Did you get an Android smartphone for Christmas? You can bet that the number of Android phones sold during the holiday period has skyrocketed and all those new phone owners will be looking for some nice new shiny apps to install, to get the most out of their new device. If you are an Android app developer, this is the golden moment to get your app out there in front of all those eyeballs.

MakeUseOf would like to wish everyone a very Happy Holidays, wherever you are in the world. May you eat too much, drink too much, get some really cool tech gifts, and be with the ones you love, during this holiday season.

As we come to the end of another year, it’s time to look back and see how things have progressed up to now, and being a tech blog, we are naturally going to examine the tech scene during the past year or two. Today’s infographic breaks down and dissects the stats with regards to the way we consumed Internet content up to now. Did the regular PC win out or was it roundly defeated by other forms of communication? And where in the world does the Internet rule supreme?

If you install an app on your smartphone these days, the chances are that it will ask to see your location, as well as other personal identifying data – and saying no to it will likely disable most, if not all of its appealing features. One classic example of this is the newly remade Google [...]

It seems like only yesterday that I was taking my camera film to the store to be developed. Then I would return a few days later to discover that I had messed up a lot of the photos with heads missing, people cut in half, badly lit rooms, red eyes making people look like vampires….and I would end up cursing the amount of money I had just spent getting the roll of film developed. But then digital cameras came along…….

I can fondly remember my first iPod. I was a late entrant to the whole Apple craze, and after years of owning crappy MP3 players that broke down constantly and had bad sound, I decided to take the plunge and buy an iPod. At the time, it was one of those big white chunky ones with the spinning wheel in the middle and to me, this thing was revolutionary. I ended up listening to more music than I had ever listened to in my entire life.

Like it or not, Facebook is becoming a huge part of online users lives, but not if offline companies have anything to do with it. It seems that, at every turn, companies are doing their level best to block access to Facebook and other social media sites to employees at work, even though there are compelling reasons why they should do the exact opposite.

For the past couple of years now, I have more or less been exclusively using Google Chrome as my day-to-day work browser. It is simply one of the best products that Google has ever produced. But saying that, there are some irritating things about Chrome that really bother me. One of them was not being able to bookmark any site I wanted to on my New Tab page. But now I have found the solution and I want to share it with all of you.

One of the first things I do in the morning, when I sit down at my desk, is check my email. And my job involves so much email that I can pretty much guarantee that I will spend at least the first hour of my working day getting through all of the new stuff and following up on older emails. It is a tedious part of the job, but unfortunately it’s also a fact of life. Every office-based job these days involves sending and receiving email.

The “problem” with having a smartphone is that there are simply too many apps to try out. Just as you’ve found 10 good apps to try, another 20 come along, demanding your time and attention. Suddenly, everything else in your life is put on hold, as you try out the latest new iOS game or the latest Android productivity app (ironic, I know). But which ones are the best in their respective categories?

I’ve never really thought about this until now, but if you use a tablet extensively, you have to watch how you’re seated when you’re using it. Just like how you sit in front of a normal computer matters to your back and neck posture, the same rules equally apply to when you’re using your iPad, Android tablet or Kindle Fire.

Being a former newspaper journalist, I can sympathise to a very large extent with the plight of print media. With the relentless onslaught of the Internet, and peoples expectations that “information should be free”, print media is caught between a rock and a very hard place. If they modernise and make their news sites open and free to all, they start to hemorrhage money right away, the quality of investigative journalism goes down and soon that same staff are laid off.

Lots of people, including myself, love their smartphone. Mine is virtually an extension of my arm and goes with me everywhere. But that innocent looking phone in your hand is also a weapon if handled by the wrong person. Which is why it is essential that you put a PIN lock on the phone, to prevent any unnecessary access, and limit what information apps have access to, about yourself.

If you are a regular reader of MakeUseOf, and you like computers & technology, then there’s a good chance you fall into one of two camps – the Nerd or the Geek. Both have their own interests and identifying marks, but on the other hand, there is also a lot that they have in common. The question is, which camp do you fall into?

Internet Addiction Disorder (otherwise known as Facebookalitis) is set to become the big psychological disorder of the 21st century – and it seems we have mostly Facebook to thank for that. Thanks to the social media goliath, it seems that we are turning into a legion of junkies who salivate whenever we hear the sound of a new status notification arriving or a Friend Request being approved.