I don't know about you, but I've always wondered if those clip-on lenses for smartphone cameras were worth using. I've had a chance to try a couple out, and here's what I thought: A modern smartphone has a camera that is more than adequate for most of the everyday snaps we take - and having the camera with you all the time more than outweighs any disadvantage from having a single, non-zoom lens. But there are occasions when you really would like to have a telephoto lens to get closer to the action, or to take a landscape shot, homing in on a particular detail. Although you can zoom digitally, this drastically reduces the resolution, often producing fuzzy pictures. The clip-on telephoto lens I tried, the niftily named Havit HV-MPC04, provides a decent optical 2x telephoto to get in closer to your subject without noticeable loss of quality. It's a good looking lens and produces clear, effective shots (in the photos alongside, the side-by-side photo shows the str...

Phonetastic, pop pickers! The other day I was walking past a bus stop and paused to admire an advert for the new Amazon smartphone . I was told that I could get it for only £33 pounds a month on O2. (Actually, as was the case initially with the iPhone, you can only get it on O2.) Whoa, I thought. That's more than I pay for a real smartphone. Now I now that's a bit unfair as this is a fully featured Android phone, and I don't want to start the old iPhone/Android rivalry (though, of course, iPhones are better), but my point was this. Yes, the Amazon Fire phone is a nice smartphone with a couple of unique but hardly showstopping features. Set against which it has some limitations that make it anything but one of the best Android options. But the point is that this is a phone that, like it or not, has very strong ties to one retailer (a retailer that wants to rule the world). Which gives said retailer huge benefits by having a direct link to my pocket and activities. So,...

Start of the journey - BBC Wiltshire reception Yesterday I made my regular appearance on BBC Wiltshire, but I was without a car, so experienced the joys of a bus in, and decided to walk back, a distance of just over four miles. What made it different, and really rather fun, was I did it with a walking sat nav. It's not the first time I've used GPS on a phone for guidance while walking - in fact I've done it when finding my way across cities on foot for years - but what I've always done before is kept my phone in my hands, glancing at the map to see where I should go. This time, I plugged in a pair of earbuds, stuck the phone in my pocket and let the software do the talking. And it worked brilliantly. Ms Google starts me off One essential before getting started on this was to use Google Maps. More often than not I use Apple's mapping app - after its initial teething problems it works fine for most uses, including my strolls around cities. But for the kind...

O yippee-do-dah, Sony has brought out another smartwatch . And further surprises, Samsung's smart watch sales are pitiful . Still my beating heart, and pass the smelling salts. (Whatever happened to smelling salts?) In case you haven't come across them, a smartwatch is the wrist-worn equivalent of a smartphone, though the screen is, of course, much smaller. I can see why people get excited about smartwatches. They are truly reminiscent of all that 1950s scifi. Once you've got a videophone on your wrist, all you need is a flying car and a laser gun and you are truly equipped for the twenty-first century. But the reality is rather different. Firstly, all the evidence is that wearing watches is going out of fashion. Remaking them as a smartwatch seems a bit like the way the gas companies responded to the introduction of the electric light by bringing out a better gas jet. They were already dead, but they didn't realize it. I'm not saying watches will disappear. T...

A pocket computer Every now and then someone proudly produces a ten-year-old mobile phone and announces that they have no need for modern technology. ‘It makes phone calls and it texts,’ they say. ‘What more do I need?’ But they miss the point. As the organizers of the Mobile World Congress are quick to highlight, mobile technology is far more than just phoning on the move. It’s for books, monitoring health, navigation, making payments and connecting with friends. It might involve a Kindle or an iPad, a GPS device or a widget to give keyless access to your car. For the moment, though, the smartphone is the most significant device – and this is where our smug old technology owner misses the point. A smartphone isn’t a mobile phone that does some other fancy stuff. It’s a genuine, accept no substitutes, pocket computer (as mentioned in the Blondie song – about 2’ 41’’ in the video ) that happens to be a phone as well. At one point most technology pundits would have told you the P...

Where does it go? Smartphones at the ready... You may have been puzzled by the rather strange looking blobs, like the one on the right, that are regularly appearing wherever you look these days. I've spotted them on products, on advertising on the tube, in on-screen graphics on the TV - all over the place. These are often called QR codes - and are nothing more or less than two dimensional barcodes. Typically they point you to a website, so that you can find out more information about a product or advertisement. If you have a smartphone, just download a free QR/2D barcode reader and you can pick up the code with the phone's camera and pop straight to a website without bothering to type in that fiddly URL. The idea, which seems reasonable, is that you are more likely to follow up links that aren't clickable this way. This is all very well and fine (and if you have a smartphone, you are welcome to have a go at my 2D barcode here - it is a genuine one). However there ...