Mobile phones have come a long way over the years. From heavy bricks with huge aerials, mobile phones are now small, light, sleek and carries an operating system that enables you to install apps and access the Internet. The iPhone and Android continually introduce new features in order to stay one step ahead of the other. But how are smartphones really used?

Yesterday Facebook announced a host of new features in what was described by industry observers as the biggest shakeup in Facebook’s history. Most of these changes are obviously due to the emerging and growing threat from Google Plus, and one of the features that Mark Zuckerberg introduced was the radical redesign of the profile page. It’s called the “timeline”.

As someone who has just bought an iPad, I can personally appreciate its potential to become the dominant force in the digital book wars. PDF and ePub files can be uploaded instantly, and then annotated with your stylus pen or finger. Let’s face it, if you were a student, what would you rather have? 10 heavy textbooks or a thin much lighter iPad?

Are you playing Angry Birds? If not then you should, because it is quite possibly one of the most addictive games you’re likely to encounter. An enjoyable game but still addictive and very frustrating! Apparently throwing those birds at pigs and watching everything crashing down improves your mood considerably.

It’s a well-known fact of the 21st century that from the moment you get up in the morning to the moment you go to bed at night, technology rules. Smartphones wake us up, we get our news from online, we check our social networks, chat on IM, watch videos on YouTube, and text on our phones. Whether we like to admit it or not, we’re addicted to our gadgets and to the Internet.

Piracy and illegal file sharing is a curse for any developer and software company. As soon as the new version of a popular piece of software hits the streets, it is pretty much being pirated before you can say “o-arrr!”. Same with games, music and movies. For every person who buys something legally, there’s probably 10 who are taking the risk of stealing it.

After James’ post on some of the feeds in his RSS list, I decided I would keep the momentum going with a little show and tell of my own. As the managing editor of MakeUseOf, I keep on top of a huge number of official RSS feeds for various websites but if we remove all those ones, which other ones live inside my Google Reader? Here’s a small selection.

New research has suggested that British people are becoming even more addicted to their mobile phones, with more than half of adults and two-thirds of teenagers saying that “they have used their smartphone while socializing with others”. But American mobile users love their phones even more with one third saying they would rather give up sex than part with their phone.

Twitter can be quite addictive but you have to do it the right way to get the most out of it. That’s why I wrote The Complete Guide To Twitter some time back and I highly recommend that you read it. Twiends has also produced a fantastic infographic showing how to quickly get started with Twitter, from choosing the right username to understanding hashtags and lists.

Yes it’s time for another infographic (this time, presented by Classfinders) and this one cleverly compares all the social networks out there with the kinds of schoolkids who would be most likely to be on them in 2011. No surprises as the new hot babe that “everyone is going bananas” for is none other than Google Plus.

Google Plus may have arrived on the social networking scene, smashing in like a bull in a china shop, but it’s still going to take some doing for the search engine giant to dislodge the Big Boy On The Block, Facebook. Everyone who’s everyone online has a Facebook account, and this may partly account for the fact that there are now more US Facebook account holders than US passport holders.

As the Internet gets bigger and bigger, so do the places needed to store all of that data. But where are these data centers exactly? Which ones are the largest and who owns them? How can we put 600 Exabytes into perspective so that we can truly understand its size?

Are the t-shirts in your wardrobe starting to look a little tatty? Are the holes in your favorite shirt so big that it’s become positively embarrassing when you have company round? Do you want to impress those around you with your impeccable fashion tastes? If that’s the case, can we interest you in a cool geeky MakeUseOf T-shirt?

It’s not been a good time for Sony’s Public Relations in the past few months with not only one but two breaches of their Playstation Network, and they didn’t exactly help their cause when they decided to delay telling their subscribers about the intrusions. They eventually admitted that customer information was out there in the wild.

Google’s latest attempt to get into social networking has started to slowly get off the ground and so far, the reception has been overwhelmingly positive. That is, if you have managed to snag a beta invite to get in. With invites currently being sold on eBay, demand to get into Google Plus is currently very high.