More and more, people are performing web searches on their smart phones. It’s great to be able to do that, but it also can be frustrating to try to find what you’re looking for on that tiny screen, or without the full tools available to you with a keyboard or mouse. For example, how can you easily search for and jump to a particular word or term that’s down towards the bottom of a web page, and not visible at the top of the page?

One of the biggest (and indeed only) frustrations for people who use the iPad (be it iPad 2, iPad 3, or originally flavor iPad) for business, or even for personal email use if you don’t use a Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, AOL or other webmail address) is that the native mail app on the iPad will only use your webmail address as your “From” address, even if you have a different default email address set within your webmail app. For example, your Gmail address may be example@gmail.com, but you may have example@yourdomain.com set as your default “From:” address in Gmail, and Gmail will honor that, but the mail app on your iPad will insist on sending your email ‘from’ your example@gmail.com address instead of your default example@yourdomain.com address. There is no way to change that default “from” address on your iPad. But it turns out that there is a way to beat your iPad into submission, and to set your default “from” address to whatever you would prefer it to be. Here’s how.

With the rash of deadly tornados recently, not to mention thunderstorms, blizzards, and wind storms, there are plenty of reasons to want to be able to get an urgent or emergency local weather alert – or even a national weather alert – wherever you are. Sure, you could carry a portable weather radio, but it turns out that the best sever weather alarm radio is… your phone! Weather apps turn your iPhone or Android phone into an emergency alert weather radio, and provide you with mobile weather alerts. Instead of an actual weather radio, your ‘weather smartphone’ will be your best weather alert radio; it fits in your pocket, will send you a weather alert text message, and provide you with weather radar and a weather map (unlike a radio). And even if you don’t get a severe weather text alert for weeks or months (and who wouldn’t like that?), it will gives you weather forecasts, weather conditions, and those great weather maps. So, what is the best weather app for the iPhone? Or the best weather application for the Android? Happily, the best iPhone weather app and the best weather phone app for Android are, in our opinion, the same one!

Internet security firm Symantec (proprietors of, among other things, Norton Anti-Virus) have released the results of research that they have dubbed the “Honey Stick Project”. In Project HoneyStick, researchers “lost” a total of 50 cell phones in various cities around North America, including NYC, Washington D.C., LA, San Francisco, and Ottawa, Canada. The aim was to see what the average citizen would do with a found cell phone: would they try to reunite it with its owner, or would they do something more sinister with it? It turns out that the answer is “both”.

Many people don’t fully explore each and every option available on their mobile phone (and even fewer fully read the user’s manual). So unless you have made a point of looking at each and every feature listed in your “Keyboard” setting on your iPhone or iPad (and who among us has?), you may have missed this fantastic goodie: Keyboard macros! Meaning custom keyboard shortcuts that you can create, allowing you to type a short set of letters that will magically expand to full phrases! For example, you can set up a keyboard short so that when you type “ty” it types “thank you”! You can create any shortcut that you want to… create custom signatures, frequently typed phrases, you name it! Here’s how to do it!

By now you may already know that the iPad 3 is out, but what you probably really want to know is how it’s different from the iPad 2. Is it really worth spending the money to buy an iPad 3 when you have a perfectly good (and still relatively new) iPad 2, or even iPad 3G or original iPad? Well, that depends on what you use your iPad for – for example, the dictation software is incredible, but that may not be that important to you. So, to learn the major differences, read on.

As our readers know, we have always been a fully Android shop when it came to our phones. Now, recently, we had the opportunity to put the iPhone 4S to the test and, in fact, have been using the iPhone 4S ever since. Because I (Anne) do a lot of work while on the road, on my phone, this means that I do a lot of voice dictation, which in turn means that I have had the opportunity to put both versions of the software for dictation (the Android phone dictation software, and the iPhone speech dictation program) to the test. To be clear, we are talking about the free dictation apps that come native as software dictation services on each phone, not a separate dictation app.

Google, Microsoft, Apple, and Firefox’s Mozilla, have at last formally agreed to include a “Do Not Track” button (DNT button) in every browser. {Let’s take this opportunity to explain that the way this works is that using the “Do Not Track” option inserts a special “Do Not Track” header into your browser. In fact, as we shall see, there may not even be a DNT button involved – you may need to be a super-user type to even find the “Do Not Track” option.} Their capitulation comes just before the Obama administration’s appeal to Congress to pass a “privacy bill of rights”, but don’t expect it to mean that they won’t still be mining your data. (P.S. See below for how to enable Do Not Track in Safari.)

Ok, first, yes, I admit it. In the form of the newish iPhone 4S, the iPhone finally had enough chops to lure me to try one out, to even consider abandoning my beloved Android. The voice control and dictation features blow Android’s away, for both accuracy and usability. And Siri’s ability to create location-based reminders, and generally how powerful it is, were pretty compelling. But, now there was a new dilemma: which is better? The ATT iPhone or the Verizon iPhone? Which has the better iPhone service – ATT or Verizon? Fewer dropped calls? Faster network?

Many people thought that the Kindle Fire would be the iPad killer, and while the Kindle Fire has dipped into the iPad market, it turns out that the iPad’s biggest competitor is its own cousin, the iPhone 4S.

With the recent decision in the Fricosu case, ruling that one can be forced to provide the password to your encrypted hard drive, you may be thinking it is better to store things “in the cloud”. In fact, it can be worse, as cloud storage currently requires no warrant for law enforcement to access any of your data which has been stored in the cloud for at least 180 days.

With the launch of textbooks for the iPad, Apple Inc. has set in motion the potential for students to say “so long” to the days of lugging around heavy book bags. The textbook initiative was announced last Thursday, January 19th, and begins with a small selection of standard high school books.

If you have the new iPhone 4S, you may find that Siri has her hand in your pocket. According to new research, using Siri can as much as double how much data your iPhone uses, which can be costly indeed. Sure, Siri is fun – but is she worth it?

What’s a person to do when their hard drive crashes, and they lose all of the songs that they purchased from iTunes? There is no option to redownload all of your iTunes purchases offered through either iTunes or the Apple website. However, while you may get chastised for not backing up your iTunes library (which you will do from now on, right?), it is possible to redownload iTunes songs again, and restore your iTunes library to its pre-crash state.

If you were one of an untold number of people who received a particular iTunes update, it will likely have planted a Trojan backdoor on your computer or smartphone (primarily iPhone or Blackberry) which allows government and law enforcement agencies access to your personal data. Let us be quick to add that this is a fake iTunes update. The malware (or “commercial software” depending on which side of this you are on) is sold primarily by three companies: Gamma FinFisher, Vupen Security, and HackingTeam. Gamma’s FinFisher product is from the UK, Vupen Security is out of France, and HackingTeam is in Italy, however all of the companies sell their software around the world.