When your phone rarely leaves your hand, you’d like to think you know everything there is to know about your phone. That may be hubris talking. Though you use your phone a lot (and in some cases, all day), you aren’t always using it properly. Maybe you have a bad habit of sending walls of text to your friends, making it almost impossible to have a normal conversation. Or perhaps you constantly check your notification during a dinner, completely ignoring your dinner companions.
These are definitely annoying habits to the people around you, but they aren’t examples of the worst things you do with your phone. Some mobile practices pose a danger to you, the people around you, and the handset itself. Few are worse than the following four bad habits.
- Setting your volume to 11
Some people think a loud ringer signals to the world that they’re important enough to warrant a real phone call and not just a text. If it makes you feel important to hear your ringer squeal out of your speakers at impossible volumes, consider it from the other side. What other people think when they hear your obnoxiously loud ringtone is that you’re a jerk. You so rarely get any kind of response from your phone that you need an ear-splitting chorus to announce the day that you do.
Have some respect for the people around you. Set your ringer to vibrate when you’re in a public setting. If you end up missing calls and other important notifications, invest in a good set of headphones.
Keep these headphones on when you pull out your Galaxy to play Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp or to watch Kesha’s performance at the Grammy’s. Nobody around you wants to have your games or music act as the soundtrack to their commute.
- Not using protection
For a phone marketed as a handheld device, it’s funny how often it ends up slipping right between your fingers. Sleek though the new Note 8 looks, it’s also very slick. One wrong move and you can drop your smartphone. If you’re lucky, it’s drop point is on your bed or some equally cushioned surface. If you aren’t, you’re left picking up the pieces from your 8’s run-in with the ground.
The death of your Note could be avoidable with a well-placed skin. These thin accessories wrap around the handset adding considerable grip to the otherwise slippery handset, making it easier to hold. They also make them easier to show, as you can customize the look of each grip-enhancing skin.
Just make sure you create a unique decal with the help of dbrand’s skin builder. Their online tool shows you how each color and texture look on the Galaxy in real-time, so you’re never surprised by the design when it arrives in the mail. Their exclusive colors and textures aren’t the only reason why they have the best skins for the Galaxy Note 8. Their Galaxy skins are tailor-made for the Note 8. This attention to detail means their skins match the handset down to the micro-millimeter, so it provides superior coverage over the 8’s curves and corners.
- Bringing your phone to bed
Every night you promise you’ll go to bed and catch a full eight hours of sleep. And every night you end up staying up staring at your screen, checking in on the squad’s group chat, scrolling through your IG feed, reading up on the latest terrible news story, and more. Suddenly, it’s 6:55 am and you have five minutes before your morning alarm goes off.
Even if you have the self-control to put your phone away after the first Tasty food video, using your phone in bed can make you lose sleep. The latest studies show the blue light in your Galaxy’s display tricks your body into thinking it’s earlier than it is. Exposure to this light before you go to bed disrupts your body’s production of melatonin. As the hormone that regulates your circadian rhythm, melatonin is an important feature to your night’s sleep. Anything that decreases you melatonin can cause you to stay up longer.
Most health experts suggest putting your phone away as little as one hour before you intend to go to bed. If you can’t break the habit, enable your Galaxy’s Blue Light Filter. Tap open settings and use the search option to find the Blue Light Filter. Touch the enable slider to make sure the filter is on. Use the opacity slider to adjust the strength of this filter.
You can do this manually each night, or you can use the Galaxy’s Blue Light Filter schedule, which lets you choose a custom time frame when this filter automatically turns on.
- Texting while driving
While the other bad habits are just annoying consequences of having a phone, texting while driving is a serious offence. It can seriously harm or kill someone, including you. So just stop doing it.
If you don’t think it’s that serious, let the facts speak for themselves:
- In the US, distracted driving involving mobile phones is responsible for nearly 65 percent of all road accidents
- Seventy-eight percent of these accidents results in serious injuries
- Texting leads to 3,000 deaths and 330,000 injuries every year
- Texting while driving is six times more dangerous than drinking while driving
Glancing from the road for just two seconds can increase your risk of an accident by 24 times. A text message that just says, “lol” isn’t worth the risk. The next time you find yourself behind the wheel, put your Galaxy somewhere you won’t be able to reach.
If you do any of these four things, let this serve as a sign from above: stop doing them. It’s time you flush these bad habits from your system. It’s easier than you think! Set your ringer low, use a Galaxy skin, set your Blue Light Filter on, and stop texting while driving. They’re simple solutions to the worst mobile habits.