Interested in saving some money on phone bills and transforming your iPad into a phone with free calling and texting?

Well, if you fall into the following 3 categories:

1. iPad 2 owner
2. Reside in the States
3. Pay for a landline telephone or sick of paying crazy cell phone bills

Then follow the below steps to replace your home landline telephone with your iPad 2 — free of charge.  And even better: you can even text message free from your iPad.  Note: If you have a 3G plan for your iPad, you could go mobile too, but not 100% sure about the stability of the phone reception when you’re on the go.

As you may know, Google released its Google Voice platform earlier this year.  This service allows Google account owners inside the USA to acquire a free telephone number and have all your phone numbers forwarded to this number (or act as a standalone number).  Well, with a little hack sense, you can download an app called ‘Talkatone‘ on your iPad and get your number set up for free on your iPad.  Just follow these two simple steps:

1. Register for a free Google Voice number by logging into your Google account.
2. Download Talkatone on your iPad 2 and input your Google Voice phone number and other info (yes, it’s an iPhone app but works fine on iPad).

Now close your iPad and try calling your new number from a new number that’s not linked up to your Google Voice phone number.

Wala!  You just replaced your landline!

If you are interested in a more aesthetic iPad-esque interface, you can check out this article to download GV Connect and sync it with Talkatone –although I think it’s not necessary.

Photo courtesy of SexyGadgets

I was playing around with an iPad recently and noticed a significant lag when waiting for YouTube videos to load. If you’ve been through a similar experience, you know how irritating it gets viewing start-stop, start-stop video streaming. :p

Below are a few different methods that could speed up the loading process. Try them one by one to see which solution works best for your situation:

1. Change Your DNS Settings (tips courtesy of iPad Video Converter)

   Step 1: Enter the settings menu on your iPad, select the General > Network > WiFi.Step 2: Then select the WiFi network that you use, tap on the blue arrow to the right.

   

   Step 3: You then need to type in your new DNS (208.67.222.222 ) settings into the space provided, if you have DNS setting you would like to keep a record of then you can simply press the Home/Power buttons at the same time to take a screenshot that will be saved in your Photo library.

   

2. Try turning off your Bluetooth in the Settings -> General -> Network category.
   
3. Try resetting your wireless router or modem.
4. Login to your YouTube account and adjust settings. This is the ultimate final desperation option.  Create a YouTube account if you don’t have one, log in, and adjust your settings to “I have a slow connection”.  The videos you watch will stream in a lower quality but will theoretically load faster.

If none of these solutions work, then it could be a problem with YouTube.  There has been discussion of YouTube throttling speeds in major traffic areas. There are people who line in NYC get buffering issues regularly. So it could be a regional problem.

If you are also experiencing slow speed on your iPhone, here is an article to help speed up your iPhone 3G or 3Gs.

Obscene title?  My bad

Allow me to explain… the reference is to a typical business transaction.

Let’s parallel a normal process of building a relationship to a normal business transaction.  Typically when you meet someone you would like to build a relationship with, you go through the following process:

RELATIONSHIP:

You meet the person, you go through some dates, then you …get your jiggy on.  Let’s look at this process from a shallow viewpoint: basically the goal is to reach the final step of sex.  From an efficiency standpoint, the trick here is to minimize the ‘x’ in  ‘x times’, meaning minimize the number of dates you need to go through in order to reach jigginess a.k.a. sex.

So, the MOST efficient way would then be:

i.e. skip the dates and get straight to the jigginess.  The problem with this solution is that this route usually ends up in a very short-term relationship.

Now let’s parallel this to a business transaction.

BUSINESS TRANSACTION:

You meet the customer for the first time, you gain their trust and increase credibility through continual follow-ups ‘x times’, then you finally get the order and get paid.

Again, from an efficiency standpoint:

You would skip the middle and just try to get your new client’s cash right off the bat.  This is what I like to call the business of being a whore.  A one-time transaction that probably won’t end up in a long-term client.  No good.  You’ll notice a lot of such ‘whores’ doing business in China. 

Bottom line: Don’t be a whore when it comes to business. There’s no shortcut, build a solid relationship and credibility with your client and the money will come very soon and very naturally.

Your thoughts?

***Tip ( June 2011): Get 25% OFF iPhone skins and cases at our partner site, Mama Studio, with coupon code: GEEKMAMA.

Have you noticed a lag in the speed at which your iPhone 3G or 3Gs loads SMS text messages or web browser pages?

Here’s the solution.

Remember that your iPhone is basically a small computer, it runs an operating system just like Windows XP or Mac OS X. And just like those systems, there are background tasks running that may slow down the performance of your iPhone. So in order to speed up your iPhone, you should properly quit the applications that you are not using.

Important note (common misconception):

When you press the ‘Home’ button on the front of the iPod Touch, you are not quitting the application. You are simply closing it, but the application is still open and running in the background.

Suppose you open a game that you downloaded or an application on your iPhone that constantly updates via the internet. But you don’t use that application often. Then it is smart to quit those applications so it is not hogging the bandwidth (speed) of your iPhone in the background.

So, in order to properly quit these applications on iPhone 3G or 3Gs, perform the following steps:

1. Open the application that you wish to quit by pressing its button on the home screen.
2. Once the app opens, hold the power button (on the top of the iPhone) until the ‘Slide to Power Off’ with a red button shows up.
3. Then let go of the power button and press and hold the ‘Home’ button on the front-bottom of the iPhone.
4. When the interface returns to the home screen, you have successfully quit the application.

Perform steps 1-4 on any applications that you don’t use often. This will speed up the performance of your iPhone.

Bonus: Clear the cache of your Safari browser regularly by doing the following:

Home Screen > Settings > Safari > Clear Cache.

This will help speed up the performance of Safari when surfing the web.

Double Bonus: Got an iPad? Learn how to speed up YouTube on iPad.

Here’s a cool little Googlie for your cellie that Kevin showed me last week.

Suppose you’re on the go. Using your text message function, you can:

Find locations of stores nearby.

1. Type in a store and zip code e.g. Safeway 95192
2. Send it to Google i.e. 466453

Google will text you back locations of Safeways in the general vicinity of that zip code.

When’s that movie playing?

1. Type in a movie name and zip code e.g. Borat 95192
2. Send it to Google i.e. 466453

It will text you back theaters in the zip code area WITH UPDATED MOVIE TIMES.

Try it! It’s totally awesome and formatted. This is very helpful. If some company got to this before Google, that company would be pretty filthy rich right now. Maybe this hack is old news. And I wasn’t in the loop. But I now am and this is an awesome Googlie for thy cellie!