Tip: A Quick Way to Turn On Your Beam Receive Function

Originally published on 19 March 2007.

In order to preserve battery life, I keep my beam receive setting OFF (to do this, go to your preferences, look under power.) It makes a great difference in power consumption to keep this off, particularly if your PDA is often around devices that have infrared sensors, like laptops.

Having this turned off, though, can cause problems if you want to turn it on to receive an application or a business card. Here is the easy way to turn it on:

If you hold down your hardware address button, the PDA will try and send your business card. If you cancel that, the PDA will tell you your receive information by beaming is turned off, and do you want it turned on? If you answer yes, the beam receive will go on, and you can receive what you need. Later, you can go into preferences and turn it back off to conserve power.

No more fumbling through the preferences to receive something!