since March 24 and since then all the educational institutes and offices (except health care services, public helpers and essential service workers) have been shut and people’s daily hectic, round the clock routine has been replaced by complete boredom. Yes, we have the endless household chores to do, TV to watch and catch up on the many movies that we have been waiting to watch on Netflix but what after that?
Here, in a way, our ever faithful smartphone comes to our rescue. Our smartphone is our companion day in and day out in this time of distress and to some extent helps us keep our sanity.
1) Firstly, take care of your phone; take care that knowingly or unknowingly you don’t incur any physical damage to your phone because in this lockdown, it is impossible to get a replacement.
2) Try and keep your phone as clean as possible – you don’t want to get an infection.
3) Now is the right time to get rid of all the junk that has collected in your phone and slowed it down. I mean, you do have all the time in the world now. Remove all the unwanted and Trojan apps. Clean the useless pictures from the gallery that clutters your phone.
4) Lastly, don’t let the phone battery drain out completely because sometimes, because of some malware, after a complete discharge your phone may refuse to get charged and won’t turn on and there is neither anything that you can do about it nor get it repaired or replaced.
Now that we have covered the aforementioned points let’s talk a little about what you can do with your smartphone during this lockdown period.
1) Firstly, you can stay in touch with your beloved friends and family through chats and video calls. This always cheers us up, doesn’t it? There are many apps like Zoom, WhatsApp, Google Duo which we can use.
2) Other than this, you can keep yourself updated about the news around the world especially now that many of us are not even getting newspapers in their homes. You can download apps like Inshorts, Flipboard, Dailyhunt, Google News for this.
3)You could download books from apps like Amazon Kindle, Google Play Books, Aldiko and catch up on your reading.
4) Also, if you check various social media platforms, you will find these short online courses which might interest you or something you have been meaning to learn for quite sometime now but never got the time for it. Try Udemy, Coursera, CodeCademy . In case, you want to learn a new language, try Duolingo. Many schools and coaching classes/ tuition teachers have started using Google Classroom and Zoom for online teaching.
5) Fitness apps Fitbit Coach, Cure.fit, Fitify put up workout videos regularly which are helpful for those who are used to working out but are stuck at home because of the lockdown and need motivation to continue with their workouts.
6) People, this is the time to try out new recipes, maybe not the fancy ones since many ingredients won’t be available in the market.
7) Playing online games like Housie, Monopoly, Ludo King, Scrabble go on video calls with friends and family is also very in now.
8) And the best thing where your smartphone can keep you safe as well as be useful, is by contactless money transfer. Today there are many wallets and UPI apps which helps you transferring money without any contact i.e Google Pay, Paytm, PhonePe, Amazon Pay, and many other banking apps. Thus keeping you safe, and helping you transact easily from home.
To sum it all up, although there is physical distance among us, our smart phones help us be together and keep our sanity in these difficult times. So make the most out of this and most importantly take care of your health, don’t go out unless necessary. Be safe, mentally strong, talk to your loved ones, catch up with people with whom you haven’t spoken in a long long time but also wanted to and didn’t find the time to do so. Let’s all of us fight this pandemic together by practising social distancing.
