texting

"No, I can't make 8. How about 9:30? I'm taking a walk on the pier right now. It's really long. LOL."

That's what I imagine that Bonnie Miller from Benton Harbor, Mich., wanted to text while walking -- just before toppling into the deep, cold beyond off the pier in St. Joseph, Mich.

This incident seems to have been even more unfortunate because Miller doesn't appear to be much of a swimmer. At least that is the evidence presented to ABC57 News by Rebecca Van Zant, who happened to be on the … Read more

A nationwide outage has left Virgin Mobile customers in the U.S. without text or data services.

The company confirmed the disruption in a tweet this afternoon and said that engineers were working on the issue but did not give any indication what caused the outage or when it is expected to be resolved.

We're currently experiencing a national data & text messaging outage. Our engineers are working to resolve it. Thank you for your patience.

Virgin Mobile is an MVNO, or mobile virtual network operator that leases network capacity from parent … Read more

Google has added a new setting to your Gmail account, which allows you to revert back to text buttons, instead of the icon-style buttons found in Gmail after the redesign.

To revert from icon buttons back to the familiar text buttons, log in to your Gmail account and navigate to Mail settings (gear icon in top-right corner > Mail settings).

Under the General tab, there will be a new option titled Button labels. Change the setting to Text, then save your changes at the bottom of the page.

Easy-enough change, right? Gmail users should have the setting available for them … Read more

Visits to two Apple stores on Friday confirmed my Apple Shiny Slab Theory. That is, some consumers, deep down, don't really know why they buy the newest Apple thing.

After attending a meeting in Hollywood on Friday, I stopped by an Apple store down the street in Century City (aka, Beverly Hills) and another in Santa Monica. I estimate I spent more than two hours total in those two stores.

My intention was not only to try to gauge the level of interest in the new iPad but also to form (I hoped) a bulletproof rationale for upgrading from … Read more

Aw, kids.

Sometimes they struggle to keep themselves occupied. Those little brains of theirs are so active. Those not yet fully-formed emotional avenues of theirs are not quite fully paved.

So they like to play pranks. Like, for example, sending random texts to people saying they've hidden a dead body.

One 15-year-old girl in Northern Arkansas tried this little jape and the random number happened to belong to someone whose sense of humor was occupationally impaired.

For this person happened to be a police detective.

Pages for iOS may not be as sophisticated as other desktop word-processing apps, but it packs plenty of punch when you just want a way to produce nice-looking documents on the go. After only a few minutes playing around with the controls, we were able to create documents with stylized text, imported images, tables, and graphs, and make formatting changes on-the-fly, all using the touch-screen keyboard. The program comes with 16 Apple-designed templates to start from, including standard letters, letters with photos, resume layouts, project reports, and many more. With Apple's keyboard dock connected, Pages performed much like a … Read more

Many Windows users prefer to replace Notepad with a more capable text editor. XPad Text is one of the many contestants for the job. This portable freeware has full Unicode support for UTF-8, UTF-16, and UTF-32, including multiple languages. It's compact, lightweight, and uses little memory. Among its features are automatic copy selection to the clipboard, multiple clipboard selections, active links, a calculator, and various decoders and converters. Since it's portable, it can run from USB drives and other directories.

XPad's developers said this portable tool is fast, and it opened almost instantaneously when we clicked its … Read more

Loaded's Bridget Carey sits down with us for a roundup of breaking news from the Mobile World Congress, a smartphone expo based out of Barcelona that started this weekend.

The announcements range from Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) handsets with simpler nomenclature and integrated quad-core processors with new features like built-in projectors and a Nokia PureView smartphone with an insane 41-megapixel camera.… Read more

Facebook is being accused of snooping on its users' text messages, but the social network says the accusations are inaccurate and misleading.

The company is among a wide-ranging group of Web entities, including Flickr and YouTube, that are using smartphone apps to access text message data and other personal information, according to a Sunday Times report (behind a paywall). The newspaper said Facebook "admitted" to reading users' text messages during a test of its own messaging service. The report also says information such as user location, contacts list, and browser history are often accessed and sometimes transmitted to … Read more