contacts

LinkedIn for Android is a free front-end app for the popular professional networking site. While the app certainly doesn't offer as much functionality as the full site, it does offer one-touch access to a few of LinkedIn's most frequently used tools.

The interface is clean and should look familiar to current users of the LinkedIn service. The home screen allows you to view and post status updates, access messages, manage connections and invitations, and of course, search through LinkedIn's huge network of professional users. There's also a nifty Reconnect button that lets you sift through users … Read more

Your grandmother--the one with the birthday book, so she never forgets a family member's special day--would approve of Fellowup. It's a modern-day version of the same thing. It watches your contacts on Facebook and LinkedIn, as well as your Google mail and calendar, and gives you a clear dashboard showing you which of your contacts could benefit from the personal touch today. In addition to grabbing birth dates from social profiles, it also keeps an eye out for things like relationship and job status changes, and news articles that mention your contacts. It will show you an alert when these things come up, so you have an excuse to make personal contact.

The service also lets you create your own dossiers on your contacts, adding private tags for a person's interests, for example. With upcoming Google Calendar integration, Fellowup will also be able to ask you for feedback after a meeting with a contact, so you can enter your impressions or to dos.

Fellowup lets you post directly to your contacts' Facebook walls from within the service, which makes it even easier to pretend you remembered a contact's birthday. It can also send e-mails. … Read more

If you or your employer use Google Apps as your e-mail provider, and you are experiencing issues setting up Google Sync on your mobile device, make sure that the account admin has Google Sync enabled. This short guide will walk you through enabling Google Sync (ActiveSync), which will allow members of the Google Apps account to access their e-mail, contacts, and even calendar as if they were on an Exchange server. … Read more

Not every photo taken is a masterpiece; some are upside down, or sideways, or have extra "scenery" that you didn't choose to include. For these issues, the Android gallery app offers a few simple editing tools to help correct image orientation and tidy up photos.

Getting to the editing menu:Open a picture from the gallery and then press the menu button. This menu is only available when previewing a photo by itself. Now, select More from this menu.

Editing choices will appear in the new pop-up menu, such as Details, Set as, Crop, Rotate Left, and … Read more

One of the selling points RIM has taken advantage and capitalized on over the years with its BlackBerry platform is security. RIM has used the same claim when providing reason for leaving out native e-mail, calendar, contacts, and other PIM applications on its tablet, thePlayBook. Accodring to RIM, the secure way to access this information on the PlayBook is through a BlackBerry smartphone using an application called BlackBerry Bridge.

This simple tutorial will cover how to set up BlackBerry Bridge on both the PlayBook and a BlackBerry smartphone. In the tutorial I will be using a BlackBerry Torch, but the … Read more

According to French Apple site Hardmac, Apple's infamous (to some) Liquid Contact Indicators--sensors responsible for allowing Apple technicians to determine if your device has had substantial contact with liquids--are not present in the newly released iPad 2.

Many problems have come about because of Apple's liquid sensors, even resulting in lawsuits, and causing Apple to adjust how it handles indicators that have been activated.

As a manager in an Apple Store a couple years ago, when the first Liquid Submersion Indicators, as they were named then, were included on the original iPhone, we were told that the sensors … Read more

This review has been updated throughout, now that I have had hands-on experience with the Plaxo Personal Assistant product.

Some time after its launch back in 2002, contact list management app Plaxo lost its way. Leadership at the company saw social networking as a bandwagon it had to get on and made Plaxo into a personal social hub--which nobody really needed. It was the second bad mistake Plaxo had made with its service, the first being its habit of sending requests for updated information to users' contacts that were often taken for spam. Nobody liked Plaxo's users, even though … Read more

Links from Monday's episode of Loaded:

Amazon is buying the parent company of Diapers.com and Soap.com

Google tests a product to let you record Google Voice calls in Gmail

Google disallows Facebook from pulling Gmail contacts to find friends

The BlackBerry Torch is now available for $99 in black, red, or white

A Chinese company is set to unveil a color e-ink eReader

November 17 will be the day to unfriend your undesirables on Facebook

But don't unfriend the Queen of England because she just joined Facebook

The Hex band gives you a way to be … Read more

Google is putting its data liberation philosophy to work in a direct slap at Facebook.

Techcrunch noticed last night that Google made a subtle change to a paragraph in the guidelines that govern how external services can let their users import contacts data from Google. Now those services will have to allow their users to export that data in a manner similar to how Google handles data export, which means Facebook will have to change its policy if it wants to allow users to morph Gmail contacts with Facebook friends.

Facebook has long resisted the notion of allowing people to … Read more