I have been using the HTC One M9 smartphone for the last six months. It’s a great phone but I am not satisfied with the camera performance at all. The pictures I take with the camera do not retain their original colours and I understand that I can probably make some adjustments to fix this problem but I don’t know how to do this. Can you help me in this regard?

—Dr M P Shrivastava

Dear Dr Shrivastava,

What exactly do you mean by: Does not retain its original colours? Are the photos oversaturated or under-saturated? If the photos are oversaturated, it might have been a conscious decision by the technicians at HTC because people these days like photos that have a vivid colour profile, where colours strike out but if it’s under-saturated, some of your settings might not be in order. Try to set everything to the Auto and see if the problem goes away, you can set everything back to the way it was after identifying what exactly had gone wrong. If your built-in camera app is really rudimentary and you can’t change settings at all, it may be a problem with the app itself. So try installing other camera apps like Camera360 or DSLR Camera Pro for full control over your phone’s camera settings. With apps like these you can change certain aspects of you pictures but even after trying out new camera applications, you can’t seem to get the aesthetic you’re looking for, you might need to add an extra step after you take photos: post-processing. There are really good apps for post-processing on the Play Store, like Adobe Photoshop Express, if you want semi-professional tools to work on your photos or VSCO, if you want simple Instagram-like filters without Instagram. This is not a problem with your phone, it’s a difference in the preference of aesthetical-style, manufacturers think you like something and will incorporate that into their phone but with Android, at least you have the ability to choose your own style with third-party apps. Tinker around with camera apps and editing apps on the Play Store and you’ll find one that will adhere to your aesthetic style.

I am on a Samsung Galaxy Ace GT-S5830i and am an avid anime fan. But when I try to watch any anime on my phone, I get a message saying ‘Sorry, Can’t Play Video’. My phone does not support flash or videos above the resolution of 320x480. Is there any way this can be fixed? 

— Rakesh

Dear Rakesh,

I think not, the phone is around five-years-old and even at that time, it wasn’t a very high-tired phone. It was a mid-ranged phone then and didn’t pack a lot of high-power for it to be relevant five years later. It has a single core Broadcom processor clocked at 832MHz, it is practically useless today. I know this because I used to own a Samsung Galaxy Ace too, although mine was an even older model. The best you can do with your phone today is to try to squeeze out as much power from it as you can. You can do this by going to xda-developers and finding a good ROM for your device, they might even have one that supports flash playback. The reason you’re getting the error message is because your GPU is not handling video resolutions above 320x480, which is really old now. Modern videos come at least in a 720p package and even videos you stream online require a lot of power to buffer, play and buffer again. So, I would actually advise you to get rid of this five-year-old phone because it’s long since turned obsolete. There are plenty new phones to choose from, in various screen-sizes, price-ranges and power as well. Upgrading is the only way out of this. In marketing terms, this is called planned-obsolesce, modern phones are designed to be obsolete within a few years because they need to sell more phones. Remember when the old feature phone would last for years without needing an upgrade, but I guess it’s because we’ve come to expect a lot out of phones as well. 

I want to fully understand Apple’s decision to go with one USB-C connector on the new iPhone7. I know it makes sense to take out the much loved 3.5mm headphone jack but won’t it make it more restrictive? I love the iPhone and have been an Apple user for a long time but I don’t like this decision because I can’t use good headphones with my device anymore and I don’t want to carry a USB-C to 3.5 converter because it’s just an extra product I have to invest in to get the most out of my device. I just can’t understand this.

—Pratikshya Pradhan

Dear Pratikshya,

I can understand your frustration but from a design point-of-view it makes sense because the USB-C connector can input and output almost anything, which in turn, makes the phone thinner. But saying that, it is a horrible design decision from Apple because you’ll be dependent on that one port for everything. No more charging and listening to music, no more Skype-ing with friends with the device connected. Apple also claims that the USB-C will output better audio, since the 3.5mm jack is analogue and USB-C is digital. But the question here arises on what kind of music are we playing? 

We have not started using huge lossless FLAC files for music and are content with the lossy but smaller MP3 files. So even if the iPhone7 outputs sound digitally, you won’t be able to hear the difference since your source material is not Hi-Fi. But to put it into perspective, there is a distinct reason why Apple has gone with this decision. 

It may not be a decision that will benefit the user but it is a decision that will benefit the company. Apple has been the trendsetters for consumer technology for quiet sometime and the iPhone is a phone that will sell no matter what Apple decides to do with it, and this decision is Apple setting a trend. Apple is telling you that you need some USB-C headphones, you need a converter and you need to change the way you use phones, like the time they told users to hold the iPhone5 properly when the phone had an obvious design flaw. So to conclude this, there is a reason for why the iPhone7 has only one USB-C port, it may not be beneficial to you as a user but it certainly is beneficial for Apple as a company.