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"My esteemed colleague, it is with much reverence that I am humbly, yet secretly, contacting you to tell you of great fortune that has come my way. My most honorable relative has kindly left me, in his will, eighty gold bars. Unfortunately, due to circumstances, I have to regretfully sell on the ...

Here's a likely familiar summer scenario for many Americans: You've been driving all day, and it's getting late. You're tired. You're ready for a hotel bed in an unknown town coming up ahead. My modus operandi has always been to watch for billboards advertising upcoming motels with rates. Or, I mig...

If you've been getting into flashing ROMs on your devices, you're familiar with the palava that goes with it: booting to recovery, swapping cards, adb, fastboot, renaming zip files, and the rest of it. ROM Manager, from ClockworkMod, the recovery software maker, claims to largely alleviate the kerfu...

Plex is a good looking media platform for running media files on Google TV, tablets, phones and so on. Online channels include Hulu, Vimeo and more. On looks and apparent tight integration between my existing Android-based devices, I decided to check out Plex's two Android apps. I was interested in...

HTC is on its fourth incarnation of Sense, and in my opinion, no one has come close. In fact, they've got nowhere near. Muddy teal menus, and crude buttons from Motorola fail to delight; the Honeycomb UI on my Toshiba Thrive tablet with its neon-effect borders looks like it should be part of the UI ...

Reports of the demise of the fax machine may be premature if research in Chico Harlan's article in The Washington Post last week is to be believed. Fax machines are still in 59 percent of Japanese homes, Harlan found. They are still popular because of a cultural interest in the use of paper and ha...

Visual voicemail functionality is the visual element in a voicemail application that allows text to be transcribed and displayed on the phone -- or more simply, message headers, or envelopes, are displayed textually in a list. Options often include push to email and SMS. It's been around in various ...

I've been looking for an alternative to Google's Google Voice product that provides one number for all my phones -- mobiles and landline -- and includes online voicemail and discounted calling. Google Voice is a fine product, and I've had exemplary use out of it, but it has a couple of failings rela...

I've got fond memories of physical keyboards embedded in smartphones. My Palm Treos -- I had three -- were superb at composing email and SMS text responses. I even made notes for a book I was writing on one Treo. I speculate that the hardware keyboard is the principal differentiator keeping BlackBer...

Have you ever found yourself scrolling endlessly around your phone's chronologically arranged photograph album -- called "Gallery" in Android -- looking for a photograph you've captured? If you can remember the specific place but not the date, then Scalado Album may be for you. I say "may be" becau...

Keep Everything. Share Anything. When a company like Google uses a tagline that includes the words "share anything" for a Dropbox-like cloud file storage system, my immediate reaction is "with whom?" Google, after-all, is a company that's made its money delivering ads based on what it learns about o...

I have to confess to being a little unfair on the Shazam Encore app for its first LinuxInsider test. It is supposed to identify songs you're listening to, but I think I may have asked it the impossible. I had downloaded the app just before a planned lunch that included a sojourn to my neighborhood c...

Instagram, the popular photography and social networking app for the iPhone, with a whopping 27 million iOS users, recently became available for Android. Around 5 million Android users reportedly signed up for the app in the first few days of the Android release. Then social network Facebook offered...

The 5-year-old subscription streaming video service known as "Hulu Plus" has doubled its subscriber numbers in the last seven months to more than 2 million, according to numbers bandied about by the company. Hulu is a joint venture between investors and television operators: Comcast's NBCUniversal, ...

If there's been a common thread to some of the recent "How To" articles I've written for Technewsworld and my Android app reviews for LinuxInsider, it might be the taming of the ever-proliferating devices that are taking over my living space. I seem to be collecting things at an alarming rate -- so ...