THERE is one area where Android smartphones are much better than the iPhone, but when it comes to increasing your storage, there are some life saving options.
APPLE’s latest range of iPhones have really stepped up the amount of storage capacity on its devices, offering welcome relief to users.
But if you’re still battling away with a 16GB iPhone 6, or perhaps a 32GB iPhone 7, you’ll know the frustration of opening up the camera app to be told your device is too full to be able to take a photo.
Unlike Android phones, Apple doesn’t give you the option to use a microSD card to increase storage space. So if like me, you have found yourself having to delete podcast episodes or old photos just so you can download a new app, there is a better way.
There are a bunch of external microSD devices which cater to storage-hungry iPhone users. If you want to offload photos and videos or carry around a large library of music and movies for your iOS device, card readers that plugs into your iPhone’s lightning port might be the way to go.
For instance, the Leef iAcess microSD reader for iOS costs about $A65 online and is marketed as “the easiest way to infinite memory”. The adaptor wraps around the back of the device to make it as unobtrusive as possible. There are plenty of similar products on the market that are worth checking out.
But if you don’t want something awkwardly sticking out of your iPhone, you might want to consider a wireless media hub, which relies on a Wi-Fi connection to provide essentially the same thing.
For example, the 1TB Western Digital MyPassport Wireless can be found online for a bit over $220. It’s about the size of a small square book and among other things can back up your iPhone or iPad and can connect to your device to let you access external media. It’s not the cheapest solution but less expensive than buying a new iPhone.
Apple also sells portable drives which act as a conventional hard drive with a Mac or PC and have built-in Wi-Fi so you can transfer files to or from an iPhone or iPad.
OTHER OPTIONS
If external devices are too much hassle, there are a few other tricks you can use to shore up the available space on your iPhone.
The most obvious is using the cloud via Apple’s Optimize iPhone Storage setting. The feature offloads your full-resolution photos to your iCloud account while keeping less data heavy versions on your device. To enable the feature go to Settings > iCloud > Photos.
As videos are one of the bigger storage hogs, it might also be worth considering adjusting the pixel resolution in the videos you’re taking. If you are just looking at your videos on the device and sharing them on social media, you don’t need to be shooting in 1080p. If you go to Settings > Camera and scroll down to video recording you can change it to 720p and save on space without really noticing the difference
It might also pay to manually manage your storage. If you keep an eye on what is using up all your available space, you might find a couple of apps which don’t get used very much but are draining more than their fair share of storage.
To do this go to General > Storage & iCloud Usage > Manage Storage.
Finally, there is also this nifty little trick which will give you some extra storage.
Online Source News.com.au.
