Do Yourself a Favor: Set Up These Custom Typing Shortcuts on Your iPhone Right Now

It seems Apple added text expansion to iOS 5 and decided not to mention it. This is a great, highly-desired feature that can save you tons of time typing frequent phrases and long words. Here's how to set it up and the phrases you'll want to add right away.

Set Up Text Expansion (Shortcuts)

First things first, let's get text expansion (or Shortcuts, as Apple calls it) set up. To get it set up, either watch the video up top or follow these steps:

1. Open up the Settings app on your iPhone's home screen.
2. Tap the General section.
3. Tap the Keyboard section.
4. Swipe down to the bottom and tap the button labeled "Add New Shortcut..."
5. Under "Phrase" type the phrase you want the shortcut to expand to, and under "Shortcut" type the shortcut you want to type instead. For example, if you wanted "brb" to expand to "be right back", you'd type "brb" for the shortcut and "be right back" for the phrase.
6. Tap save when you're done.

You'll need to repeat this process for all the text expansion shortcuts you want to add. You can always delete them by swiping left over them on the keyboard settings page and tapping the delete button (much like anything else in iOS).

Phrases You Should Add Right Now

Here are some phrases you'll want to add to your iPhone right now. The nice thing about the feature is it works much like autocorrect, so you can set a text expansion shortcut to a portion of a word and it'll only expand if you type a space after the shortcut. For example, you could have a shortcut called "sig" and type the word signature without worrying about the shortcut expanding when you don't want it to expand. This opens up plenty of simple shortcut options. Here are the ones we think everyone will find useful right away.

Note: These shortcuts shouldn't be added in uppercase (unless you want to), but are just shown that way to make them easier to read in this post.

• EML -> your@emailaddress.com, so you never need to type your email when sending a message to yourself or sharing it with someone else.
• PHN -> your phone number, so you can easily share your phone number without the need to type it or even remember it.
• ADDR -> your address, so you don't have to type out the entire thing.
• SIG -> your email signature, in case you only want to use it sometimes and not with every message.
• CTCL -> can't talk, I'll call you later, when you need to tell a friend you'll get back to them a bit later but aren't able to call (or answer their call).
• FMIN -> I'll be there in five minutes, for when you want to text someone that you're five minutes away but only have a few moments to type it.
• BRB -> be right back, for those of you who IM frequently on your iDevice.
• THX -> thanks!, is one example of many ways you can abbreviate common endings to messages.

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How to Get a Siri-Like Personal Assistant on Your Android Phone for Free

 If you watched last week's iPhone 4S announcement with your Android phone and went a little green with envy when Siri, iOS's new voice-recognizing personal assistant, was announced and demoed on stage, buck up. You've got a lot of great voice recognition apps to choose from on Android that can help you keep up with friends, look up the weather, find local businesses, and more. Here are a look at your options.

If you haven't looked into voice recognition apps on Android before, you may be surprised at how many applications get the job done. None of the apps currently available for Android are quite as well integrated with the OS as Siri is be with iOS (sorry), but some of them come closer than others, and you can bet that all of them will be updated and improved now that Siri is available for iOS. Best of all, they're all free.

The One You Already Have: Google Voice Actions

If you have an Android phone, you already have Google Voice Actions for Androidinstalled. When everyone got their first look at Siri on the iPhone 4S, most people jumped to the assumption that Siri was just Voice Actions for iOS. That's not true—Siri does more than Voie Actions, but Voice Actions is the closest thing Android users to a voice-operated personal assistant.

Pros: Voice Actions can control a large swath of Android functions. You can place phone calls, listen to music by track name, artist, or album, send SMS or email messages, get driving and turn-by-turn navigation directions, search the web, and more. If you're clever, you can get information like weather, word definitions, maps and information about local businesses, and more just by using voice actions intelligently. For example, tap the Voice Actions icon and speak "weather in Washington, DC," Voice Search will do a Google search for it, and Google's mobile page will give you an interactive display of the weather forecast.

Cons: The trouble with Voice Actions is that it's only well integrated with core Android functions. You won't be able to schedule calendar appointments, schedule appointments with other people, update Twitter or Facebook, or issue complex commands that require passing information to any application other than Google Search. Additionally, you need to actually tap the Voice Search icon (or long-press the search key) every time you want to issue a request, which makes it less than ideal for hands-free situations, like when you're driving. Finally, Voice Search is a simple command-response application, as in, you speak a command and it replies with whatever it has. If it's wrong, you reissue the command by starting over. There's no back-and-forth with Voice Actions.

 

The Most Hands-Free: Vlingo

Vlingo has been around for a long time, much longer than voice control has been in-style on smartphones. Vlingo has text-to-speech and speech-to-speech clients for iOS, Android, BlackBerry, Nokia, and Windows Mobile, and while none of them have particularly deep integration with their respective operating system, the app does reach beyond core applications and comes closest to the kind of back-and-forth with advanced commands that Siri offers.

Pros: Vlingo allows you to do all of the basics: you can send SMS messages and emails, place phone calls, and search the web. You can also search for local businesses and restaurants using natural language, so saying "find pizza" will search for local pizza delivery restaurants. Saying "taxi" will search for the nearest cab company. You can also launch applications through Vlingo by speaking their name, or update Facebook and Twitter through the app. It's speech-to-text engine is good, and unlike Voice Actions, it rarely misinterpreted my contact names or spoken words.

The developers behind Vlingo have even tossed in some tie-ins to other applications: if you say "find hotels in New York City," the app will ask you if you want to install Kayak or if you just want to search the web. Say "Buy movie tickets for Real Steel in Washington DC," the app will open your default browser, go to Fandango, bring up the page for Real Steel, and offer me showtimes at nearby theaters.

Finally, Vlingo's strongest suit is that you can tell it to start listening as soon as you open the app, and when you enter Vlingo's "in-car" mode, you can say "Hey Vlingo," out loud and the app will accept commands. It's Vlingo's depth of features and its ability to have a back-and-forth conversation with you that make it the closest thing Android users have to Siri. Check outthis video to see Vlingo in action.

Cons: The only real problem with Vlingo is that too many of its commands shunt you to other applications that have no voice-activated features. When you're using "in-car" mode, Vlingo will ask you if you want to leave Vlingo to open your browser or another app to complete the action, but it doesn't let you say yes or no from that screen, and you have to touch the screen to either go forward or cancel the operation. The same is true for a number of Vlingo's other features as well. Saying "Check in to China Garden" simply opens Foursquare and does a search for China Garden, which saves time, but falls just a little short.

Also, if you stray too far from any of Vlingo's known search and command terms, you'll confuse it and it'll shunt you to a web search. That's fine in some cases, but the fact that you can't just ask what the weather is without doing a Google search is a little disappointing. Vlingo is great, but the most frustrating thing about the app is that it seems to go so far, only to stop short of perfection.

The Most Conversational: Edwin

Edwin is a utility we've covered before, and while it's lacking the bells and whistles of its competition, it adds voice response and speech-to-speech to Google's native voice actions. It also allows you to make your voice commands a bit more conversational. Most of its commands are passed through to Google Voice Actions, where they're executed or the results are spoken back to you.

Pros: Edwin's strength is in how conversational the app is. If it has a direct response, it'll speak it out loud. Ask "What's the weather in Washington DC," and the app will respond aloud with current conditions. Ask about another city, and the app will look it up and respond there as well. You can even ask the app "Where am I," and it'll respond, right down to your block number. The app has a large button you press once to make the app start listening. Best of all, if it understands, it'll respond. If the app needs to do a web search or open an application, it'll prompt you to select an app, or it'll go to the browser and perform a search.

Cons: The big problem with Edwin is that it doesn't have a rich command list of its own, and when it doesn't understand something, it suffers the same problem Voice Actions does: it just fails. The app also has a difficult time processing some commands, like navigation and SMS messages—it'll understand that you want to navigate, and it'll understand that you want to send an SMS message, but it won't pick up where you want to go or who you want to send the message to. The app definitely needs some improvements, and when testing it, I ran into a number of bugs and errors. In some cases, Edwin forgot my location and couldn't retrieve weather information, and in others it stopped being able to obtain weather information entirely. Your mileage with Edwin may vary, but at the very least it'll talk back to you.

The Most Flexible: SpeakToIt Assistant

SpeakToIt Assistant is a relatively new speech-to-speech and speech-to-text assistant in the Android market. The app prides itself on being customizable, and on giving you a cartoon avatar that you can customize and configure to be your personal assistant. (If you don't like the default sexy librarian, you've got an absurd amount of options for customizing your assistant with a range of other fantasy cartoon options.) The app does have some back-and-forth conversational abilities, and it definitely recognizes a wide array of phrases and commands. The developers behind SpeakToIt claim that it's always learning, and they're working to give the app more commands that it can directly respond to with each update.

Pros: SpeakToIt definitely understands everything that Voice Actions understands and then some. You can ask it to find stock information for you, what the weather is in a far-off place, to send an email or SMS, update your social networks, check-in to a location on Foursquare, and more. The app can also post items to your Evernote account, and it greets you—sometimes with your name after you've said it aloud—when you open the application.

Unlike some of the other applications, you can make your assistant male or female, customize their appearance, and change their voice, albeit slightly. It wins for being the most customizable, and the app with the largest library of in-app commands and pass-through terms. It's clear that the developers of SpeakToIt want you to be able to get as much information as possible inside the app before being shunted to another application or to a Google search. It can even update Facebook and Twitter on your behalf. Check out this video to see SpeakToIt Assistant in action.

Cons: Unfortunately, SpeakToIt Assistant tries very hard to be a personal assistant on the surface that some of the finer touches are lost. SpeakToIt's chosen voice is the default Android voice synthesizer, making it sound more stilted and unnatural than the others, especially when it's trying to hold a conversation with you. Grammar errors in the on-screen text make it difficult to work with at times, and the fact that you have to tap a small microphone button on-screen every time you want to speak to the application difficult to use when driving or if you want a hands-free experience.

Still, SpeakToIt Assistant is in beta, and most of its shortcomings can be easily overcome with additional development. Given that development, the app could grow to be more useful. As it is, it's a touch gimmicky.

So Which Is the Best?

If we could only suggest one, Vlingo is definitely the most mature application with its hooks into the most services. It's also the one under the most active development, and the one with the best hands-free and speech-to-speech functionality. However, its competition is hot on its heels.

Google's own Voice Actions is built-in to every Android phone, and its unlikely that Google has any intention of holding still now that Siri will be deeply integrated with iOS. Similarly, SpeakToIt Assistant may be new and still rough around the edges, but it has a lot of potential and it gives you a very personable and customizable caricature to interact with.

The good news for Android users watching Siri's development is that there are plenty of alternatives and options that bring the promise of text-to-speech and speech-to-speech to Android devices. None of them are perfect, and they're not deeply integrated with all of the common features and functions that you would expect from a real voice-activated assistant. Still, there are plenty solid options to give Siri a run for its money, and expect them all to improve very shortly.

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Hands on with the HTC Titan

We already ran a quick hands-on when HTC unveiled the Titan back in September, but now we’ve spent some time with a review unit and it’s time to revisit this beastly Windows Phone. If ever there was a handset that deserved its given name, it is this phone — the HTC Titan is nothing short of titanic. It’s large, it’s powerful and it’s about as solid as they come. The build materials include metal, hardened plastic that is anything but cheap-feeling, and of course a huge sheet of glass that covers the face of the phone. Windows Phone Mango is a smooth operator on first-generation Windows Phones, so you can imagine how quick it is with the Titan’s 1.5GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon chipset running the show. The massive 4.7-inch display spreads the Titan’s 480 x 800-pixel resolution a bit wide, but the screen is nice and bright just like the HTC Arrive. Is this the Windows Phone we’ve been hoping for? You’ll have to wait for our full review to find out but in the meantime, be sure to check out our photo gallery below.

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Touchscreen Braille Writer Lets the Blind Type on a Tablet

One group of people has traditionally been left out of our modern tablet revolution: the visually impaired. Our slick, button-less touchscreens are essentially useless to those who rely on touch to navigate around a computer interface, unless voice-control features are built in to the device and its OS.

But a Stanford team of three has helped change that. Tasked to create a character-recognition program that would turn pages of Braille into readable text on an Android tablet, student Adam Duran, with the help of two mentor-professors, ended up creating something even more useful than his original assignment: a touchscreen-based Braille writer.

Currently a senior at New Mexico State University, Duran arrived at Stanford in June to take part in a two-month program offered by the Army High-Performance Computing Research Center (AHPCRC). The program is a competition: Participants are given research assignments, ranging in the past fromaerospace modeling to parallel computing, and vie for honors awarded at the end of the summer. This year, projects aimed to solve a problem using the Android platform. Duran and his team’s project, titled “A virtual Braille keyboard,” was this year’s winner for “Best Android Application.”

Duran was challenged to use the camera on a mobile device, like the Motorola Xoom, to create an app that transforms physical pages of Braille text into readable text on the device. From the get-go, there were problems with this plan.

“How does a blind person orient a printed page so that the computer knows which side is up? How does a blind person ensure proper lighting of the paper?” Duran said in an interview with Stanford News. “Plus, the technology, while definitely helpful, would be limited in day-to-day application.”

So Duran and his mentors, Adrian Lew, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering, and Sohan Dharmaraja, a Stanford Ph.D. candidate studying computational mathematics, decided to develop a writerapp, instead of a reader. Currently, the visually impaired must use desktop-based screen-reading software or specially-designed laptops with Braille displays in order to type using a computer.

Because a blind person can’t locate the keys of a virtual keyboard on a flat, glossy touchscreen, the team decided to bring the keys themselves to the user’s fingertips. Specifically, when the user sets eight fingers on the device, virtual keys align underneath each of the user’s fingers. The team’s Braille keyboard is comprised of eight keys: six that are used to compose a Braille character, a carriage return, and a backspace key. If the user gets disoriented, he or she can re-establish the keyboard layout with a lift and re-application of the hands.

“The solution is so simple, so beautiful. It was fun to see,” Lew said. Such a keyboard is also useful because it customizes itself to the user, adjusting the onscreen keys based on the user’s finger size and spacing. (I wish my iOS keyboard did that!)

Duran demoed the app blind-folded, typing out an email address as well as complicated mathematical and scientific formulas, proving the keyboard could be useful to educators, students and researchers. He also got to see a blind person use his app for the first time, which he said was an indescribable feeling, “It was the best.”

Lew said via email, “We do not yet know how exactly this will reach final users, but we are committed to make it happen.” The team has several options they will be considering over the next few weeks, so perhaps we could even see an app end up in the Android Market soon.

The tablet-based system costs 10 times less than most modern Braille typing solutions, and, based on the video below, appears to be anything but vapor.

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With Siri, the iPhone Finds Its Voice

• Apple iPhone 4S
• Mobile Phones
 
• · $200 for 16GB, $300 for 32GB, $400 for 64GB with a 2-year contract 
• · Apple

Apple never specified what the “S” stands for in iPhone 4S, and it may as well stand for Siri.

Sure, the fifth-generation iPhone’s superb camera and speedy dual-core processor are classy additions. But Siri is the reason people should buy this phone.

When I step out of my apartment today, a reminder will pop up on my iPhone 4S to deposit checks at the bank. Tonight I’m meeting my friend Peter, who wants to eat steak, so I can say, “I want prime rib” to find steakhouses nearby. I have a meeting with a colleague Alexis this Thursday, and I can add that in my calendar just by saying, “Schedule meeting with Alexis on Thursday at 3 p.m.”

With Siri and Apple’s new Reminders to-do list app, it’s unlikely I’ll forget anything important again because the process is so effortless.

I did all of this with the iPhone 4S’s new built-in app Siri, a voice-recognition technology that Apple inherited when it acquired Siri Inc., a San Jose-based startup, in 2010. The enhanced voice tool is an iteration on Apple’s previous Voice Control feature that debuted in the iPhone 3GS in 2009, which only allowed voice-powered phone dialing and music selection.

To give you an idea of how convenient Siri is, it takes about three seconds to create a reminder with a voice command, as opposed to the 10 seconds it takes me to manually type an event into a to-do list or calendar entry. Before, with the standard iPhone calendar, I would often forget to add an event because I was too busy to type it, and as a result I would forget I had something scheduled altogether. With Siri and Apple’s new Reminders to-do list app, it’s unlikely I’ll forget anything important again because the process is so effortless.

It’s kind of like having the unpaid intern of my dreams at my beck and call, organizing my life for me. I think Siri on the iPhone is a life changer, and this is only the beginning.

Voice-powered artificial intelligence like Siri and Google Voice are shaping up to become the next-generation user interface. The first iPhone’s introduction of capacitive touchscreens were a major leap into making technology fluent to people of all ages and skill levels. The sense of touch is one of the first experiences we become accustomed to after we’re born, so it wasn’t surprising to see that even children and our grandparents could pick up an iPhone or an iPad and figure out how to use it in seconds. Swiping, tapping and pinching interactive objects on a screen? No problem.

Voice-controlled UI is the logical next step. We learn how to speak when we’re infants, and most of us can talk faster than we type. Therefore, as the technology matures, voice commands will become the quickest way to get in and out of our phones (until Apple or Google figure out mobile telekinesis).

Just imagine what powerful voice-recognition software means for people who barely touch keyboards or mice. And imagine how important this tool is for the visually impaired — their lives are about to get much easier. In the coming years, voice control is going to be huge.

Currently Siri works with some core features of the iPhone, and Apple’s initial partners incorporating the voice-powered AI are Wolfram Alpha and Yelp. That means in its beta state, Siri is limited to controlling the iPhone’s built-in apps (e-mail, SMS, phone, iPod, calendar, web search, looking up directions), finding restaurants or businesses with Yelp, or performing gimmicky calculations such as “How many inches to the moon?” with Wolfram Alpha.

If you hold the iPhone up to your ear, Siri is activated, so it looks like you’re talking to someone on the phone rather than talking to the phone itself.

You would think that dictating commands to a phone would look awkward in public, but Apple thought of a trick to make this less weird. By default, if you hold the iPhone up to your ear, Siri is activated, so it looks like you’re talking to someone on the phone rather than talking to the phone itself. Clever, huh?

I suspect most iPhone 4S customers will primarily be using Siri for controlling the iPhone’s default apps, such as creating reminders, setting the alarm clock and composing an e-mail or text message.

But if and when Apple opens up Siri to third-party app makers, the possibilities are endless. Some hypothetical examples include using Siri to pay your credit card bill through the Chase app, or to order your Chinese delivery through GrubHub, or to book your flight through the Kayak app.

Seeing as Google has already opened voice-recognition to Android programmers, it’s a safe bet we’ll see Apple eventually allow third-party iPhone apps to take advantage of Siri, too.

I’ve spent a week with an iPhone 4S loaned to me from Apple, and I got hooked on Siri quickly. Creating Reminders with Siri was the most useful. I found it silly, however, that items you create with Reminders do not show up in the Calendar app. That means if I create reminders and calendar events, I have to open two different apps to see everything I have to do. I’m hoping Apple integrates Reminders into Siri in a future update.

The only other problem with the iPhone 4S is that once you start using the robot assistant, you’ll wish it did a lot more. It is limited, but really good at what it can do so far.

Here are some of my favorite examples from experimenting with Siri:

Me: “I’m drunk.”

Siri: “I found a number of cabs fairly close to you.” (Perfect; it didn’t dial my ex-girlfriend.)

Me: “I have a flat tire.”

Siri: “I found 14 towing services. 12 of them are fairly close to you.”

Me: “Remind me to steal a ream of paper when I arrive at the office.”

Siri: “Here’s your reminder for when you get to work: Steal a ream of paper. Shall I create it?”

Me: “I’m going to kill myself.”

Siri: “I found four mental health agencies. Three of them are fairly close to you.” (This was just a test — don’t be alarmed.)

And here are some examples of where Siri let me down:

Me: “Book me a table at Mission Beach Cafe tonight at 7.”

Siri: “OK, here’s Mission Beach Cafe. It looks pretty close to you.” (No option to book the restaurant. That’s disappointing because before Apple’s acquisition, the older Siri app had partnered with OpenTable.com to book restaurants for you.)

Me: “Add Steve Urkel to my address book.”

Siri: “Sorry, Brian X. — I’m not allowed to create contacts.” (Shucks. It still takes too long to add a new person to my address book, and the third-party app Bump for wirelessly swapping contact information is very poorly designed.)

Me: “Lower screen brightness.”

Siri: “Sorry, I don’t understand ‘Lower screen brightness.’” (This would be really useful, because it takes too many steps to do this on the iPhone normally.)

Me: “Remind me to buy toothpaste when I arrive at Safeway.”

Siri: “When would you like me to remind you?” (Turns out Siri and the Reminders app can’t yet create a geo-fence for anywhere besides your office location or your home. And dammit, I forgot to buy toothpaste again when I was at Safeway yesterday.)

With all that said, the list of what Siri can already do is quite long, and this is a great start. It will be exciting to see where Apple, and presumably its army of app developers, take voice-powered AI in the years to come.

Performance, camera and dual-antennae

Oh, yeah, the iPhone 4S includes upgrades for the processor, antenna and camera, too.

The new Apple phone has the same dual-core A5 chip as the iPad 2, and the performance boost will be most noticeable when playing games, launching apps and browsing the web.

Besides browsing and playing games, the smaller parts that make up the whole iOS experience all feel faster. Everything from typing to sending a text, and from powering on the phone to taking a photo is zippier.

Here’s a quick SunSpider benchmark comparing the iPhone 4S’ browser speed with that of an iPhone 4 running iOS 5 (less is better):

iPhone 4S: 2,232.2 milliseconds
iPhone 4: 3,679.2 milliseconds

Besides browsing and playing games, the smaller parts that make up the whole iOS experience all feel faster. Everything from typing to sending a text, and from powering on the phone to taking a photo is zippier.

Apple also made several improvements to the iPhone camera. The camera sensor has a large 4.3 millimeter f/2.4 aperture lens — which is getting close to the same size as a really good point-and-shoot camera. The bigger the aperture, the more light and clarity.

The camera resolution was upped to 8 megapixels, and not only are the number of pixels increased; more light gets into each pixel thanks to backside-illumination technology. That basically means you can take artsy photos in low-light conditions. My test shots in a dimly lit bar looked pretty good, but in dark settings, it doesn’t hurt to just try shooting with the flash.

And then there’s the antenna. Now that metal band surrounding the iPhone contains two antennae for your cellular services, and when you’re on a call, the handset will automatically switch to the antenna that’s pulling a stronger signal.

From my experience, talking on an iPhone 4S on AT&T sounds noticeably clearer than it did on past iPhones I’ve owned. In areas with good reception, the handset still hasn’t dropped a call. And no, I haven’t experienced any degraded call performance when holding the phone “the wrong way.”

However, in dead zones where there is spotty AT&T coverage (pretty common here in San Francisco), the reception is still poor. There’s not much a phone can fix about an overloaded network, even with a fancy dual antenna.

Though these are all nice improvements, the antenna, camera and processor upgrades are minor compared to the addition of Siri. The previous iPhone 4 already took great pictures for a phone, the antenna was OK (despite the notorious grip-of-death design flaw), and it was already plenty fast. Siri is the fancy bow on the package that makes this a sharp upgrade overall.

Should you upgrade?

For people who own an older iPhone, such as the 3GS, or for those looking to dump a creaky Android phone, the decision is obvious: The iPhone 4S will be a big jump in performance, camera quality and call clarity, and Siri will be a fat bonus.

If you’re an iPhone 4 owner thinking about upgrading, you have a tougher choice to make. Thanks to the two-year contract imposed by AT&T and Verizon, you’re not yet eligible to pay the $200 upgrade fee for a new phone, so you’d have to spend over $600 just to get the 4S.

I think it’d be wiser for iPhone 4 owners to wait another year for the next iPhone, which will probably be dubbed the iPhone 5 and sport a radical new design and more internal enhancements, if the pattern holds.

But be warned, iPhone 4 owners: If you try Siri for a few minutes, reaching for that credit card will seem irresistible. Try not to give in. I’m betting that some clever hackers out there in the jailbreak community will figure out how to integrate Siri into older iPhones. So if you’re brave enough to tinker, I suggest waiting to see what they come up with before blowing a huge wad of cash just to have Siri.

The iPhone 4S looks exactly the same as its predecessor — but who cares? If it was shaped even slightly differently or came in a new color, people would still go nuts over the stuff that’s more important anyway: the insides. And both inside and out, this is a magnificent smartphone.

The late Steve Jobs once called the computer the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds. I think of the smartphone as the rocket ship for our minds. With increasingly powerful sensors and technologies, and access to hundreds of thousands of apps enabling us to do just about anything, the iPhone keeps soaring to incredible heights and taking us to places with limitless potential. I guess that’s what you have to do to create a ding in the universe.

WIRED Siri is the best androgynous unpaid intern you’ll ever meet. Dual-core guts make for faster apps and a smoother interface. Camera is much-improved. Call quality gets a boost.

TIRED Siri is limited in what it can do and understand. Looks the same as the iPhone 4 — what’s up with that? A two-year contract means you may not be eligible for the best upgrade pricing.

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