Portable devices and handheld reviews

:: Handheld Help & How-To

Sending E-Mail from Your BlackBerry
Send an e-mail from your BlackBerry to everyone who needs to know that you now have a BlackBerry. Here's how to share your notable news:
Recording a New Task on Your BlackBerry
Recording a task on your BlackBerry is the first step to take when building a to-do list. Don't groan and roll your eyes, dreading how long this will take. Recording a task on a BlackBerry is easy, so just relax and you'll be finished in a snap.
Navigating Web Pages with a BlackBerry
Using the Browser on a BlackBerry to navigate a Web page is easy. Note that hyperlinks are highlighted on-screen. To jump to a particular hyperlink, scroll to the highlighted link on your BlackBerry and press the trackball.
Choosing a Calendar View on Your BlackBerry
To open your BlackBerry Calendar, go to the Home screen, press the menu key, and then select Calendar. The first time you open Calendar, you'll likely see the Day view, which is a default setting, as shown in Figure 1. However, you can change the Calendar view to one that works better for your needs:
Using the Windows Vista Control Panel
The inner workings of Windows Vista reveal themselves inside the mysterious Control Panel. Choose Start --> Control Panel to plug away at the innards.
Using a Scanner to Make a Digital Photo
Scanning existing photographic prints is a popular use for digital imaging. By scanning existing digital images, you can preserve vintage photographs on CD-Rs and CD-RWs, repair and retouch your family album, and share images with friends and family without losing control of your valuable negatives or original prints. You can email or post your images on a Web site, even when they were not shot with your digital camera. In order to take advantage of these opportunities to use and share your existing photos in a digital format, you need to scan them into digital images.
Understanding Photography's Rule of Thirds
The position of your subject matter within a picture is one of the most important decisions you make. Whether you can move the subject or objects around, change your position, or wait until everything moves to the right spot, you should constantly be aware of how your subject matter is arranged. Photographers often consciously or unconsciously follow a guideline called the Rule of Thirds. It's simply a way of dividing your picture horizontally and vertically into thirds (see Figure 1). The best place to position important subject matter is often at one of the points located one-third of the way from the top or bottom and sides of the frame.
Troubleshooting a "Broken" Laptop
There aren't enough words in the dictionary to describe all the possible combinations of mechanical failures, human errors, and software issues that result in a "broken" laptop. However, there are several likely sources — some are easy to fix and some are extremely bad news. But before you declare your laptop as dead as a Monty Python parrot ("stiff, bereft of life, resting in peace, off the twig, kicked the bucket, shuffled off its mortal coil, and a member of the choir invisible"), consider some of these possible sources of problems.
Transferring Photos from a Photo Library to Your iPod
If you store photos in an iPhoto library on a Mac, or in a photo library managed by Adobe Photoshop Album or Photoshop Elements on a Windows PC, you can transfer photos to your color-display iPod automatically, and synchronize your iPod to your library so that any changes you make to the library are copied to your iPod. You can also limit the transfer and synchronization to albums or collections rather than the entire library.
Transferring Images from Your Camera to Your PC
The first challenge you have to face is getting your digital images from your camera into your computer so that you can edit them (if necessary), store them on some archival medium (such as CD or DVD), and make prints.

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