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!

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!

In the past few days the charge has been levelled that Apple’s voice-command entity, Siri, is anti-abortion. This after it was noted that when people ask Siri for guidance to abortion services, ‘she’ is “unable” to find such services, or in some instances instead directs them to pro-life organizations.

iPhones are hot. Everybody knows that. But the crew and passengers of an Australian plane belonging to Australia’s Regional Express airline learned just how hot they are first-hand today, when a passenger’s iPhone began emitting clouds of smoke, and glowing red-hot.

Digital marketing analysis firm comScore has released a report showing that in terms of marketshare, there are now more (vastly more) Android phones in use than iPhones. With nearly 40% of all smart phones in the U.S. being Android phones, compared to the Apple iPhone having just a little over 25% of the market, Android seems to be eating Apples for lunch. Just how many people are using Android phones as to compared to the number of people using iPhones? Read on…

It’s so easy to end up with a big collection of apps, isn’t it? There are so many free applications, so many interesting looking apps, that you can eat ’em like candy. But eventually they start taking up too much space on your iPhone, iPod or iTouch, or on your hard drive in iTunes. Here is how to remove an app from your device, from iTunes, and from your hard drive.

State Farm, the insurance company, has just released an iPhone app that evaluates how you drive. Called the State Farm Driver Feedback app, the iPhone application uses your iPhone’s accelerometer and GPS to track your acceleration, cornering, and braking, and then gives you a grade. But is that all it gives you? What about increased insurance rates, or even being declined insurance, based on how you drive, as recorded by the State Farm Driver Feedback app?

In response to the howls of outrage over the news that iOS4 is tracking and storing every location you visit with an iPhone or iPad, Apple has finally, more than week later, issued a statement on the matter,. In essence, they say that a bug made them do it, and they are going to fix it. Sort of.

While we are talking about how to lock down the Internet access on an iPod Touch, iPhone or iPad so that you can safely let a child use it without having to worry about what they may access on the Internet, you may find yourself having forgotten the parental restrictions passcode (that allows you to reset parental controls to disable Safari, email, etc.), and wanting to reset it. If you haven’t jailbroken your iPod Touch or iPhone or iPad, then the standard advice – to do a factory reset through iTunes – may still be your best bet. But if you have jailbroken your iPhone or iPad or iPod Touch, then you can actually remove and reset the parental restrictions passcode without having to reset your device! (Oh happy days!) Here’s how you do it:

If you are a conscientious parent who wants to let their child use an iPod Touch (or “iTouch”) or iPad, but who wants the iPod Touch wifi disabled before you give it to them, you may be frustrated at the lack of any way to disable wifi so as to lock down the iPad or iPod Touch internet access. You can’t password protect the internet access on an iPod Touch or iPad, as there are no passwords for iPod iTouch wifi. In fact, natively, there is no way to disable or password protect the iPod Touch internet access (how stupid, Apple, get on the ball here! Give us some iPod Touch wifi apps to disable wifi!) Oh sure, you can put parental control restrictions on individual applications (Safari, Email), but your child can still turn the iPod Touch wireless internet on, and for some parents, that’s still too much of a risk (and we say “Bravo!” to them for ‘getting’ it). There is, however, an iPod Touch hack that will allow you to disable wifi on your iPod Touch or iPad, by password protecting the iPod Touch wifi on/off switch, and here it is.

Researchers have discovered that Apple’s newest operating system, iOS4, is literally spying on iPhone and iPad 3G and iPad 2 3G users’ movements, using geolocation to create a file that records every place that the user carrying the device passes through. At least as bad, the file, called “consolidated.db”, not only is on your iPhone or iPad, but is unencrypted, meaning that anybody who can access the file can read your every move.

The iPhone 4 was unleashed on the Verizon network earlier this month, and despite some nice extras unavailable on the AT and T iPhone 4, including the ability to use your Verizon iPhone to create and share a wireless mobile hotspot, the sales of the Verizon iPhone have been, by most accounts, underwhelming at best.

The wait is over – at least, the wait to learn how long the wait is is over. As we mentioned earlier, today was the big day for Verizon’s announcement of the Verizon iPhone. And Verizon did not disappoint: this morning they announced the Verizon iPhone’s release date, along with a couple of interesting features, some of which that other iPhone doesn’t even have, including, most notably, wireless hotspot capability, allowing you to not only to connect your laptop wirelessly to the Internet through your iPhone, but to share that connection, wirelessly, with four additional people.

iPhone users around the world are finding (some the hard way) that the change from 2010 to 2011 has caused the alarms on their iPhones to stop working. This primarily is affecting one-time alarms, not repeating alarms, but that doesn’t make it any the less frustrating, especially for those who relied on their alarms to get them up this morning for work, only to find that their iPhone alarm didn’t go off. Fortunately there is a workaround for your broken iPhone alarm.

The Google Book Store or, perhaps more accurately, the Google eBook Store, was officially launched today. The store, stocked with at least 3 million books, allows you to download Google books from the Google eBookstore to your iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch, Android phone or device, the Sony Reader, and even the Barnes and Noble Nook, as well as to read Google eBooks with your browser.