Many of us use our iPhones in a personal capacity, to capture family photos, post to social media, message friends, get directions, and more, but Apple’s smartphone can be a powerful tool in your professional life, too. Here are 10 iPhone productivity tips to take advantage of in and around the workplace. Best of all, these features aren’t limited to new iPhones, running iOS 17. Those with older models running iOS 16 can take advantage of them, too.
1. Get online from anywhere
We’ve all been there: running from a meeting uptown to another downtown when the boss calls to say she needs the finished presentation that’s sitting on your laptop to be sent over immediately. So, you rush into a coffee shop, get on their Wi-Fi, and upload the file. The only problem is that finding a parking spot and figuring out how to get onto that Wi-Fi network took time, the Wi-Fi itself was slow or intermittent at best, and most likely it was not secure, at all. Plus, to justify using the free Wi-Fi, you probably had to buy a cup of coffee.
If only you’d remembered the productivity tool in your pocket. The iPhone has a feature called personal hotspot, which lets you essentially turn your iPhone into a wireless router. On your laptop, you can connect to your iPhone as if it were any wireless network and thus use the iPhone’s cellular 4G/5G connection to access the internet. Personal hotspot works from anywhere that your iPhone has a cellular signal, and it’s a great way to get your laptop online even when you are nowhere close to a reliable Wi-Fi network. In other words, you could have uploaded the presentation from your car before going to that next meeting.
To set up a personal hotspot, on your iPhone go to Settings > Personal Hotspot. And on your laptop, open the Wi-Fi network menu and select the name of your iPhone.
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