(See also HP Envy x2 Tablet/Laptop Combo Cust Across Categories.)

I've always been a big fan of using multi-function devices instead of carrying multiple specialized devices for particular purposes. I was thrilled with my first smartphone, for example, because I could finally leave my music player and PalmPilot at home. So I was really excited when I first saw the Envy X2, and thrilled when HP sent one over to let me try it out for a while.

Great Form Factor, Solid Construction

The form factor and hardware construction made me feel even better. Both halves of the 3.1-pound unit come finished in natty brushed aluminum. The tablet portion, which also serves as the screen/lid when attached to the keyboard base, sports an 11.6” touchscreen (1366 x 768 resolution), as well as 2GB of RAM, a 64GB solid-state hard drive (in the $650 base version), an HD webcam on the front and an 8-megapixel camera on the back, plus dual-speaker "Beats Audio" sound. My only issue was the extreme widescreen aspect ratio, which made the unit awkward in some use cases.

Connectivity and ports include a propriatary charging connector (boo!), headphone jack, micro SD card slot and Near Field Communications (NFC) wireless connections.

Finally, A Real Keyboard

The separate base unit has an honest-to-God laptop-style keyboard: I had no problem touch-typing on it right from the start. That's critical to this type of device, and frankly better than any of the keyboard covers, add-ons and excuses offered for everything from the Apple iPad to the Microsoft Surface. The keyboard also sports its own USB and HDMI ports and a full-size SD card slot - as well as its own battery that gets used up first when the x2 is is fully assembled.

Best of all, the two parts snap together with a solid, easy to use hinge - and you don't have to worry about turning off the device to go from laptop mode to tablet mode, or vice versa.

(See also HP's New ElitePad Business Tablet Is All About The Accessories.)

The Envy x2 I tested runs on Windows 8, which I believe works best in these kinds of small, touchscreen devices. (HP has also released a $480 version running Android called the Slatebook x2.)

(See also How Windows 8 Throws Computer Users Under The Bus.)

Trading Performance For Battery Life: = A Bad Idea

In a deliberate move to extend battery life, HP chose to power the Envy x2 with a Intel Atom Z2760 processor running at 1.8GHz. The company claims battery life of up to 10.75 hours for the tablet portion, and up to 19.25 hours for the combined unit (continuous video playback was rated at up to 7 hours for the tablet only, 12.25 hours for the combined unit). In my informal tests, I was never able to use the x2 enough in one day to empty the battery, which I guess is the point. But leaving the machine off for a couple days did seem to drain power.

But there's a steep trade-off here. The Atom processor is simply too wimpy to provide full-fledged laptop performance. I noticed lags and delays constantly just moving around the Windows 8 interface, using simple programs and watching videos. Think netbook, not notebook, and those things faded away for a reason. Using the x2 as a tablet was less bothersome, but still not up to the smoothness and responsiveness standards set by iPads and leading Android tablets.

More Netbook Than Notebook?

In the end, I could probably live with the tablet-side performance (hardly a ringing endorsement, I know), but there's no way I could give up a "real" laptop for the x2. And that, right there, turns the Envy x2 into an interesting experiment instead of a useful computing solution. If you still need a real laptop, you might as well get a real tablet.

One final note: Earlier this month, HP announced the $800 Split x2, with a 13.3-inch touchscreen and a much more powerful Intel Core processor. This version is not due out until August, but could solve the performance issues. On the other hand, the faster chip will challenge battery life. And with a 13.3-inch screen, that's going to be one heckuva big tablet!

(See also Forget the iPad Mini - Is There Room For An iPad Maxi?)

All images by Madeleine Weiss for Readwrite, except Split x2, courtesy of HP.

Can we go back to work now?

I won’t pretend it’s not fun to be a tech reporter during gadget season. I love a new computer. I love to imagine how much more I could accomplish with a next-generation device. This year’s crop did not disappoint, either. I’m thrilled with the iPhone 5, I’m intrigued about why Dan Frommmer calls the iPad mini “the real iPad,” I could see myself switching from an Air to a 13-inch MacBook Pro with retina display in the next generation, and I really enjoyed exploring the Nexus 10 tablet.

I enjoyed these device announcements because I could see how each of them might enhance my life as a reader and a writer. I like how gadget season makes me contemplate my daily workflows and consider ways I might change them, speed them up or slow them down.

Even more than that, I love imagining what young geniuses and first-time computer users can accomplish with them as prices and barriers to entry plummet. That’s the revolution of personal agency that makes tech so critical right now.

Remember The Real World

But all the drooling is gross. When people use words like “sexy” to describe a chunk of metal, my skin crawls. And the breathless comparison of specs and stats and prices gets us nowhere.

Why is it so easy for people who love technology to lose sight of what we do with it? It’s not specs or features or form factors that matter. It’s applications. It doesn’t matter which tablet looks better on paper. Which one is better for reading? I don’t care what the company says the battery life is; which phone will last me through a real day of work?

Not only do these practical questions make for more interesting reviews, they open perhaps the most important point that all techies have to consider. Everyone uses devices differently. We all have different habits, different jobs to be done, different interests, and different goals. No gadget is the best choice for everyone.

Your favorite phone may not be my favorite phone. Having the same phone as someone else shouldn't make you part of some tribe whose enemies use that other phone. As we go about the Internet reading about phones, can we all please try to keep that in mind?

Photo credit: Eliot Weisberg

Like many entrepreneurs, Moysidis is a very determined person. After being largely ignored by publishers, her next step was to take an intern job at Simon & Schuster. There she was dismayed to find her very own novel - submitted under a pen name - in the slush pile! On the plus side, Moysidis saw first hand that it was impossible for a publishing house like Simon & Schuster to pick up every book sent to them. They simply receive too many manuscripts.

After seeing the writer submission process from the other side, Moysidis concluded that publishers are so overwhelmed that they aren't discovering enough new talent. She felt that writers needed a better way to try and get noticed, which ultimately would help publishers too. So she created Writer's Bloq, a wonderfully named social network where writers can post snippets of their work and network with others in the industry.

The first thing that struck me about Writer's Bloq when I signed up for a nosey, was the crisp and clean design. Goodreads could learn a thing or two from that.

Writer's Bloq has two main sections: a writing section and a reading section. As with any social network, it's advisable to have a look around first before posting your own content. There are many ways you can discover the writing of others - by genre, format, status (published or unpublished), or tags.

You can choose to read a piece immediately, or save it for later. You can also send it to your Kindle. The staples of social networks are all there: comments, likes, sharing via Facebook and Twitter, the option to subscribe to the author.

What's In It For Writers

Writer's Bloq is clearly very early in its evolution - there isn't a huge amount of activity on the site right now. That is of course the problem every new social network has. Goodreads is at the opposite end of the social network spectrum. It's a mature social network that reached its tipping point a few years ago and is now in the midst of mainstreaming (10 million users and counting!).

So the challenge for Writer's Bloq is to get its core user base - budding writers and people in the publishing industry - to sign up. I asked Nayia Moysidis why new writers should post their work on Writer's Bloq. Why not just self-publish, if they aren't able to land a traditional publisher? She replied that when writers submit a manuscript to a publisher, essentially they are after the following three things:

1. Editing and serious feedback on their work.
2. Marketing.
3. Validation.

Writers can't get those things by self-publishing, said Moysidis. The aim of Writer's Bloq is to give writers a better opportunity to attract publishers. They can promote their work on Writer's Bloq and get feedback from peers - and perhaps even from publishers sniffing around the site. The community helps self-select the best writing, through ratings and comments.

Not a Novel Idea

There are many other social networks for writers on the Web. So getting new users is going to be nearly as much of a challenge for Moysidis as getting a publisher to notice her debut novel.

But according to Moysidis, most of the existing social networks for authors are geared towards helping writers self-publish. Writer's Bloq is all about helping new writers get the attention of publishing houses. Which begs the question: how will Writer's Bloq attract publishing industry people to the network?

Moysidis replied that Writer's Bloq is starting out with a focus on writers, but it intends to open up to publishers officially at a later date. In the meantime, she said that industry professionals are already registering... as writers. Many in the industry are budding writers themselves.

Like any new social network, Writer's Bloq has a very tough road ahead of it. The key is to get network effects going, in other words get more and more writers - and ideally publishing industry people too - signed up and using the site regularly. Easier said than done. But Writer's Bloq has a great design, enthusiastic early users and a Kickstarter project (see video below) to raise money for offline meetups - cleverly called "bloqparties."

Perhaps most importantly, Writer's Bloq has a passionate, focused founder in Nayia Moysidis. Whose ultimate goal, by the way, is still to get her first novel published.

One Device? Or  Two?

Do you want your laptop and your tablet to be the same device? That’s the essential question facing HP’s new Envy x2 - a clever combination of full-featured Windows 8 laptop with a detachable screen that functions on its own as a Windows-8 powered tablet.

I was able to examine the consumer-oriented Envy x2 for only a few moments at an HP preview event earlier this month, but my initial impressions were of a sturdy, well-made device.

HP did not disclose pricing, but said the Envy x2 would ship in time for the holidays. It will be available only in a combined form - you won’t be able to buy just the tablet portion.

Welcome Innovation In Form Factors

I’m not yet convinced it’s best in class in any category, but the idea of combining the laptop and tablet into a single fully integrated device is certainly intriguing. Along with Microsoft’s Surface and other Windows 8 devices expected to be announced in the coming weeks and months, the Envy x2 augers a welcome spate of innovation in the form factors of mobile computing devices. The iPad has been deservedly popular, but I have to believe there’s value beyond what Apple offers.

When fully assembled, the Envy x2 looks for all the world like a small laptop computer, its 3.1-pound brushed aluminum clamshell case holding an 11.6-inch touch-screen display and full-size keyboard and touchpad. So far so good.

The Guts Are In The Tablet

But that’s obviously only half the story. Pretty much all the guts are in the screen portion, so when you pull apart the cool magnetized hinges, you’re holding a 1.5-pound Windows 8 tablet with a 32GB or 645GB solid state drive as well as a mini SD Port for expansion. The keyboard portion holds a separate battery and a full-size SD port along with standard laptop connectivity options. The unit features HP’s Beats Audio technology (though I wasn't able to check actual sound quality), Near Field Communications (NFC) capability, an 8-megapixel camera on the back and an front-facing HD webcam.

Fredrik Hamberger, HP’s Vice President, America’s Consumer Category Management, told me that 55% to 60% of total battery life was in the tablet portion, and that the unit automatically draws on that keyboard portion battery first, leaving as much charge as possible in the tablet portion for detached use. Hamberger estimated battery life as “a lot more” than the 8 hours claimed for the Envy TouchSmart Ultrabook 4, which HP also announced.

Two Touch-Screen Laptops

The 4.77-pound Envy TouchSmart Ultrabook 4 uses a 14-inch touchscreen display on an otherwise fairly typical laptop equippped with a subwoofer. HP also did not reveal pricing for this unit. 

HP is also announcing the $1,399 Spectre XT TouchSmart Ultrabook, which also weighs 4.77 pounds but sports a 15.6-inch, "edge-to-edge glass" touchscreen and Thunderbolt connectivity. It's due to ship in December. 

While Windows 8’s touch-centric interface would seem to argue for the value of such devices, using a touch screen on a standard laptop has alway been awkward for me. I can never seem to decide whether to reach for the screen, the touchpad or maybe even a mouse if one is connected. And reaching over the keyboard always seems like a stretch - literally. Still, with the touchscreen adding only $100 to $200 to standard laptop prices - and that premium expected to decline over time - I think we're likely to see a lot more touchscreen laptops in the coming months.

All images - except for HP product shot - are by Fredric Paul.

We dove into study apps and found that most are not free, but price isn't always equal to usefulness. The ones we reviewed averaged about $5, but we ran across one that was $30. Sadly, too many were nothing more than scheduling, organizing and prioritizing apps, with little or no thought about the unique demands that students face.

Those apps that were focused on study skills tended to be age- or grade-specific, which is fine if you want to buy study apps every year. We were looking for an easy flashcard app that is more of a platform. That way, the students can pour the grade-specific content each year into the app. That's cost-effective and gives the software only one task -- help students study. 

There are plenty of great education apps. We particularly liked Flashcards Deluxe and Evernote’s effort to integrate flashcard functionality into its popular note-taking platform with Evernote Peek. We also liked AnkiMobile’s ability to include images on flashcards, but that sells for $29.99, which we deemed beyond the budget a lot of students.

Our Recommendation: StudyBlue

StudyBlue combines all of the things we liked in the apps mentioned above and it's free (there is a premium version, but most students can probably get by with the basic app). StudyBlue makes it easy to put class notes, online textbook content and even Evernote materials into flashcards. StudyBlue's free mobile app also lets students put flashcards on their smartphones.

And of all the apps we reviewed, none were as adept with social as StudyBlue. Students (13 years and up, according to Facebook rules, of course) can use the app to share flashcards via Facebook. There, they can even pick up flashcards created in years past.

If your ride still sports a clunker of a window-mount GPS unit, it's high time to switch to your smartphone. GPS apps have come a long way in the past few years, and for as little as 99 cents you can tap into the same features that come in a stand-alone navigator costing $150 or more. 

TomTom is still the Cadillac of GPS apps for iOS, and at $49.99, it is cheaper than that of most fixed units. But there are less-costly apps we looked at that modeled their features on TomTom. You do get perks for that extra money (even before a $19.99 annual fee for HD traffic info), but if you can live without advanced lane guidance and a faster-than-most location system, a cheaper app may be for you.

Of which there are several. Google Maps is already preinstalled on many iOS and Android smartphones, and for the Sunday driver who can live without voice guidance, it may be the only GPS direction tool you ever need. Waze -- available for not only iOS and Android, but also Windows Mobile and Symbian -- is also free and boasts community-sourced traffic tracking (that works better in some cities than others). We also liked the slightly more expensive TeleNav, which sells for 99 cents and comes in versions for iOS, Android, and BlackBerry. 

But if you're on iOS, you can do even better.

Our Recommendation: Motion X GPS Drive

Motion X is one of the most frequently downloaded GPS apps for iOS, and with good reason: It’s cheap at 99 cents, simple to use, and, in our tests over the past six months in half a dozen U.S. metro areas, accurate. There are some hidden fees (audible, turn-by-turn directions, for example, are free for 300 days, after which you have to subscribe either monthly or annually).

Be sure to check out the predictive traffic info to avoid traffic jams. We also liked the Wikipedia button, which was a fun distraction to help us learn about attractions in the immediate area. Like most GPS apps, Motion X had all the basics, including residence and business searches, the ability to bookmark frequently visited places and to easily switch from maps to text directions.

There i slew of studies suggesting that taking 10,000 steps a day is the easiest way to maintain a healthy weight while avoiding glucose spikes and serious disease. Yet most Americans take fewer than 5,000 steps.

The American Heart Association’s 10,000-steps recommendation is daunting for sedentary people -- it means finding time to walk about five miles per day. Fortunately, a pedometer can make it easier (or serve as a wake up call if you are consistently falling well below 10,000).

iTreadmill crashed too often in our tests. The app seems to be striving to do too much and most of the problems came when we tried to listen to music while using the app on our morning walk. We liked the fun interface on iSteps but had some concerns about the accuracy of the count. We (and, according to reviews, several others) noticed it would occasionally stop counting our steps. iWalk was easy and worked well enough, but it had no history function, and it frequently reset itself, particularly when we took a call.

A word of warning: All of these apps we reviewed taxed our smartphone’s battery. Also, many will not differentiate between walking and, say, riding in a car. Get yourself in the habit of pausing the step count when you sit down.

Our Recommendation: Pedometer FREE

Like the name suggests, this app has the added bonus of being free (all of the others we tested were $1.99 and up), but in our tests, Pedometer FREE broke the “you get what you pay for” rule. It was far and away the most accurate app, and gave us all of the features we wanted (maps, history, legible displays and social networking).

You will see the occasional advertisement, including pitches to try some of the other apps offered by Arawella, maker of Pedometer FREE. But that did not deter from our experience (we’re closing in on 500,000 steps for the summer). More advanced features include easy access to our music library without leaving the app and advanced weight- and body-change tracking. 

How does the best free scheduler compare to the best paid service? Here's the answer.

The best social-media scheduling service is SocialFlow, which we reviewed in February. The service not only uses analytics to send tweets when most of your followers are online, it also can send when your followers are discussing the subject of your tweet. SocialFlow’s service is effective, with some people reporting as much as a 60% increase in engagement, but it's also costly: $99 a month.

We wanted something more affordable, and were willing to sacrifice some of the spot-on engagement for a free, easy service. HootSuite recently launched an auto-schedule feature, but in our tests, it doesn’t effectively time tweets to when most of your followers are online (we’re also not thrilled with the analytics, which HootSuite sends weekly as an email). We used to love the free offering at 14Blocks, which gave us the two top times to tweet each day which we could combine with the tweet scheduling of HootSuite or TweetDeck, but 14Blocks is now a paid service.

Our Recommendation: Buffer

Buffer let us connect one Facebook page, one Twitter account and one LinkedIn account for free, and we can schedule posts from whatever page we’re on with a Chrome or Firefox extension. We’re not content with mobile Buffer, as you have to copy links and open the Buffer app to schedule your post, but the desktop version works perfectly.

What really set Buffer apart, however, was its integration with SocialBro, a free service for managing and analyzing Twitter followers and traffic. After running SocialBro’s “Best Times To Tweet” report, we can set Buffer to tweet at peak times with a single click. (Buffer recommends running the report weekly and updating your Buffer schedule after getting the results.) 

HootSuite also allows schedule syncing with SocialBro, but Buffer stood out on another front: It offered the best analytics of the three services we looked at.

We were able to quickly find the basic data for each tweet, including clicks, retweets and reach. Analytics are arranged chronologically, making it easy to see how a given tweet performed.

Humans, dogs, bees and even the computers themselves all use information technology to extend themselves. We’re all cyborgs. We may not realize it, but we are.

When we extend our memories by storing them in Gmail or Evernote, when we’re ambiently aware of people far away thanks to their status updates, or when we switch identities by switching accounts, we’re experimenting with a new, extended kind of humanity.

But the more you examine our behaviors, and even those of other species, the more you realize that we have all kinds of customs, languages and codes that extend ourselves. There’s no clear line between these kinds of organic technologies and the ones we plug into the wall at night to “feed them,” as Case writes in her introduction.

Case is a seasoned guide to this thick forest of ideas. Not only is she a software designer and CEO of pioneering mobile location platform Geoloqi, she’s an anthropologist by training.

Case describes our relationships with technology - both the digital and analog kinds - as a kind of symbiosis between life, society, objects and information. And the more we study these relationships, the more prepared we are for their growth and change, which is constantly accellerating.

The Illustrated Dictionary of Cyborg Anthropology reads like Case’s report from the field. She’s been logging concepts that illuminate aspects of our cyborg relationships, and she’s reporting back to us on each of them with their definitions, significance and relevant source materials.

Each entry is no longer than one two-column page, and they’re accompanied by whimsical full-page illustrations by Maggie Nichols. The 111 pages are not densely packed; they’re quick references to massive ideas, and you can gaze into the warm illustrations as you think about them.

Terms in the dictionary range from computer science notions like machine learning and natural language processing to social constructions like celebrity as cyborg and city as software to trippy mental states lke flow and synesthesia.

Entries are listed in alphabetical order, so the text serves more as a reference book than an exploration. But the lightness of Case’s treatments of the subjects lends itself to skipping around, and the pages themselves and the additional reading section at the end provide jumping-off points for deeper diving.

The book is available for digital download from cyborganthropology.com/store for $17. You can pre-order a print (analog) copy for $35, which will be available in October.

Disclosure: Amber Case is a person who I know and like very much.

The guide starts with some basic territory, explaining what a community manager is and the different roles community managers play on a regular basis. Anyone who has done community management for a few years can tell you that it’s one of the weirdest jobs out there. On any given day, depending on your company’s unique requirements, you may be settling community disputes, approving a set of wireframes for the new community area, ordering lunch for 500 people and queuing up hundreds of social updates for 10 different channels.

The work is uniquely variable, meaning that you have to be a self-starter and willing to work very odd hours. The work is fast paced and exciting, and though it may have a few drawbacks, is very rewarding. In every meeting, there are a dozen people who advocate for the company’s needs. The only role that is specifically designed to advocate for the community is that of the community manager.

Crisis Management

An explanation of why the discipline matters to a company follows this role introduction, followed by an excellent overview of a crisis situation. If you are unable with what a crisis situation is, count yourself fortunate. In a heartbeat, you can go through a product or service catastrophe, a PR snafu, a legal misstep or even an outside attack, and if you aren’t ready with a plan in place, you can muck it up quite easily. Companies that handle crises well, do so because they are able to respond proactively, with a pre-written plan, rather than reactively, often with negative consequences.

Any community manager who has not yet written a crisis plan should be able to take this overview and easily craft her own plan, without missing any major areas. This was probably my favorite part of the ebook.

Measurement

Defining success in any job is crucial to your job security, but that’s even more important in a discipline that is relatively new and largely undefined. To determine how you’re doing, you have to know where you’ve been, where you appear to be going and where you’d like to go. That means defining your overall goals that map to set company goals, understanding, through benchmarks, where’re you’re starting and drafting a set of tactics to achieve those goals.

Just as important, it means aligning measurement with those tactics to see if you’re actually meeting goals. It’s extremely important that you understand what you’re measuring and why you are measuring, else the goals you achieve may not be ones that really matter to your company.

Landing a Job in Community Management

The guide continues with the expected salary of a community manager, which as you might expect is largely dependent on their demand and their years of experience. One of the most frequent questions I hear from budding community managers is how to land the first gig. The answer, like many other answers you learn in life, is hard work and fierce determination. It’s a popular job and for every open role you may have a hundred people or more interested.

Many of us got started by volunteering, and I think that’s a healthy way to get your foot in the door. Many businesses just can’t afford a community manager, but they understand the need and are willing to take on an unpaid intern for a season. The result is often a mutually beneficial relationship.

Resources

The ebook is not intended to give you everything you need to know about the subject. Eloqua publishes these Grande Guides to give you a basic overview of a discipline and whet your appetite for further study. This 10 page ebook will give you enough information to know if you want to further study community management. If you do, there are several options for intensive study, including at least 3 certification programs (here are links to GetSatisfaction’s, Online Community Roundtable’s and Pillar Summit’s), and at least a few  college programs (here is a link to USC Annenberg's program) and dozens of books. Disclosure: I wrote and teach the certification program for GetSatisfaction. 

Overall, the guide is a great first step to understand community management and I recommend you go out there and snag a copy tout de suite.

I was pretty excited to finally receive my two TouchFire screen-top keyboards in the mail this week, after having ordered them last December. You might not expect someone to be particularly thrilled with a seven-month shipping delay, but I didn’t mind.

That’s because my relationship to TouchFire began with Kickstarter, the crowdfunding Web service designed to let startups and entrepreneurs get investments from the general public. I had seen lots of KickStarter projects, of course, but TouchFire was the first for which I’d ever personally plunked down my hard-earned cash.

The reason for the plunge was simple. I really wanted something to improve the typing experience on my iPads - without the bother and weight of a separate Bluetooh keyboard. The idea was especially appealing for short trips where I wanted to leave my laptop behind.

So I pledged $80 for the project. In exchange for my donation, I would receive the “Kickstarter Special”: two keyboards in black and white, two storage cases and five pairs of cover clips in colors that complement the iPad Smart Covers (this was before Apple’s Smart Cases came out, which I’ll get to in a minute). With an initial estimated delivery date of Dec. 2011, I waited for my new keypads to arrive.

And I waited. And waited.

To be fair, the team behind the TouchFire project were very good about communicating with me and all the other “investors” about what was going on. Every couple of weeks or so, I would get an update about how the manufacturing process was going. I was riveted by how the design team dealt with magnets that didn’t fit, and learned how third-generation iPad speaker magnet polarity was apparently completely random (who knew?) - a nail-biter that had not the team figured out a solution might have required more than one version of the TouchFire.

By the time it got here, I was personally invested in the TouchFire product.

How did it turn out?

In many ways, the TouchFire met or even exceeded my expectations. It took me a little while to figure out how to attach the thing to the inside of the Smart Case cover for my third-generation iPad. (I attribute part of my confusion to a bad 24-hour virus.)

I was concerned that my Smart Case would have problems, since it wasn’t released when the TouchFire was in mid-production, but was happy to find it worked just as well as the Smart Cover on my wife’s iPad 2. I was also stunned (and a bit intimidated) by how light the TouchFire was. I was expecting something thicker and perhaps slightly less pliable - and was initially worried that it would tear in my hands. But there have been no problems with a few days of normal use.

The typing experience is also surprisingly responsive, considering how thin the overlay is. It works whether you use a light or heavy hand with the keys, though you get a better feel with a lighter touch. That’s due to the silicone material itself, and the friction it provides.

Some reviewers have called this sensation “tacky,” but I don’t think its true stickiness so much as more friction than you’d feel using a “normal” plastic-key keyboard. The solution is simple, but takes a little practice: pull up your fingers after striking a key.

Overall, I think the typing works well. I typed the first draft of this review on the iPad with the TouchFire, and found myself running at just about seven-eighths normal typing speed.

If you have a Smart Case or Cover, the TouchFire folds back out of the way pretty easily. If not, you can fold the material back and have the corner magnets lock in into a tri-fold configuration. But it’s a bit awkward when holding the device in your hands,

And then there’s the dirt problem. I consider myself relatively tidy, but after literally 15 seconds of screen overlay, I peeled back the TouchFire to find a lot of debris from my screen. It was kind of gross, actually. The good news is you can wash the whole thing in water. The better news is, there’s a nice case that comes with it, which I definitely suggest using.

Perhaps the biggest problem with the TouchFire may be the price: $49.99. Not cheap for a simple keyboard overlay, especally when you consider other iPad keyboards - with “real” keys - can go for $99 or less.

Still, the TouchFire’s light construction, above-average functionality and ability to work with existing iPad covers makes it a winner.

Images by Brian Proffitt.

After I crossed the finish line in New York of my third and, ultimately, final marathon, I gave myself a few weeks off. A few weeks turned into a winter and the winter turned into two years of a start-and-stop (with mostly stop) training regimen. While my marathon running days are behind me, I was determined to get back in the habit of running three to five miles three to five days per week.

Like a lot of runners, I turned to tech for help. But I was soon overwhelmed by the sheer number of running apps. RunKeeper Pro is one of the best-known running apps, and it has all the bells and whistles any experienced runner wants. Get Running is a variation of the app I ultimately selected as my favorite, but I found the interface hard to read when sweat was dripping in my eyes. Fitnio struck me as not much more than a glorified pedometer.

All of these apps had their merits, but none met my needs for an easy-to-use running app that would get me on the road (or, more accurately, on the treadmill).

Our Recommendation: 10K Runner

Based on the popular Couch-to-5k and Couch-to-10k running plans, 10K Runner is designed to get you in shape to run a 10k race in 14 weeks with a commitment of three runs per week. It won’t get seasoned runners to personal records, but for people who have never run (or, like me, are trying to get back into running), the app offers an easy-to-follow, almost mindless training method. But remember to check with your doctor before starting any exercise program.

You pick a workout routine (they get incrementally tougher, so if the first few workouts are too easy, skip ahead.), hit "RUN NOW" and go. The training programs combine intervals of running and walking so that over 14 weeks you run more and walk less. A recorded voice (male or female) will tell you when to run and when to walk. Initially, plan on 25-minute workouts, three times per week, building up to a 60-minute run in week 14.

The voice will interrupt whatever song you’re listening to on iTunes, but keep in mind that running on busy streets with headphones is dangerous (we did our tests on a treadmill). 

One of the big complaints of the Couch-to-10k program is that, at least in the early going, runners have to spend a lot of time tracking their time to know when to switch from running to walking to running. 10K Runner's voice prompts take the clock-watching out of your workout, which makes the training that much less boring and, hopefully, makes the training easier to stick to.

Running shoes photo via Shutterstock. 

There are a lot of apps that help you travel smarter and, increasingly, these apps are designed to store all the information about your destination in one central place. But what we wanted, as we worked our way through a hectic summer travel schedule, was one app that would store all our travel information and make the process as easy as possible. Or at least easier than our old method of printing out travel confirmations after copying-and-pasting the details into Google Calendar.

Itinerary looks great and has a lot of the features we were looking for, but, in the end, we found that it relied on us to do too much of the manual input. We liked WorldMate’s built-in currency converter and its connection to LinkedIn to find connections in the cities we were visiting, but found the best services (including flight delay updates) were hidden behind a paywall. We were tempted to try TripDeck, until we read reviews on the iTunes store about multiple crash issues.

Our Recommendation: TripIt

TripIt gave us everything we were looking for, including most of the features listed above. One of our favorite features, however, was the ability to email flight and hotel confirmations, dinner reservations and other plans straight to plans@tripit.com and have them added to our itinerary (we had some problems adding a second email address but the fix was easily found in the Support section of TripIt’s Website).

Other services offer similar email services, but TripIt took it one step further: by connecting our Gmail account to our TripIt account, the site performed regular scans of our inbox to look for new travel plans and added them automatically to our itinerary.

And that is TripIt’s key advantage: a lot of the planning becomes automatic. Directions from the airport to a hotel are automatically inserted into your itinerary. Connections on TripIt’s social network as well as your other networks can also be added so you know who to visit (or avoid) when you reach your destination.

The site and free smartphone apps are primarily supported by Groupon-like offers for your destination, but users do have the option of upgrading to TripIt Pro for $49 per year. The biggest advantage, and probably a must-have for frequent fliers, is an automatic refund tracker for all of your flights, as well as complimentary memberships to services like Hertz #1 Club Gold.

Of course, a mobile writing app has to be a good place to write. It has to compensate for the limitations of an onscreen keyboard by helping you move the cursor, find special characters and correct mistakes. The screen has to be clear and legible. It has to enable some formatting, but it can’t have a giant Microsoft Word menu bar, either. It requires a delicate balance.

But the most important thing for a mobile writing app is that it has to be as easy to get words out of it as it is to put them in. Maybe you want to write your whole story or article or poem on your iPad, but you might want to start it there, add to it on your phone from the subway, and then finish it on your laptop at home. In short, the ideal mobile writing app has to sync your work to everywhere you want to access it.

There are way too many entrants in this category to mention, and many of them are excellent. But we have to pick a winner, and we chose the one we think is the best example of its category. It’s only on iOS, but even though that excludes many of you, its balance of features feels like one that should be emulated (where possible) on every platform.

Our Recommendation: Byword

Byword, made by indie app shop Metaclassy, is appropriate for writers at all levels. It has very few preferences - enough to get comfortable, but not enough to get lost fiddling with your margins. It works right out of the proverbial box, and there’s nothing in it to keep you from taking that all-important step of starting to write.

Byword can use Dropbox to save files, like so many other apps in its category. That means you can write on your iPad, iPhone or iPod Touch, and your documents will just be there when you go to access them on another computer. Byword saves in plain text, which means just about any text app on any computer can read what you write in it. If you write a draft on Byword on your iPad, you can finish it in another app when you get back to your desk.

But if you prefer a syncing solution with even fewer things to fiddle with, Byword also has iCloud syncing between the mobile version and the Mac version (sold separately). If you use iCloud syncing instead of Dropbox, your files will be saved and synced in a menu inside Byword itself. So Byword will be a self-contained cubby just for your writing that syncs across all your devices.

Byword provides a way to add links, bold and italic text, headers and other basic formatting using Markdown. You don’t have to use this feature at all. But if you want to format your text, Markdown is an intuitive, human-readable way to do formatting that a Web browser can display as HTML. You don’t even have to remember what the characters are; Byword has an extra row of keys on the screen that automatically insert bold, italics, headers and more.

While some of the other iOS writing apps have most of these features, none has all of them, nor do they implement them quite as well. Because Byword is simple enough for anyone to use but powerful enough for pros, we recommend it as the best mobile/tablet writing app for just about anyone.

Byword is a universal app available for $2.99 in the iTunes App Store.

For Android users, nothing quite compares to Byword, but there's a close second. Writer by James McMinn has a clean writing interface, and it has Markdown formatting smarts, although it doesn't have the extended keyboard with the formatting shortcuts that Byword has. It also doesn't have sync yet, but McMinn says future versions will have Dropbox and Box.net support. It's free on Google Play.

By now we know that social media can’t predict the ebbs and flows of the stock market with 100% accuracy - at least not yet. Using social media sentiment as part of an investing model seems to have its advantages, but the research is preliminary and the field is in its infancy.

But that doesn’t mean we should discount social media as part of our overall investment strategy. There is something to be said about the future of social media sentiment stock picking and, in the meantime, investing-focused sites remain a great way to find tips for further research and just up your investor knowledge.

There are dozens of upstarts out there, including previously reviewed Motif Investing and StockTwits, as well as TradeStreaming, which aims to connect investors with experts, and WealthLift, which also accents the idea of investment education based on a community approach. But when it comes to money and risk, there’s something to be said for experience and longevity.

Our Recommendation: The Motley Fool

Founded in 1993, the Motley Fool is one of the oldest and most-respected investing communities on the Web. Yes, the message boards seem a bit antiquated when compared to some of the bells-and-whistles offered by the newer social media sites, but Fool was a social-investing site before social media was a Web buzzword, and its community of investors remain active and, in our experience, helpful.

On top of that, Fool offers loads of free and subscriber-only content, expert commentary and stock-tracking tools. The Fool also offers something else: a consistent message. While other sites have chased the Day Trading trend of the later 1990s and jumped on the IPO-hunting bandwagon of the early part of the decade, its community has always been built around the idea of championing individual investor rights and removing the complex jargon that convinces individuals that investing is something best left to the pros.

We’re particularly fond of their relatively new CAPS Community, which measures social sentiment (as well as the opinions of more than 100 Wall Street firms) to give capsule reviews of whether or not a stock will underperform or outperform the market.

While a portfolio based solely on the whims of social media sentiment is ill-advised, investing can be a social experience. There are investing clubs, employer-sponsored workshops and water-cooler chats about the ups and downs of the market. Talking stocks (and bonds and such) can be empowering and help people feel more comfortable as they plan for their future.

Until now, however, social investing has meant little more than traditional brokerages and Wall Street news sites adding discussion boards. Despite the rise of social media and the increasing number of ways people can connect online and through mobile devices, options for a social approach to investing have been stuck in the dot-com era.

Check Out MotifInvesting

The San Mateo company behind MotifInvesting launches its product officially today. In addition to a social component modeled after Google+ (where you can choose who to share posts with), Motif has created a series of portfolios based on popular or timely themes. That lets users purchase, for $250, a stock portfolio such as Caffeine Fix (companies centered on coffee production and consumption) or Renter Nation (for investors who believe Americans are going to be gun-shy on new home mortgages and choose to rent).

Co-founded by former Microsoft executive Hardeep Walia and hedge fund manager Tariq Hilaly, Motif is designed around the concept of investing in ideas, as opposed to individual stocks or companies. Walla said the two hatched the idea over dinner in 2010 while they were talking about investments.

"If we liked the idea of, say, mobile, Tariq could have a team of analysts do the homework and immediately put money to work. I, as an individual, could not do that," Walia said.

The site has also been designed to be completely transparent, Walia said. Each of the ideas - or motifs, in company parlance - can be easily compared to major indices. The stocks within each motif can be customized and weighted, and users can see if the Motif community has purchased a motif as is or opted to customize it by changing stocks and weightings. Users can also forgo the social component and choose not to share their thinking about particular investments. 

The Problem

Pariser coined the phrase filter bubble in his 2011 book of the same name. As Pariser sees it, the online world is increasingly controlled by behemoths like Facebook and Google. Because they want to sell us ads, they present to us a version of the Internet that suits our tastes and exposes us to content that we find agreeable.

Clicking on an article about Obama while skipping one about Romney, for instance, speaks volumes about a user's taste. Over time, we create an Internet that matches our world view through the click signals we send. We aren’t exposed to different points of view, which Pariser says is a threat to everything from creativity to democracy. Adding to the threat is that the filter bubble usually works behind the scenes: In fact, it must go unnoticed to be effective. So while we make the media that ultimately makes us, we don’t notice that we’re being exposed to certain content because we never see the content we’re missing.

Pariser outlines several ways to address the problem, including building serendipity into search engines and helping users find alternative viewpoints, particularly when it comes to news. That’s the angle rbutr is trying to address.

How rbutr Works

rbutr is an add-on app for Chrome, with versions for Firefox and Internet Explorer in the works. Its goal is lofty: to give you other points of view by listing content that shows a counterpoint to whatever it is you’re reading. Say you land on the The Guardian’s negative review of Noam Chomsky’s new book. If you have the app installed, you can click on the rbutr button and see that someone has posted a link to Chomsky’s response to the review:

Read that sentence again and see if you can spot the problem phrase: “someone has posted.”

While the filter bubble works automatically and behind the scenes, rbutr needs lots of people to actively find rebuttals and post them: a cumbersome process that needs a five-minute how-to video to explain.

rbutr does have some interesting concepts built in, including an upvote feature to push the most useful links to the top. And to be fair, it is perhaps too soon to be reviewing rbutr: the app depends on people posting links to content, and it's new enough that few people have. rbutr openly acknowledges the issue on its website, saying “this is a real problem, and our primary focus at this point.”

No Solution in Sight

Blog comments are not a perfect vehicle for airing a diversity of opinion, but they work - better than rbutr, at least. At this writing, 71 comments follow the Guardian’s review of Chomsky, which provide a diverse set of viewpoints, as well as a link to the same alternative commentary rbutr turned up.

If I’m going to take the time to find a link and a counterpoint of view, why would I post it in rbutr without comment - presumably where only other rbutr users will see it - when I could post it in the comments section of the post? rbutr ultimately takes a simple task and makes it monumentally complex. Sad to say, the filter bubble won't be going away anytime soon.

Photo by Harley Pebley

The one-letter Ruby gem, t, is written by Erik Michaels-Ober. The source is available on GitHub, or you can just grab it using Ruby's gem install command. Ruby is on most *nix type systems by default (Linux distributions, Mac OS X) but Windows users will need to download the installer to get started.

After you've installed the t gem, you'll need to authorize it. You can use it without getting API access, but then you're limited to 150 requests per hour, and you can't use t to post a Twitter message or make changes to your account.

Using t

To see all of the commands available via t, just run t help. You'll find that t supports more than 40 commands, or tasks as its documentation calls them. The syntax is simple: t followed by the task name, and any options and arguments.

For example, you can use t to get all of the followers for an account by running t followers username. Note that you don't need to include the @ in front of a username.

Many of the commands are mundane operations that you can do with any Twitter client. For example, posting a status update or following another user. Running t update "message goes here" will post an update, running t follow username will follow the user that you specify, and so on.

If you're a command-line diehard, then you might prefer using t for those operations. But its real value is in doing things you can't do with most Twitter clients. Want to see a list of users who follow you but whom you don't follow? Run t groupies. You can also use that command to check on other users, t groupies username.

The most interesting thing about t is that it works well with other *nix commands. For example, you can create a list (t list create listname) and add all users who are followed by another user (t followings user | xargs t list add listname. That's just a small sample. You can use any of the standard *nix utilities with t, like uniq, which might be useful in generating lists of users to follow by examining users that other people follow (and much more).

You may bump up against arbitrary limits when adding people to lists and such. According to the Twitter API docs, you can only add 100 users at a time to a list, and a list can only have 500 users. When I tested the limit, though, I was able to add 195 users to a list with one shot. The operation failed (sort of) when I tried to add another large chunk of users (more than 400), leaving my list with 582 members. To put it another way, trial and error is called for.

Some of the t commands also support a --csv option, which you can use to dump output to a comma-separated value file and then import it into a spreadsheet.

The Bad

While t has a lot to offer, it also has a few problems. First and foremost, a few commands don't quite work. For instance, the t stream timeline command is supposed to provide an on-going stream of your timeline. It provides the first 20, and then errors out. The "matrix" command, likewise, returns an error. The "trends_locations" task doesn't seem to be implemented at all, as it returns a "could not find task 'trends_locations'" error.

The error messages, in general, are pretty minimal. You may be notified "too many terms specified in query" for instance - but no information on what part(s) of a command succeeded or failed. I've seen a few operations that appeared to mostly succeed, like adding users to a list, but received an error notice. When that happens, it's not trivial to figure out what worked.

Sparse documentation is another problem. Many of the commands have options that are not well-explained. You may need to go spelunking through the code to see what options are available.

Finally, it's pretty easy to hit Twitter's rate limit. Twitter has an hourly limit of 350 requests per hour with an authenticated client. You can bump up against the limit if, for example, you try to request a list of all users for an account with tens or hundreds of thousands of followers. Note: If you wish to check on your current rate limit, use t rate_limit. You'll see the current limit (should be 350) and how many remaining hits you have, and the time your limit will be reset.

For the most part, though, t works quite well and provides a great way to do more with Twitter than the usual clients allow. If you're doing more than idle chit-chat on Twitter, take a look at t.

But the book itself seems split on whether social media - and the challenges it presents to our old-line institutions - are good or evil. All at once, O’Connor seems amazed by YouTube, okay with the speed over accuracy rule of news distribution on Twitter and concerned with the typical laundry list of privacy violations committed by Facebook, Google and other big, digital media players.

I’m OK with those parts of the book. Like a lot of people and, apparently, like O’Connor, I raise concerns about privacy and Facebook while still checking it a few times each day. I worry about whether the filter bubble limits my news diet, but still find myself clicking on headlines that seem like they were tailor-made for my interests. I worry about the accuracy of sensational tweets, yet find myself checking Twitter when I’m stuck for something to write about.

In reviewing Friends, Followers and the Future, the Boston Globe’s Hiawatha Bray noted that it seemed too basic for the tech-savvy reader - the kind of people who “punch up websites like Techmeme and GigaOM first thing in the morning” and, presumably, are also fans of ReadWriteWeb.

“O’Connor offers a portrait of the current digital landscape as well as the historical context in an efficient, but pedestrian way,” Bray wrote. “His book is devoid of original insights and unexpected observations. I felt as though I was reading back issues of Wired magazine or the technology sections of last year’s newspapers.”

That assessment starts to speak to my problems with the book, and also raises a broader question: Is it even possible to write a book about an industry that changes as quickly as social media?

Book Publishers Will Struggle To Break Social Media News

The book’s official publication date is today, but Friends, Followers and the Future has been available on Amazon for the past several weeks. And it was clearly rushed to press: I counted no fewer than 12 typos, a sure-fire sign that the book was pushed through the editing process at breakneck speed. I was willing to forgive them because, ultimately, O’Connor has an engaging, straightforward writing style and this book will be a solid reference of what social media looked like in 2011, complete with a history of the sector up to that point..

The book references news events that happened in late 2011, but think of everything that has happened since then: Facebook filed for an IPO and spent $1 billion to acquire Instagram, an app many of us were only hearing about for the first time when O’Connor was most likely sending proofed galleys back to his publisher. Twitter has remade TweetDeck, said it wouldn’t file for an IPO and publicly acknowledged difficulties in generating revenue.

And, oh yeah, have you heard about Pinterest? The breakout social media hit of 2012 doesn’t even warrant a mention in O’Connor’s book, in large part because it was just starting to make it onto the radar screens of the mainstream tech press by the end of 2011.

In daily journalism, we talk about “evergreen” stories. Those are the explanatory stories and features that can hold for a day, a week or even a month or two because they aren’t necessarily time-sensitive. Books were once the place to tell the truly evergreen stories - the ones that are more in-depth and more likely to stand the test of time.

Changes in publishing and profit models make that less so now, but books are still supposed to have a longer shelf life than, say, this blog post. Books like O’Connor’s - or at least his voice, research and perspective - would have been more useful to me three, four or five months ago. But in tech in general - and in social media specifically - the landscape changes too damn fast.