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: Open up the Settings app on your iPhone's home screen. Tap the General section. Tap the Keyboard section. Swipe down to the bottom and tap the button labeled "Add New Shortcut..." 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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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