Unwrapped: Tips and tricks for your new mobile phone

Did you get a brand-new phone for the holidays? Find out how to make the most of its camera and its battery.

Tip 1: Get the most out of your mobile phone battery
Tip 2: Take better pictures with your camera phone
Tip 3: Transfer camera phone pictures to a computer

Tip 1: Get the most out of your mobile phone battery
You can't run from the beep of impending doom. Anyone who's used a mobile phone for any length of time has experienced the low-battery warning. All too often, you hear that sound in the middle of a conversation. Prevention is the best medicine, so make sure you charge your phone every night and before you hit the road. But there's also an emergency cure or two.

Carry an extra battery: If you spend a lot of time out and about during business trips, you may not have a way to recharge your phone during the day. It's also a good idea to keep your extra battery in a protective case (even a plastic sandwich bag) so that there's no risk of the exposed connectors shorting out on coins or other metal objects.

Limit your camera and video use: Your handset's camera or videocam features may be fun and perhaps even useful, but they're also a heavy drain on your battery.

Buy a battery booster: Sometimes there's just no way around getting caught with a dying battery, but you do have one emergency option: a battery booster. Think of it as a spare tire for your phone. These products plug into the bottom of your phone and provide you with about an hour of talk time (or 60 hours of standby time). Motorola's Portable Power, for instance, works with most mini-USB-compatible phones.

Tip 2: Take better pictures with your camera phone
Although mobile-phone pictures can't match the quality of those taken by real digital cameras, often your phone's camera is the only one handy for important photo opportunities. Here are a few simple techniques for improving image quality.

Keep your subject close: Mobile-phone camera lenses can capture details in a wide area but not a deep one. If your subject is too far away, it will appear small and indistinct. It's best if you keep your subject within one metre of the camera.

Avoid backlighting: Before snapping a picture, think about where your light source is coming from. When the light source is behind your subject, the subject will often appear too dark, almost like a silhouette. Whenever possible, stand with the light behind you, not behind your subject.

Avoid low light: Camera phones have difficulty capturing details in low-light environments. Taking pictures in bright environments provides a faster shutter speed and more depth of field. If you must take photos in low light, hold the camera as still as possible; the camera will compensate for the low light by slowing the shutter speed, so if you move the phone while you shoot, the image may come out blurry.

Tip 3: Transfer camera phone pictures to a computer
How you can get photos from your phone to your computer without paying your service provider depends on the phone you purchase. Some camera phones have no way to connect directly to a computer, which means you'll either have to transfer images via your service provider or purchase syncing software and a sync cable that connects to your phone's charging port. You might find the one-time cost of the latter option most economical.

If your phone has a USB port, you can purchase a USB cable and connect it to your computer. Not all USB connectors are the same, so make sure that you buy a cable with connectors that will fit into the ports on both your phone and your computer. If you're not sure which kind of connector to buy, take your phone to a store and find the one that fits, instead of buying one online. You will probably also need software from the phone manufacturer to download photos via USB. This may come with the phone, or you may have to purchase or download it separately.

Some phones can wirelessly transfer photos to a computer, via Bluetooth or infrared, and in the future, we can expect to see more phones that support 802.11b and 802.11g Wi-Fi standards. Unfortunately, many phones that are equipped with Bluetooth cannot transfer photos with that technology because the function has been blocked.

One of the most straightforward and economical options may be to buy a phone that stores photos on a memory card. Most phones with removable memory cards use formats that are miniaturised versions of the larger cards used in cameras, so you'll probably need an adapter to read your phone media via a standard card reader.