Ins and Outs of Using Gadgetry

Every time a reader asks me a basic question, struggles with a computer or lets a cellphone keep ringing at a performance, I have the same thought: There ought to be a license to use technology.

I’m not trying to insult America’s clueless; exactly the opposite, in fact. How is the average person supposed to know the essentials of their phones, cameras and computers? There’s no government leaflet, no mandatory middle-school class, no state agency that teaches you some core curriculum. Instead, we muddle along, picking up scattershot techniques as we go. We wind up with enormous holes in our knowledge.

This week, for example, a reader asked me about those weird, square, pixelated black-and-white bar codes that are cropping up on billboards, movie posters, signs, magazine ads and business cards. Nobody ever bothered to explain them. (They’re QR codes — quick response bar codes. You can scan them with your iPhone’s or Android phone’s camera, using a special app that translates it into an ad or takes you to a related Web page.)

That interaction made me realize that it’s time to publish the first installment of what should be the Big Book of Basic Technology Knowledge — the prerequisite for using electronics in today’s society. Some may seem basic, but you’ll probably find at least a couple of “I didn’t know thats!” among them.

Cellphones

• Searching for a signal scarfs up battery juice appallingly quickly. Turn your phone off, or put it into Airplane Mode, before you travel out of cellphone range — for example, on a plane or, for AT&T users, Manhattan and San Francisco.

• When you need the phone number, address or directions for any commercial establishment, call 800-BING-411 for an amazingly good voice-activated agent. (Thank you, Microsoft.)

• You can skip the inane 15-second voice-mail instructions when leaving a message (“To page this person, press 5”) — if you know your friend’s cellphone carrier. If it’s Verizon, press * to cut directly to the beep. AT&T or Sprint, press 1. T-Mobile, press #. (Better yet: Do the world a favor and add this trick to your own greeting: “To cut to the beep, press 1.”)

• If you travel overseas, you may return to a smartphone bill for $5,000 or more, thanks to the staggering international Internet fees. (You might not even know your phone is online — if it checks e-mail every 15 minutes, for example.) Despite many well-publicized horror stories, some people still don’t realize they should call the cellphone company before traveling to buy a special temporary overseas plan.

Cameras

• The half-press trick eliminates the frustrating delay when you press a pocket camera’s shutter button. Frame your shot, then half-press the shutter button. The camera beeps when it has locked focus — and that’s the time-consuming part. When pushed the rest of the way down, you snap the picture instantly. No lag.

• Your flash is useless if the subject is more than about eight feet away. Turn it off. (This means you, concertgoers and football fans.)

• If you erase photos from your memory card accidentally, you can still recover them if you haven’t used the card since. For about $30, you can download memory-card recovery programs; Google “memory card recovery” to find them.

App Phones

• On the iPhone, the camera doesn’t snap the photo until you release the on-screen shutter button. That’s good to know if you want a steady, blur-free shot. Frame the shot with your finger on the button, then snap the photo by lifting off the screen instead of tapping it.

• On iPhone, Android, BlackBerry and Palm/H.P. phones, tap the Space bar twice at the end of a sentence. You get a period, a space and a capitalized next letter, without hunting for punctuation keys.

• Also on those phones, you can type dont, wont, youre, didnt and so on. The phone adds the apostrophe to those automatically. (But you’ll have to learn the difference between it’s and its.)

• On a BlackBerry, hold a letter key down to capitalize it. The Web

• You can press Alt+D to highlight the Address bar at the top of your Web browser. Without touching the mouse, type the site name you want.

• You don’t have to type “http://www” into your Web browser. Just type “nytimes.com” or “dilbert.com,” for example. In Safari or Firefox, you can even omit the “.com.” In Internet Explorer, you can press Ctrl+Enter to add “.com,” or Ctrl+Shift+Enter for “.org.”

• You can tap the Space bar to scroll down by one screenful. Add the Shift key to scroll back up again. (You can also hit the Page Up/Page Down keys, if you have them.)

• When you’re filling an order form, you don’t have to slide six miles down the pop-up menu to choose your state. Instead, type the first letter to select it without the mouse. (If you get the wrong state, press the same key again. For example, press C once for California, again for Colorado and a third time for Connecticut.)

• When you get an error message — in a program, on your smartphone, on your tablet — search it on Google. You’ll find out what it means instantly.

• If you’re trying to paste some ridiculously long Web address where it would be confusing to read (or impossible to fit, as on Twitter), visit a site like Tinyurl.com or Bit.ly. These free sites convert long addresses into very compact ones.

Editing Text

• You can double-click a word to highlight it. (You don’t have to drag the mouse across it, in other words.) You can triple-click a word to select the entire paragraph.

• When you see highlighted text — in your word processor, for example, or in a Web browser address bar — you don’t have to delete it first. Just start typing.

• Sick of how Word automatically creates clickable links, boldface words, indented bulleted or numbered lists and other formatting as you type?

The on/off switches for these features exist, but they’re well hidden. In Word 2010 (Windows), open the File menu; click Options, Proofing, AutoCorrect Options, then AutoFormat Options. On the Mac (Word 2011), open the Tools menu; click AutoCorrect, then AutoFormat As You Type.

Mac Specials

• When you buy something online, don’t waste paper by printing the confirmation page. Instead, choose Print, and from the PDF pop-up menu, choose “Save PDF to Web Receipts Folder.” You get a beautiful PDF copy stashed in Documents, in a folder called Web Receipts.

• You can view most documents without opening a program to do it. At the desktop, highlight the icon and then tap the Space bar — a fantastic way to preview photos, but also great for Office documents, PDF files, movies, sounds and so on.

• Press Command-Delete to put a highlighted icon into the Trash.

Windows Specials

• When you want to send a file to someone, right-click its icon; from the shortcut menu, choose Send to Mail Recipient. Windows thoughtfully creates an outgoing e-mail message with the file attached. (If it’s a photo, Windows even offers to let you shrink them down to reasonable e-mailable size.)

• Ever wonder about the Windows-logo key? It sets off a host of useful functions: press it with F for Find, with D to see the desktop with all windows hidden, with L to lock the screen while you wander off to get coffee, and so on.

• You don’t have to pay for antivirus and anti-spyware software, year after year. Microsoft offers a perfectly good free security program.

All right, there’s a start. There are more waiting for you at nytimes.com/pogue.

Here’s hoping that your tech knowledge is just a little less sketchy.

7 Reasons Apple Shareholders Should Be Cautious

Apple (NYSE: AAPL - News) investors could be excused for feeling on top of the world. Another blowout quarter has sent the stock booming to another all-time high. The iPad seems to be a success. Everything the company touches seems to turn to gold.

Savor the moment, by all means. But don't get complacent. If you're an Apple shareholder, here are seven things to be concerned about—and one thing you can do about it.

1. Apple's good — but not that good. It's just that the competition is so bad. Nokia (NYSE: NOK - News), Microsoft (NasdaqGS: MSFT - News), Samsung, Palm (NasdaqGS: PALM - News): From smartphones to Internet tablets to computers, it's hard to believe so many big companies have blown it so badly. And they've committed mainly unforced errors, such as terrible user interfaces. I bought a non-iPod MP3 player the other day. It's great ... except making playlists is nearly impossible.

As long as the competition acts like this, Apple will keep winning. But its success owes less to the genius of Apple than the incompetence of everyone else. And that's something you can't control.

2. Apple fatigue. Was anything so ridiculous as the coverage of the new iPad? A computer company launched a new computer. Time and Newsweek put it on the cover, for heaven's sake, complete with fawning copy from the likes of Stephen Fry. A lot of people are getting absolutely fed up with this circus. Fashions come, but fashions go. Is Apple becoming overexposed? Right now Steve Jobs could sell his old underwear for $200 a pair (the "iPants"), and the sheep would line up at your local Apple store. If this mania lasts, it will be a first in human history.

3. The share price. At $260, Apple's stock price has more than doubled in a year. Amateur investors say, "It's going up." Present tense. Serious investors say, more accurately: "It has gone up." Past tense. No one knows the future. And the more it rises, the less attractive it gets. It's now 20 times annual cash flow and 5 and a half times annual sales. At $235 billion, the company is being valued at more than Sony (NYSE: SNE - News), Research In Motion (NasdaqGS: RIMM - News), Dell (NasdaqGS: DELL - News), Motorola (NYSE: MOT - News), Nokia, HTC (Taiwan 2498.TW - News), SanDisk (NasdaqGS: SNDK - News) and Palm ... put together. That assumes a lot.

4. Steve Jobs's ego. I don't care how much of a genius he is: Nobody is perfect. Yet Mr. Jobs has been subject to extravagant cheerleading, and it's not as if he was overendowed with a sense of humility to begin with. Bottom line: If and when he makes mistakes, who is going to stop him? A small but telling example: One thing keeping Apple from lots of extra iPhone sales to business users is that Mr. Jobs, for some reason, has a thing against keyboards. There's no business reason for it. It's a silly, unforced error.

5. The cellular networks. At what point will they stop giving away the store? Right now they're paying most of the cost of each new iPhone, and under-charging for the data plans too. That's great for customers and great for Apple, and bad for the networks. The iPhone is an expensive data hog that soaks up airtime, and there's always a risk the networks will start playing tougher. Verizon, which lost out to AT&T three years ago for the right to carry the iPhone in the US, doesn't seem to be suffering as a result. Its investors have done no worse than those of AT&T. And its data traffic just jumped 20%, even without the Apple phone.

6. Apple backlash. As the competition forfeits game after game, Apple is starting to dominate industries from cell phones and games to music and media. Now it looks like it wants to dominate ebooks too. But if Ken Auletta's account in the latest New Yorker is correct, Apple's game plan to defeat Amazon means teaming up with book publishers—and that may mean higher book prices for consumers. How will consumers react? And what will that do for Apple's "friendly," rebel image? Anyway, you can't play the underdog when you're the third-biggest company in the world by market value. Apple is already worth more than General Electric (NYSE: GE - News), Wal-Mart (NYSE: WMT - News), Chevron (NYSE: CVX - News) or Procter & Gamble (NYSE: PG - News). It is worth nearly as much as Microsoft. At some point it starts to look like the Big Brother it once vilified. It may even look like the new Microsoft.

7. Steve Jobs's health. This is the "ick" issue. But Apple cheerleaders can't have it both ways. They can't hail Steve Jobs as a visionary genius and the world's greatest CEO, and then say it's none of shareholders' business whether he will still be running the company in three years' time. It's only a year since he had a liver transplant, and investors can hardly feel confident they got all the relevant information clearly and early. We all hope Mr. Jobs enjoys the best of health and lives to a ripe old age. But he still looks worryingly thin. This is something for investors to keep an eye on.

Some of these are issues that could erupt into problems quickly. Others, if they do emerge, would take more time. But if you're a nervous Apple investor, what are your alternatives? Sure you could sell some stock and take your profits. But if you don't want to get off this train quite yet, here's another idea: You could buy some insurance using "put" options. These pay out if the stock falls. So for $19 you can buy $200 puts, good until January 2012. These will limit your downside on the stock to $200. But if Apple keeps booming upwards, all you can lose is the $19.

PSP GO

Smallest, lightest PSP™, weighing in at just 158g. Boasting all of the PSP's best features, with 16GB built-in memory, Bluetooth 2.0 wireless technology and a M2 Memory Stick Slot now added to the mix to compliment the great features that PSP™ fans love.

• 16GB built-in Flash Memory
• Sleek new design with sliding screen
• 3.8” widescreen LCD display with improved colour gamut
• Integrated Wireless 802.11b
• Bluetooth 2.0 compatibility
• M2 Memory Stick slot,

General
Dimension (W x H X D)
128 x 16.5 x 69mm
Weight
158g (including battery)

System
CPU PSP CPU (System clock frequency 1~333MHz)
Main Memory 64MB
Embedded DRAM 4MB
Storage Capacity 16GB
Sound Stereo speakers
LCD Screen 3.8" (16:9) TFT LCD, with anti-glare coating, 480 x 272 pixel / approx. 16.77 millioncolors displayed

Inputs / Outputs
IEEE 802.11b (Wi-Fi) Yes
Bluetooth 2.0
Price: RM 900.00

Apple to unveil new iPhone operating system

WASHINGTON (AFP) – Apple on Monday extended invitations to an unveiling of the next generation operating system for its smash hit smartphone, the iPhone.

Apple said it would offer a "sneak peek" of the latest iPhone operating system on Thursday at an invitation-only event at company headquarters in Cupertino, California.

"Get a sneak peek into the future of iPhone OS," the invitation said. It did not provide any further details.

Apple released the iPhone in 2007. It sold 8.7 million iPhones in the last quarter of its financial year, up 100 percent from a year ago.

The unveiling of the latest software for the iPhone comes on the heels of Apple's launch on Saturday of its eagerly anticipated iPad tablet computer.

Apple unveiled the iPhone 3.0 operating system in March of last year.