Mobile Phones

Henry wants to know what's a good iPhone app to identify the key of a song being played. Leo says that is a great idea. Google has song recognition capability. There's an app called Shazam, but that can't identify the key of a song. The chatroom says the app is called Keyfinder. It's manual though, not automated.

KeyDetect is another app.

Dave loves to drive when he travels, but the most recent car he has doesn't have a CarPlay option. How can he use an iPad as a CarPlay alternative for maps? Leo says a Wi-Fi iPad doesn't have GPS and as such, the maps are going to be inaccurate. Wi-Fi does triangulation of Wi-Fi signals that it can read, whereas GPS uses location based on a triangulation of GPS signals and cellular towers, which is far more accurate. He'd be better off using an iPad that has LTE.

Artie has a Samsung Note 8 and a Plantronics Bluetooth headset, but sometimes the Bluetooth drops out when he listens to music. Leo says "welcome to Bluetooth!" Leo says he prefers to listen wired to music, which is one of the reasons he keeps buying Samsung. John in the chatroom has the same issue with his device and the Plantronics. For using calls, Bluetooth is fine. For listening to music, it's really not ready for prime time. The chatroom says that Plantronics has an app for Android, which may help.

Robert has a low budget Alcatel smartphone, but he forgot the password to access it. How can he recover it? Leo says on those older Android phones, the easiest thing is to erase it and start over. Most Android phones have a way to get into recovery mode. But if he can't, then he'll have to do a hard reset by pressing the power button and the volume up button at the same time, and hold it there. That should put it in recovery mode. It's a text based menu that he can navigate with the volume buttons until he reaches "reset." Then he can press the home button and that should reset the phone.