Learn How To Talk About Smartphones In English

Hi Bob, the Canadian here.

Welcome to this English lesson on smartphones.

This little device has become very, very useful to people around the world.

In fact, almost 80% of the people that watch my YouTube videos watch them on some sort

of smartphone, and many of you have asked me to do an English lesson about smartphones

and all of the words and phrases that we use in the English language when we talk about

smartphones so that's what I'm going to do today.

So the first thing we should talk about is, what do we call this thing?

Actually, there's a lot of names for it.

We say mobile phone or mobile phone, cell phone, smartphone but it's more and more common

in English right now to just call it a phone.

Most of us don't have phones in our home anymore.

We simply have a smartphone.

So for Jen and I, we just call this a phone, you know, where is my phone?

Have you seen my phone?

So that's, that's what we call it now.

In order to use a phone, you need to have a data plan or you need to have a service

plan, and you get that plan from a service provider.

We would call them a cell phone provider still using the old term cell phone.

So I pay money every month to a cell phone provider so that I can use my phone.

In order for me to unlock my phone, because phones are locked, I have a fingerprint scanner.

So I can push that and my phone unlocks.

Very, very handy.

But I also might need to swipe up and then punch in my pin number.

So your pin number is, I think it's a personal information number, but you should look up

what a pin number actually is.

So either way, I can use the fingerprint scanner or punch in my pin number in order to unlock

my phone.

You'll notice too that my phone has some buttons.

It has a power button.

So you would push the power button to turn the phone on and push it again to turn it

off.

It's not really off though.

I think it just turns the screen on and off, and I have a volume up and a volume down button

on my phone as well.

This large black area is just called the screen, and you'll also notice that I have a front-facing

camera or a forward-facing camera, and I also have a rear-facing camera.

So most smartphones these days have two cameras and that's how we refer to them in English.

The front-facing camera and the rear-facing camera.

So I often use this camera to do my live streams.

I'm not sure if you knew that.

When you have your phone on and you're in a place where you don't want it to make noise

you can turn your phone ringer down or you can turn your volume down.

So you'll see that my phone right now all of the ringers are turned off.

I like to keep them off.

You can also set your phone to vibrate.

I'm not sure if you can see this icon.

I'll try to focus on it, but you can see I have my phone ... That's not my volume control

here.

Let me do this.

You can see I have it set to vibrate.

I think it disappeared on me again.

But vibrate means instead of making noise, the phone goes ..bzzz bzzz.. So sometimes I have my

phone set to vibrate.

When you have the volume turned off completely we say that we have the phone muted.

So in English we say, "You can mute your phone so that it doesn't make any noise."

I have a protective cover on my phone.

So many times people will buy a protective case or protective cover to put on their phone.

So you can see here I've taken mine off.

Now, there's also a little slot in the side where you can put a SIM card.

So when you buy a cell phone plan from a provider they give you a small card called a SIM card.

If any of you travel, you can buy SIM cards at the airport to put in your phone so that

you can use it temporarily in other countries.

So that's where you would put the SIM card in this phone.

It also has a port on the bottom where I can charge it or connect it to my computer.

So this hole in the bottom where I can plug a cable in is called a port and it has a headphone

Jack as well.

So I can plug in a pair of headphones if I wanted to listen to some music.

Let me unlock this for a sec.

On the screen, you'll see that there are all kinds of icons.

If I press an icon, it will open what we call an app.

So I think that's my camera app right now that just opened, but just to repeat, the

items on the screen are called icons and if you tap on them or press on them it will open

an app.

An app is short for application.

If I push this button down here I go back to the home screen.

So your main screen is called your home screen and that's what this middle button does.

I think if you have an Apple phone though, it has a slightly different button.

I also have a pair of earbuds.

You can have earbuds or headphones and these are Bluetooth.

So if I plug these in, do you plug them into your ears?

If I put these into my ears.

You don't plug them in your ears.

If I put these in my ears I can listen to music from my phone without having a cable

or wires.

So it's really nice to have Bluetooth headphones.

I use them a lot when I go to the gym.

When we had the camera open, if you set the camera to face yourself you can take a selfie.

So I could be like take a selfie like that.

So a selfie is when you take a picture of yourself.

Many people take selfies this way in portrait mode.

You can also take selfies in landscape mode.

So that's another thing about the phone.

I'm just checking over my list to make sure I have talked about almost everything, and

I think I have.

So that's just a little bit of information about the device that almost all of you have

in your pocket.

This device has made my YouTube channel possible, so thank you for having one of these things

and using it to watch my YouTube videos.

Bob, the Canadian here.

That was just a quick lesson about smartphones, or cell phones, or phones.

They're just phones, aren't they?

I think at this point in our lives we should just start referring to this as a phone.

Anyways, Bob, the Canadian here, I hope you enjoyed this little lesson.

Hope you're having a good day and I will see you in the next video.