Do you have a favorite song that you’d love to have as a ringtone? You don’t have to be restricted to the pre-installed ringtones that came with your device.

Long ago, the only way to get custom ringtones on your phone was by purchasing them from your service provider. At about $1-2, this method is still an option today, but luckily, you can now create your own ringtones for free and load them onto your device.

With this do-it-yourself method, you’ll be able to turn any piece of audio into a ringtone–any part of your favorite song (not just the chorus), or even audio from a YouTube video.

In any case, make sure you have the audio files for the music you want to turn into ringtones. When you do, follow the instructions for the appropriate phone and desktop operating system. Click here to read more.

Android is awesome and powerful, but it has, shall we say, a learning curve. That scares some people away but it doesn’t have to be so.

Android may require a little effort to learn and set up, but you get a tangible return on that investment: A properly configured Android phone can get you the stuff you want faster and with less work than any other mobile operating system.

These tips will get you started exploring. Don’t stop! Once you’re comfortable with the basics, customizing your phone is actually kind of fun. Many of us fell in love with technology because the process of mastering it brought with it a sense of accomplishment.

And once you get an Android phone tailored to your needs, you just might realize you don’t want something that’s all set up right out of the box—because nothing beats a custom fit. Click here to read more.

Everyone knows the latest smartphone can take good pictures, but did you know its potential to be “the best camera or video camera?” As even the most seasoned photographer will tell you – the best camera is the one you have with you when you need it. Since most of us don’t carry a dedicated camera every day, our smartphones have become our “go-to” devices.

Here’s an expert rundown of the best photo and video tips and tools to help you channel your inner Steven Spielberg or Annie Leibovitz.

Take time to learn the features of your smartphone’s camera. The DROID RAZR MAXX, for example, lets you choose “panorama mode” to capture scenic vistas. Taking a self-portrait? Try the “timer mode” while you scramble to get into the shot. Better yet, switch to the front-facing camera to get the perfect shot. Or try “multi-shot mode” at the basketball game so you don’t miss a single jump-shot.

Adjust the image brightness for the environment. You can set the “exposure” slider by clicking the menu button and selecting the half moon icon. Natural light is always best, but for low-light settings, make sure the flash is set to “on” or “auto.” A slider on the left of the screen lets you set the digital zoom. Some photographers and videographers even use inexpensive clip-on lenses to capture wider angles.

For video, good sound quality helps tell the story. Stay close to your subjects, or consider an add-on microphone to help enhance the sound captured. Shoot in high-definition (HD) mode and in a horizontal or landscape format. Don’t hold the phone vertically for a portrait format unless you like watching TV at a 90-degree angle.

Once you’ve captured your images and video, use apps like AndroMedia and VidTrim to make edits and enhancements. The final step is to share your creative work using apps such as Instagram, Photobucket Mobile or Qik.

With a smartphone in-hand or in-pocket, you’ll never be without the best camera!

The Verizon Wireless Mobile Broadband Connect service lets you connect, or tether, your mobile device to your laptop computer or other device. You can then use your mobile device as a wireless modem to connect your computer to the Internet anywhere within Verizon’s mobile broadband network. To use the Verizon Mobile Broadband Connect service, you must have a hot spot enabled device and a paid subscription to the service.

Mobile Hot Spot
In the context of wireless Internet, a hot spot is an area in which you can access a wireless network, such as one created by a router. With the Verizon Mobile Broadband Connect service, you can access the internet on your computer via Verizon’s communications network. This effectively makes your phone an internet hot spot anywhere it’s within range of the Verizon data network.

Tethering to your Device
Tethering is a term that describes a connection between two or more electronic devices. Once you have signed up for the Verizon Mobile Broadband Connect service, you must tether your phone to your device to access the mobile broadband network from that device. Connect the device and your smartphone to create the tether. Once the devices are tethered and you have followed the setup procedure for your phone, you will be able to access the internet on your device anywhere within the Verizon broadband network.

Applicable Smartphones
Not all phones work with the Verizon Mobile Broadband Connect service, but most smartphones will. These include the Apple iPhone 4/4S, the current Droid devices as well as various Samsung and Motorola smartphones. Contact your Mybullfrog store to find out specifically which hot spot enabled smartphones are available to purchase in your location.

Data Plan and Pricing
The Mobile Broadband Connect service requires a special data plan from Verizon Wireless. As of the time of writing, there’s only one plan available. This plan costs $20 per month and allows for up to 2GB of data usage. Additional monthly data usage costs $20 per gigabyte. To subscribe to the Mobile Broadband Connect service, you’re required to have a subscription to a broadband data plan that costs $30 or more on your smartphone.

Productivity on business trips can drop for many business travelers. Between airport delays, hotel technology quirks and other unforeseen events, finding efficient solutions and making use of traveling down time may mean the difference between a successful trip and an exhausting one. Someone running a small business is more than likely to feel more impact. Here are five traditionally unproductive time periods you can turn around with a mobile hotspot.

The Car Ride
No, not your own car, but the taxi or car service from the airport. Chances are you were able to knock out a few documents on the flight and now with a Verizon Wireless 4G LTE Jetpack you can power up your laptop or turn on your tablet during the ride home and send those documents to your colleagues. Spend the time saved with your family when you get home.

The Layover
You’ve traveled thousands of miles and participated in endless meetings. Now you’re sitting at the airport waiting for your connecting flight home. Sure, you can people watch, but try using this time to de-stress by catching up on the latest episode of your favorite shows or sending photos to your family from your successful trip.

The Other Office
You are visiting a client’s office and ready to start working. You’ve set up the bridge for a teleconference and you need to log in. Accessing 4G LTE via your mobile hotspot ensures a smooth transition without having to ask your hosts for Internet passwords or involve the IT department. All of those minutes add up.

The Aftermath
So you get back to your familiar surroundings and then it hits you – expenses. We all have to do them and account for all our receipts. The mobile hotspot immediately cuts down on the paperwork. It’s one bill. You don’t have to worry about tracking down a receipt for Wi-Fi at the airport or a hotel Internet charge. One bill at the end of the month covers every expense.

The end result is you can make downtime your friend. 4G LTE can be a great friend to the traveler and eliminate the need to wait to get back to the office to accomplish tasks. Being untethered has never felt this good. Call into any Mybullfrog location today (click here for all locations) and see how we can help you increase productivity and enjoy smarter business trips.

Unless brazen thieves pull up to your house in a moving van with the aim of purloining all your electronic valuables, your desktop PC isn’t likely to get stolen. It’s too bulky, and a zillion cables connect it to other devices. Certainly you’re not going to simply lose a PC!

However, your smartphone has nearly as much computing power as that PC (more, if the PC is really old), and opportunities for smartphone loss or theft are almost limitless. We’ll show you how to protect both your iPhone or Android device and the personal data it contains.

Lock It Up

If you haven’t set up a screen-lock passcode to protect your smartphone, pull the device out right now and set one. IPhone users can choose a simple four-digit numeric PIN or an eight-character alphanumeric passcode. The four-digit PIN is easier to enter due to the big buttons on the phone keypad, but the eight-character passcode is much more secure. To minimize the annoyance of frequent passcode re-entry, you can set the phone to auto-lock after a delay of one to five minutes.

Android users have choices that vary by device. Using a numeric or alphanumeric passcode is one option. Some devices support unlocking with a swipe pattern, or even using facial recognition. As with the iPhone you’ll probably find it convenient to set a delay, so the phone doesn’t lock immediately when you turn it off.

While a four-digit numeric PIN is handy on either type of device, you should know that law enforcement can crack four-digit PINs using advanced forensic software. If the lawmen can do it, chances are good the crooks can do it too.

Don’t Break Security

Numerous studies have shown that the built-in security in Apple’s iOS works very, very well. It’s not perfect, but it’s significantly tighter than Android’s.

The one way to lose this protection? Jailbreak your iPhone. According to researcher Dino Dai Zovi, a jailbroken iPhone is roughly as secure as a standard Android phone. Jailbreak it and you throw away your security advantage.

Rooting an Android phone is the equivalent of jailbreaking an iPhone. Some apps require rooting; don’t install those apps. Do note that the law-enforcment forensic software mentioned earlier can automatically root an Android phone, and some malware attacks can also root the phone.

A few high-end Android phones automatically wipe all data when rooted. The thief will have your smartphone, but not your personal data.

Don’t Give Permission

Every time you install an Android app, you have to approve a laundry list of permissions. Don’t just click to allow them all. Read the entire list. If you find something illogical, like a flashlight app asking for access to your email contacts, cancel the installation. An Android app with no permissions whatever can still get a small amount of information about your phone, but if you don’t review the permissions list you may be giving an app the keys to the kingdom.

You can only get iPhone apps from the App Store, but Android apps are available outside the Android Market. In China, the official Android Market isn’t even available. Android malware is rampant in China because there’s no Google Bouncer to suppress obviously malicious apps. Stick to the Android Market, or put your phone at risk.

Apps for the iPhone go through a rigorous vetting by Apple. In theory, an app requiring unreasonable permissions wouldn’t get past this process, though there have been slip-ups. The main area where you have a choice involves apps that want to use your location. Check the list of apps under Location Services in the iPhone’s settings, and turn it off for any apps that don’t truly need your location. Note that if you let the camera use location settings, every photo you upload reveals exactly where you were at the time.

Crank Up Security

When your smartphone’s operating system gets an update, it almost always includes patches for security flaws. Don’t delay; always install updates as soon as they’re available.

Android users can prevent certain types of hack attacks by making a few simple changes to settings. The USB Debugging feature gives hackers (or lawmen) easy access to your Android phone via a USB connection to a PC. Disable USB debugging. If your phone includes the option to use full disk encryption, enable it.

Those using iPhones should check to see if backups are encrypted. If not, open iTunes, delete the old backups and set a password to encrypt new backups. You can also choose the SIM PIN option in Phone settings to ensure that a thief can’t simply eject your SIM and use it in another phone.

Get Help

You wouldn’t leave your PC naked, unprotected by an antivirus tool or security suite. Your smartphone, especially if it’s an Android device, can benefit from a mobile security app.

In addition to protection against mobile malware, these tools often come with a variety of antitheft features. They’ll let you check a lost or stolen phone’s location, lock the phone remotely, wipe or encrypt personal data, even snap a photo of the thief.

Smartphones put virtually all the power of a desktop computer in your pocket. Most of us would sooner go out without pants than without our cherished phone. Take the precautions listed here to keep your smartphone and its data as safe as possible.

As we rely on our smartphones more and more, battery life becomes an increasing concern. While the iPhone isn’t a horrible power hog, particularly in terms of standby time, there still are situations where your battery can drain too quickly. If you have trouble making it through the day without charging up, here’s what you can do right now to boost your iPhone’s battery life:

1. Disable as many notifications as possible

Notifications were a battery drain with earlier versions of iOS. I usually kept them turned off on test handsets, and saw several days of standby time on a charge even with Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and GPS enabled. But iOS 5 has a completely different notification system, with an Android-style pull-down bar at the top that collects multiple notifications and organizes them.

In the process of adding this, Apple removed the global notification toggle in the Settings menu, so you can’t just disable them all in one shot anymore. You can, however, disable app notifications, while leaving important ones (such as text and voicemail) intact. In other words, you can turn it back into an approximation of the original system, which separated call notifications from app notifications automatically.

To do this, head to Settings > Notifications, tap a given category (Phone, Messages, Reminders) or app (Words With Friends, Zillow, etc.), and toggle Notification Center at the top to Off. The fewer notifications you enable, the more standby time you should see. While you’re in there, note that you can change the way they appear; you can return a given notification to an alert window in the center of the screen, the way it used to be, instead of with the new bar on top.

2. Turn off Location Services

You can also disable all Location Services, which is a good general rule for conserving battery life, as the iPhone’s GPS can blaze through your battery. Head to Settings > Location Services, and tap the On/Off slider next to Location Services to turn all of them off. You can also disable these services on an individual app basis below.

3. Check for email manually

Push email is another perennial battery drain. Normally I set all accounts to receive updates manually (i.e. when I load the app), instead of at a set frequency or via “push.” The same goes for Facebook and Twitter updates; if the app is constantly refreshing them in the background, it’s hitting the radios and consuming power, and you’re not even reading them. Head to Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendars > Fetch New Data, toggle Push at the top to Off, and then set Fetch to Manually.

4. Watch your signal strength indicator

If you spend a lot of time in areas with poor reception, your iPhone will search harder for stronger signal. This drains the battery much faster. I’ve left my iPhone untouched on my desk, where there’s a particularly poor signal, and watched the battery drain by almost half over the course of a workday. Short of switching off your phone, there’s not much you can do about this one, but keep in mind that it could be your power-sucking culprit.

5. Check for software updates

With the advent of iOS 5, you can check for OS updates right from the phone, instead of using a USB cable and syncing with iTunes. Simply head to Settings > General > Software Update.

6. The old power-saving standbys still help

You can still do all the basic, old-school things to improve battery life, such as reducing screen brightness, disabling Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, and so on. The one that helps most here, in my experience, is screen brightness, but you need it cranked up to see the Retina Display in bright sunlight.

7. Consider a battery case or an add-on battery

Some battery cases combine a hardware enclosure, which protects your phone, with an extended battery that can double your iPhone 4 or 4S’s endurance. They average about $70, but there are some lower-cost options as well.

There are many different reasons that a phone may need to have a factory reset performed. You may be experiencing too many issues with apps loading slowly, or malfunctioning when they finally do load. Or perhaps a friend or customer service person suggested the process to help with connection issues.

Another reason to reset your Android is to prepare it for sale. Your Android has become a part of your daily routine and then the latest-and-greatest Android phone is released. You’re sure someone out there would love to get their hands on a gently-used Android phone at a sharp discount, and the funds from that sale will go a long way toward buying your new Android phone.

No matter what the reason, at some stage you will likely want to perform a factory reset on your Android device. So, how do you do this? Fortunately, Android makes it very easy – follow the steps below to have your device reset quickly and efficiently back to its factory condition.

Important note: If you are resetting your device for any other reason than selling it, make sure you save any information that does not sync to the cloud on your phone before performing this process. Your photos on the SD card will be fine (unless you choose to format it), but text messages and other settings will not be saved. If you’d like to save these kinds of things, you can do so using an app like MyBackup Pro (click here to download it from the Google Play Store). It’s recommended that you reinstall apps once the reset is done–instead of backing them up–in case one of them is actually causing the issues you’re experiencing.

1. From the Home screen, press the Menu button and go to Settings.

2. Select Privacy and then Factory data reset.

3. Verify the information on the screen and press Reset phone.

The process may take a few moments, but the phone will eventually reboot and ask you for your credentials. Once logged in, if you selected for apps to restore themselves, they will begin downloading after opening the Android Market and agreeing to the Terms of Service again. Additionally, any other services you had synced to the phone will restore their data as well.

One of the things that sets Android apart from iOS is the differentiation. Most Android phones run OS version 2.2 “Froyo,” 2.3 “Gingerbread,” or 4.0 “Ice Cream Sandwich” (with a certain number of tablets running 3.2 “Honeycomb”). But did you know there are certain tips and tricks which are common to all Android platforms?

The people at CSM wanted to share the love with Android users – who, after all, make up the largest proportion of the smart phone community – by offering up 20 handy tips and tricks you can use to get more out of your Android device.

How about responding to a call with a text message with one swipe of the screen, loading flash content on demand, setting up personalized voice recognition, customizing your lock screen, and more? Click here to read the full article.

Your phone goes everywhere with you. You keep it at your desk at work, near your bed when you sleep, and in your pocket during dinner. Many people use their phones for mobile banking, keeping in close touch with friends and family over Facebook and Twitter, and sending countless text messages about their daily lives. But do our phones deserve the trust we place in the security of all the information we’re giving them?

If you choose your apps carefully and give out your personal information sparingly, you’ll have no problem at all. But if you download everything and give out your name and address every time you can, you’ll be making a huge mistake.

Smartphones and apps are just like anything in life — only give your personal information to the apps you trust. You wouldn’t walk up to a stranger and tell him where you live, right? In the same light, you shouldn’t just tell any old app where you live, either. Let’s take a look at some of the more prevalent threats that could pose a risk to your iPhone or Android device and see what you can do to avoid them.

Threats to your phone

RuFraud
This Trojan virus that affects Android devices presents itself as a free version of a real app like Angry Birds. When it is run, it asks for permission to send text messages. Once granted, it begins sending premium rate text messages that cost $5 each, which get charged to your wireless account. You won’t even know you’re being charged until you review your bill.

Droid Dream Light
Here’s a malicious virus that modifies Android apps, then distributes the modified versions to Google Play. This bit of code is pretty nasty; once it’s on your device, it auto loads when you receive a call. It then sends sensitive data about your smartphone (like its model, International Mobile Equipment Identity, International Mobile Subscriber Identity, and software development kit) to a remote server, where it can be used for a wide variety of malevolent ends.

GGTracker
This is another Trojan that will kill your expense account. This code is installed after you click on an in-app advertisement. Once you’ve clicked, you’re directed to a malicious website resembling Google Play’s installation screen that persuades you to install and download an app. The app contains the malicious GGTracker code, which then subscribes you to premium SMS subscription services that may charge up to $9.99 per month.

FlexiSpy
Affecting Android, Apple, and Symbian devices, FlexiSpy is a scary piece of software. Not only does it provide live call interception, it also offers your smartphone spy access to SMS, emails, GPS location, and call records. It’s being marketed as a tool to keep track of children with smartphones and to catch cheating lovers red-handed, but we all know how this can be used for nefarious activities as well.

How to keep yourself safe

While there are threats out there that can take advantage of your trusting nature with your phone, it’s easy to make wise decisions that prevent these problems from ever happening.

Read the reviews

One of the best features in all the app stores is the wealth of user reviews of the apps. If an app has a problem or is a malicious app in disguise, then you can be pretty sure that some review of it will say so: “Warning! This app is no good!” or “This cost me $100 in text message charges!” When you see those kinds of reviews, avoid the app like the plague.

Major publishers are OK

You can be sure that apps from major publishers are probably safe. For instance, it’s highly unlikely that Facebook will ever have a virus in its app or that major game publishers like Rovio (known for creating Angry Birds) will ever let malicious code get by in its games. You don’t have to worry much about security problems from the big guys.
Make sure you’re downloading an app from a major publisher so you don’t accidentally download a fake title ridden with malware. If you don’t know an app’s original publisher, you can always search for it by name on Google. The publisher’s website should be one of the first results to turn up.

Keep personal info personal

Just because an app asks for your personal info doesn’t mean you need to give it out. Think twice before entering any sort of contest or prize giveaway an app suggests. Don’t give it permission it to automatically send text messages, post to Facebook, or use your address book data. Keep your personal info private to spare yourself the headache of having to deal with malicious apps on your phone.

Finally, keep in mind that all the major app distributors (such as Apple and Google) are doing a ton to keep all the apps they offer safe and secure. Both Google Play and the Apple App Store have options for reporting malicious apps. Once an app is reported, it’s quickly reviewed by trained security experts and removed if it’s found to be corrupt. But even with companies doing their best to protect our privacy, it always pays to be on the lookout.