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!

As promised, here are our impressions of the new Android Sidekick, the first Sidekick with a touch screen, out this week from T-Mobile. The first thing to know is that this is one sweet phone, with the always-superlative Sidekick keyboard, which blows all other slider QWERTY keyboards out of the water, and blazing-fast 4G. There are already a few standard reviews out there – this review is the ‘other’ review, with missing tidbits and tips not found in those other reviews, like why is Gmail not syncing on the Sidekick 4G? And where is the flash on the 4G Sidekick? And does this version of the Sidekick still have those auto text macros (automatic word replacement) built in?