TEXTING

Texting was introduced fairly early in the development of mobile phones. Depending on your age, you likely either love or loathe texting, but even older users often can find it a useful means of communication—I receive at least as many texts from my dad as I do from anyone else. Of course, early phones had a significant limitation on texting, as typing messages on a phone's dialer was annoying, to say the least. Typing the word “hello” on a traditional 10-key pad requires 13 keypresses: 44-33-555-555-666. Although some were able to learn to type longer messages quite quickly, most limited their messages or refused to adopt texting altogether because it was simply too difficult to type.

Your Android phone, of course, removes this limitation altogether, because whether it has a real keyboard or a virtual on-screen one, you have the full set of keys to work with, so typing “hello” is back to requiring only five keypresses. Even better, if your phone supports Swype, it is really one press-and-drag action.