B2 Friday, December 12, 2014 • The Kentucky Standard

StatePoint

Millions of Americans find themselves focused on planning the perfect party, juggling a packed social schedule and shopping for the best holiday deals.

Nearly seven in 10 smartphone users are “al-ways looking to improve their productivity,” accord-ing to the results of a glob-al study on productivity, conducted by BlackBerry.

Don’t make the mistake of underestimating your smartphone — it can and should be more than just a way to text or email. It can be your secret weapon to sanity this holiday season.

To help, the experts at BlackBerry are sharing five savvy tips for using your smartphone to drive productivity during this busy season.

Find dealsEnsure you’re getting

the best deals on holiday shopping. Activate the ge-olocation feature on your smartphone. Many brick-and-mortar retailers will be pushing special holi-day discounts and offers to consumers shopping near-by or who have “checked in.” Additionally, apps such as Flipp allow you

to browse the flyers and weekly ads of your favor-ite stores, highlight the best deals and clip items straight to your shopping list so you never miss out on a holiday sale.

The holidays can also mean a hectic travel sea-son. Use travel apps to search hotels, find flights deals and track your itin-eraries.

Set remindersCreating reminders is a

seamless way to stay on top of day-to-day tasks that seem to double dur-ing the holidays. With apps such as SlickTasks you can boost productivity instant-

ly and focus on what needs to get done by creating and sorting tasks. You can then build-in reminders for each and easily keep track of what needs to get done.

Bring along your personal assistant

Most smartphones are equipped with voice recog-nition technology, allow-ing you to jot down notes, search the Web, add cal-endar updates, place calls and send messages, with-out typing. These “assis-tants” can prove highly useful during the holiday season.

Driving from store to

store looking for the per-fect gift? BlackBerry As-sistant can be activated via Bluetooth and can detect when you’re in the car and unable to type. The assis-tant will take action based

on your voice commands, helping you multi-task on-the-go.

Protect yourselfThieves are working

overtime during the holi-days.

When it comes to your smartphone, make sure all security features are en-abled. This includes pass-word protection, as well as activating app permissions, particularly on your bank-ing apps.

For BlackBerry users, apps such as BlackBer-ry Protect will safeguard users in the case of a lost or stolen phone by allow-ing users to remotely lock, locate or wipe their smart-phone, ensuring sensitive information remains out of reach from potential

thieves.

Don’t becamera shy

Smartphone camera technology has vastly im-proved over the past few years. For example, the new BlackBerry Passport has a 13-megapixel cam-era and is capable of taking the same high-quality pho-tos as a traditional point and shoot camera. With just the click of a button, and the help of photo edit-ing tools like Photo Studio, you can take beautiful pho-tos of the holiday party and share instantly with family and friends across social networks.

With the right tech tools and strategies, you can get your to-dos done in record time this holiday season.

Holiday shoppers tend to fall into three distinct camps. There are those people who have complet-ed all of their shopping and wrapping before No-vember ends. Others shop in the weeks between Thanksgiving and Christ-mas. Finally, many people wait until the last minute, and such shoppers are the ones seen rushing from store to store on Dec. 24.

Waiting until the last possible second to pur-chase a gift may not prove much of a problem when shopping for birthday gifts. But come the holi-day season, such procras-tination may find shop-pers perusing limited in-ventories and dealing with other frantic proscrastina-tors.

But even those shop-pers who still plan to put off their holiday shopping can make the most of such stalling this holiday sea-son.

· Consider e-gift cards. Many retailers offer digi-tal gift cards that can be emailed in a matter of minutes. Purchase the card from the online re-tailer and email the re-demption code to the gift recipient. Time the email

to arrive on Christmas morning or include all of the necessary information in a holiday card.

· Ship to store. Some shoppers like the conve-nience of ship-to-store services. This enables a person to purchase a gift online but avoid ship-ping charges by having the item made available at a store location. In-stock items are typically ready the day of purchase. This helps you avoid crowds and impulse buys, as on-line purchases are typi-cally available at special pick-up locations in the store that allow online shoppers to skip long lines at registers.

· Avoid gimmick gifts. Skip the “as seen on TV” aisle at the store or trendy infomercial gifts. Such gifts may suggest to their recipients that you wait-ed until the last minute to buy the gifts and then re-ally didn’t have any good ideas.

· Expect extra charges and factor such charges into your budget. Pro-crastinating may work for your schedule, but expect to pay more if you shop online and require ship-ping. You will probably

need to expedite ship-ping if you expect to have gifts delivered on time. Verify the delivery date before making any pur-chases. Paying more for shipping may outweigh the hassle of driving to store after store searching for gifts. Online retailers such as Amazon may even offer selective delivery on Christmas Eve.

· Check store hours. Some stores offer extend-ed shopping hours to meet the needs of last-minute shoppers. You may be able to visit early morn-ing or late at night to skip the crowds. Certain de-partment stores time sales with these extended hours, such as “early bird” or “night owl” specials, so you may even be reward-ed for procrastinating.

· Shop smaller retail-ers. One way to avoid the hassles that often come with holiday shopping is to patronize smaller, in-dependent shops. Chanc-es are the crowds will be smaller at these shops and you may have access to a more unique selection of gifts than you would find at a mall.

Th is is your chance to fi gure out whodunit! If you thinkyou are a pretty good amateur detective, now is your opportunity to

prove it. In this murder mystery dinner experience,murder is on the menu, and suspects abound.

Share a deadly delicious evening with fellow wine lovers as you attempt to solve the murder in this unique entertainment extravaganza.

Strategies for last-minute holiday shoppers

Five ways your smartphone can help you get through the holidays