You don’t have to go far in the PCMech community to find people who don’t own a smartphone, citing that they "hate smartphones". Smartphone haters hate two things primarily: Wireless plan contracts of any kind The ridiculous prices of the phones themselves It’s never the actual phone that these people hate, because if it did [...]
It is possible for just about any cell phone (even for plain featurephones) to send messages to email addresses as well as other mobile phone numbers. The drawback to this is that on reply to a message via email, HTML formatting by default is enabled, which on receive of the phone comes across as mostly [...]
There have been several attempts to get broadband internet available to you while driving. Technically we already have this via smartphone, but manufacturers want a integrated-into-automobile solution because they feel we as consumers could use it. The latest iteration of this is 4G LTE in the car, and I can honestly say yes, that would [...]
PostSecret, the popular tell-all-your-secrets web site, shut down their iPhone app that allowed people to post their secrets 100% anonymously via electronic means (prior to that it was by mail-in postcard only and has gone back to operating that way). Cited reasons for the closure of the app were, "…absolute anonymity made it very challenging [...]
On the eastern side of the United States, today is best described as an ice cube – even for Tampa Florida where PCMech is based: Even though it happens rarely, cold snaps causing freezing temperatures do happen in Florida. In a truly cold area for this time of year, like Boston, Massachusetts, that’s where you [...]
Every few years or so the electronics industry gets all stupid and introduces way too much of a specific tech at us way too fast. As of right now, which Forbes has confirmed, there’s too much mobile crap out there; so much so that it leaves people literally fatigued. And yes, it is all crap. [...]
As far as desktop use is concerned, Opera has little to no presence. However, on mobile platforms, Opera is #1 worldwide. Yes, that means Opera is used more than Android’s browser is. Why does Opera have so much popularity on mobile? Because it runs on just about any smartphone that exists. If your phone no [...]
The 800G from LG is a phone available in the US through prepaid carriers Tracfone, NET10 and others. The one I have uses the Tracfone carrier. As I’ve said before on more than one occasion, I’m a cheap cell phone user and hate post-paid cell phone contracts with a passion; this is why I use [...]
In a relatively short period of time, the smartphone has become the must-have accessory in the world of business. It was not long ago that a mobile phone was only capable of one primary task – enabling a user to send and receive calls. Today, the mobile phone has evolved into the smartphone, a device [...]
Yesterday, I went in for my biannual teeth cleaning at the dentist (in the US, dentists schedule routine cleanings once every 6 months). After the cleaning was done, I receive the dentist’s reminder card at the front desk stating that my next visit is scheduled for May 2012. Now while it’s true the office will [...]
Although I live in Florida now, from age 0 to 30 I lived in New England, so I have a pretty good idea what it means to deal with harsh weather conditions and winterize things appropriately. Something that most people don’t give a thought to are the operating temperatures for mobile devices. Every one sold [...]
A friend of mine visited Florida all last week and this friend’s only computer that was taken was an iPod Touch, which most of you know as "an iPhone without the phone part". For all intents and purposes, that’s a fairly accurate description of what an iPod Touch is. Something that truly amazes me about [...]
"Tablets will replace PCs and everything will be great!" Don’t count on it. The dark side of tablet computing is its overreliance on the cloud to do basically everything. The cold bitter fact is that Google, Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo!, AOL and anyone else that offers cloud services (mail, storage, docs, etc.) absolutely do not care [...]
Most of you out there had that phone in the past which you miss dearly because everything about it was "right". You probably stopped using it only because you changed carriers, am I right? In case you weren’t aware, Sony is phasing out feature phones, and that truly marks the beginning of the end for [...]
What next for the smartphone? The latest generation of swishable, app-packed mobiles would appear to have it all, with enough processing power to send a rocket to the moon while uploading lunar images to Facebook in real time. What can we expect the next generation of smart phones to bring us – other than an [...]
