HELPFUL HINTS AND TIPS FOR EVERDAY LIFE: CELL PHONE EDITION

Hi, and welcome to the first issue of Hints and Tips.  I hope some of these alleviate a little of the stress and cost of everyday problems that pop up.  This first issue is some little tips to avoidexcessive cell phone cost, and also hopefully save you some time.

 1.   If you have ever called someone on the Verizon cellular network and get their voicemail you will probably notice that you have to wait for the woman’s voice to go through her spiel and then finally you can leave your message.  Well, you don't have to wait for that by pressing certain keys depending on the network you can skip it and get right to stumbling through your message to the person.

On Verizon---press the * key 

Sprint--press 1

T-mobile or cingular/AT&T---press #

This can save you time and also valuable minutes since the carrier is charging you to listen to the announcement.   Some personal voice mail options like on sprint which i use, you can change these settings in the voicemail menu to not have the announcement and you can set your own.  Now if you have these carriers you can also say in your greeting to press one of these keys depending on your carrier so the caller doesn't have to remember which key for what company.  Neat and helpful.

 2.    There are also secret codes you can dial in for such things as seeing how many minutes you have used up or have left.

for Verizon---press #646#----spells min

Sprint---#4

Cingular AT&T----*646# 

3.  Don’t want to pay 2 bucks for Directory assistance you can dial 800-free-411 for the number. The catch is you have to listen to a 20 second ad.   Or you can call 800-GOOG-411 because those guys over there can do anything.

 4.  Hopefully you will never find yourself stranded where you have an emergency in the middle of nowhere.  But if you do the emergency number worldwide is 112.  This automatically searches any existing network to dial the emergency number for you.

5.  Have you ever locked your keys in your car and don't have a spare or ON-Star, well you still might be in luck.  Now you have to have an electronic and remote key entry for the car for this to work, but if you can call someone that has the spare electronic key hold your phone about a foot from the car and have the other person hold the key next to the mobile on their end and press the unlock button and your call will unlock.   I know you can't wait to try this one out, I couldn't.  

6.  Ever look down to find the battery level on your cell phone very low and you don't have a charger hand?  If you have a Nokia Phone they come with a reserve battery.  To activate this feature press   *3370# your cell will restart with this reserve and the phone will show a 50% increase in battery.  This reserve will get charged the next time you charge your phone. 

7.  Check your cell phones serial number by keying in the following digits  *#06#,  a fifteen digit code should appear.  This number is unique to your cell phone so write it down somewhere.  If your phone is ever stolen you can phone your service provider and give them this code.  This will allow them to block your handset from use even if they change the SIM card the phone will be totally useless.

Hope you have enjoyed these tips and come back for more or add your own.