Google Voice is a great service, but it has one flaw that a lot of people wished didn’t exist – you can’t send an initial text message out from a featurephone a.k.a. dumbphone as your GV number. (You can with a smartphone because you can use a GV app or go to m.google.com/voice in he [...]
If you happen to live in an area MetroPCS covers, and you use tons of bandwidth on your smartphone, MetroPCS offers unlimited LTE data at $70/month. This is actually a price raise from what they had before concerning LTE plans, but for bandwidth-hungry users, this is still a good deal. The first question people have [...]
This one is for members of The Tin Foil Hat club; long live Big Brother. It is of course no surprise that cops track cell phones without warrants routinely. It is also no surprise that shopping malls do the same thing (and not just in Australia as it happens here too). If this scares the [...]
Well, I can’t say I didn’t see this one coming. Chapel Hill, North Carolina puts their note in the tech history books as the first town in the US to completely ban the use of a phone while driving; this includes both hands and hands-free methods. If you’re caught doing it, the fine is $25. [...]
When will Windows 8 ship? The answer is October 2012 according to this source. Will I be getting it? On my PC, probably not, but on a tablet, probably yes. Windows 8 boasts 300+ new features, but a huge amount of them are tablet and touch-related. That’s not necessarily a problem, but it doesn’t give [...]
Most of you probably already know by now that despite the fact that the iPad 2 hasn’t even reached the end of its life cycle, Apple’s planning on adding another iteration to their product line. Due on March 16, the product which Apple’s dubbed “the new iPad.” Some journalists feel that the name’s something of [...]
As you’ve no doubt heard by now, Apple announced the iPad 3 – or as they’re calling it, the “new iPad” – on Wednesday. The summary is that it has a retina display, 4G support, and some more graphics horsepower (which it would need in order to pump all those pixels). Now, like a lot [...]
The Electronic Frontier Foundation recently released their Mobile User Privacy Bill of Rights, so I gave it a read. While I applaud EFF for going ahead and putting that document together, there are certain parts that are good and some that simply won’t work at all; the "rights" that I don’t believe will work will [...]
Cell phones even with light use get beat up easily, and over time they get all scratched up. And these days more people are electing to stay with their old phones instead of upgrading to a new one every 1 to 2 years. It’s not that a new phone costs that much, and in some [...]
I was pretty much dragged into texting kicking and screaming all the way. For years I refused to use it until smartphones got cheap and prepaid options presented what I considered to be a fair deal. Ultimately, what finally got me to use texting regularly was the right phone (as in one with a touchscreen, [...]
Hey you. Yeah, you. The one with the Smartphone. I’ve got news for you. Your data’s not as safe as you’d like to think it is. Believe it or not, as mobile becomes more and more important to society, the ne’erdowells and net crooks are turning their attention to Smartphones and Tablets. Plenty of malware [...]
Some good news from the FCC – they just put into effect tighter rules against telemarketing and spam texts. The rules basically state that written permission (which means on paper or electronic) is now required before reaching out to bothering people with prerecorded or direct sales calls. My question to you, the reader, is this: [...]
The first question most of you would have after reading the title of this article is, "Why would I even want a used cell phone when new ones are cheap or free (with certain wireless post-paid contracts)?" That’s a good question, and I have a good answer in two parts. 1. Battery life has not [...]
If you’ve ever found text messaging to be too limited and wished that you could actually chat with your SMS contacts, you’re pretty likely to love this app. Available for Blackberry, Android, iOS, and Nokia phones, Whatsapp markets itself as a “cross platform mobile messaging app.” Not too shabby, eh? It’s basically a surrogate Blackberry Messenger [...]
One of the best-running platforms on a smartphone and several featuresphones is Java. If you have a multimedia-capable handset that’s not Android or iOS-based, all the apps you have are probably Java-based. New touchscreen smartphones these days are really cheap and in some instances well under 50 bucks new. Okay, you’ve got a smartphone but [...]
