There are many different reasons that a phone may need to have a factory reset performed. You may be experiencing too many issues with apps loading slowly, or malfunctioning when they finally do load. Or perhaps a friend or customer service person suggested the process to help with connection issues. Luckily, a factory reset doesn't actually involve sending your phone off to the factory, just these few steps that you can do at home:

Important note: Make sure you save any information that does not sync to the cloud on your phone before performing this process. Your photos … Read more

Please keep in mind that this post is based off of a beta version of iOS 5. Apple can (and often does) change the behavior of features before the latest OS hits consumers hands. If anything drastically changes in regards to this feature in iOS 5, we will be sure to update the post.

When Apple announced a new Notification Center with iOS 5, it also revealed that iOS 5 would come with a couple of widgets: weather and stocks. The widgets are active in the Notification Center, the same place you will find the rest of your app alerts on iOS 5.

iOS 5 has been released to developers, packed with 200 features new to the popular mobile platform. One of the features not discussed during the keynote was Shortcuts. Shortcuts allows you to make your own AutoText corrections for common phrases. We will show you how easy it is to use Shortcuts. Follow along!

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Perhaps when iOS 5 arrives this fall, it will offer a way to delete text messages en masse. Currently, your deleting options are limited in the iPhone's native texting app, which is disappointing to anyone with dozens if not hundreds of old text messages littering your inbox.

At the present, you have three methods to delete texts:… Read more

Step 1: Long press on the icon you want to change.

Step 2: Select the app or shortcut you want in the Add to Dock list.

That's it! Now you can have your most critical apps on the dock at all times.

Step 1: Go into your Android calendar and hit the Menu Key, then tap Settings.

Step 2: Tap the box next to the "Use home time zone" setting to check mark it. Make sure that the "Home time zone" setting, just below, is set correctly to your home time zone.

That's it. Now when you're traveling, you can still see all of your events in your home time zone.

Step 1: Tap the App Launcher icon on your desktop to open up your master list of apps.

Step 2: Tap the "All apps" box in the upper left-hand corner to display the group list.

Step 3: Tap "New group" to create a custom app group.

Step 4: Type in the name of your new app group and tap the save icon.

Step 5: … Read more

Contacts just naturally accumulate, but smartphones and e-mail systems collect information about the people we interact with in very different ways. It's nearly impossible to maintain a single list of contact information that our primary phone and e-mail services can share.

This hit home the other day when I noticed the entry for a new contact in Google had the person's e-mail addresses but not her phone numbers, and her entry in my iPhone had the phone numbers but not her e-mail addresses. Dozens of these little inconsistencies had appeared in the months since I had last synced … Read more

If you recently ordered a present for a loved one on your iPad or iPhone and don't want him or her to stumble across the site you used to place the order, clearing your browser history will eliminate that possibility. Clearing Mobile Safari's history is a great way to cover your tracks on the Internet, as well as free up some memory (although the amount of memory is minimal). We are going to show you how to erase your browser history, cookies, and cache on your iOS device of choice in two simple steps.

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There are plenty of reasons why your music library may have incomplete album cover art, but they all add up to a series of petty annoyances that can drive some of us insane. If you die a little inside each time the default image pops up instead of the proper album cover, take heart--here's one free, easy way to find and download most missing of your art to your Android mobile device automatically.