Five tips for a more secure lockscreen

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1. Passwords are harder to guess

The most difficult lock for a thief to break is the password. As each character is one of around 90 options, taking into consideration numbers, symbols and capital letters. A fi ve-letter password potentially has nearly six million combinations. To keep your phone’s content safe from strangers, a password is your best bet.

2. Use more than one method

Here we look at several ways of protecting yourphone and data, but you don’t have to pick just one. Use several methods to foil a burglar – certainly include at least one to protect your hardware and another for your data.

3. Use a PIN code

The third option for putting a barrier between your phone and the outside world is the PIN code. There are ten numbers available to you and because each of them can be reused, there are 10,000 different combinations to baffle potential hackers.

4. An elaborate picture password

Picture passwords require you to tap certain parts of the lockscreen to unlock the device. You will select a picture and draw lines, circles or tap a spot to unlock. Make this as elaborate as possible to deter random lucky tapping.

5. Avoid the swipe lock

If you are on and off your Android device an awful lot, there is the swipe lock. This affords absolutely no protection whatsoever against people trying to access your phone, but at least it prevents pocket dialling.

Why bloatware doesn’t waste your space

Bloatware is annoying, but it isn’t the waste of space that you probably think it is. Having an app pre-installed does not eat into your available storage and uninstalling it will not free up space, even if you use a root-based method. A device’s storage is partitioned into several sections. These include a data partition, the bit where all your stuff goes, and a system partition, where the OS is. Pre-installed apps go into the system partition. Uninstalling an app from here does free space in the system partition, but that space will not become available for anything else, so it’s a moot point really. Incidentally, it’s the same with anything else that is pre-installed: ringtones, wallpapers, sample movies and so on. Sometimes these apps can be uninstalled such as through the Play store by going to Settings>Apps and locating it there. If not, it ca almost certainly be disabled in the same place Disabling an app uninstalls any updates that have been made, deletes all the data and settings stored in it too, removes it from the app drawer and prevents it from using any system resources such as RAM or processor power. It is no less effective than uninstalling.