I’ve probably mentioned before that I’ve got a Motorola smartphone – it’s pretty good, nothing fancy, but it does everything I need. The only issue I had with it when I first got it was the “power on” jingle.
Every time I turned the thing on I got various beeps and bings and a chirpy annoying woman saying “Hello Moto!” at me.
Some other Android phones have a “power on” sound as well, and there are two ways to stop them happening on yours:
- On my phone, and lots of others, there’s a setting that you need to turn off. Open your Settings app and look for a category called “Sounds” or “Sounds and Notifications” or something similar. On the Sounds screen, you might have a setting labelled “Power on sounds” – but more likely, you’ll need to tap on “Advanced” or “Other Sounds” first before you can see it. Tap the switch to turn it off and that’s it – no more annoying jingles.
- If you can’t find a setting for it in your Settings app, the other solution is to put your phone in Do Not Disturb mode before you turn it off. Swipe down from the top of your screen to open your Quick Settings, and look for an icon that looks like a “no entry” sign. Tap on that, and all the sounds on your phone will be silenced until you tap on the “no entry” sign again. It’s a bit of a fiddle, because it means you need to remember to un-silence your phone when it’s finished turning on – but if the jingle’s driving you mad, it does work!
An email scam to look out for
There are always email scams doing the rounds – where some nasty piece of work tries to get you to type in your bank details and other personal information by pretending to be your bank, eBay, PayPal or whatever. But I wanted to warn you about this one, because it’s really convincing – I wasn’t quite sure when it came through, I needed to check quite carefully to spot the fake.
It claims to be from TV Licensing, saying that there’s a problem with your Direct Debit. It asks you to click on a link to sign in to your account and update your details. Obviously, if you do, the scammer gets hold of your name and address and your bank details.
There are a few ways to tell if an email is a fake:
- They usually don’t address you by name (because they don’t know your name), whereas most genuine companies will use the name that you registered with.
- The grammar of scam emails is usually quite poor – if something doesn’t seem very well-written, that should be a warning sign.
- Companies have standard email addresses that they send emails from, in the case of TV Licensing, it’s [email protected]. If you’re using a PC, the email address is usually shown in <pointy brackets> at the top of the email. (It’s a bit harder to find the email address of the sender on a mobile, though.)
If in doubt, don’t click or tap on any links in the email. Instead, either call the company (in this case TV Licensing) or open your browser and type in the address of their genuine website. If you don’t know their phone number or web address, they’ll be printed on any paperwork they’ve sent you – or it’s fine to just type the name of the company into Google and let it find them for you. Once you’ve signed in to your account, there’ll be a message for you somewhere if there’s a genuine problem.