While thumb-typing or finger-swiping on your smartphone screen may be good enough for tweeting or texting, more wordy activities -- like typing long email messages, taking notes at conference sessions or writing documents like this one -- are grueling at best. For that, you need a physical keyboard.
In our daily activities, our smartphones increasingly store or access sensitive business and personal data -- not just email, but also financial and medical information, company systems, travel itineraries, etc. Many of us also use smartphones to access cloud data repositories like Dropbox, Evernote, Google Docs, Microsoft OneDrive and Apple iCloud.
With the right apps, cases and add-ons, your smartphone can tackle a wide and whacky range of tasks.
Smartphone users have gotten used to having 3G/4G connectivity whenever they're away from a Wi-Fi network. However, if you're using a tablet or a laptop, that's often a different story.
Today's coders may know how to whip up a PHP script or a Drupal extension, create a mobile app for both the iPhone and Android, and run DOOM on their car's GPS. But there's a lot that their predecessors knew that today's programmers don't.
With the ever-rising cost of electricity, we're all getting increasingly sensitive about how much power our computers, televisions, appliances and other doohickeys are using -- not just when we're using them, but also when they're allegedly turned off.