Phone Phun

You got up at oh-dark-thirty and went and stood in line at the Apple Store. You laid down your hard-earned dinero, and walked out with your spiffy new iPhone 4. You take it out, fire it up, and call–who? All those nifty new features, but there's nobody to call, since nobody else has theirs yet. A brand new toy, but nobody to play with.

As luck would have it, Apple has taken care of this for you, at least for the FaceTime video conferencing app. All you need to do is to dial 1-888-FACETIME and a nice friendly Apple employee will answer and help you put your new phone through its paces. In addition, they'll give you "a few advanced tips." Who knows, maybe there's a secret handshake and a decoder ring as well. This service is available between 8:00 am and 8:00 pm Central Time. And remember to smile.

Along with all the other things that make cell phones cool is the fact that you can send email to them. Communicating via SMS text messaging is pretty easy phone-to-phone: just enter the phone number you're sending to, write your message, and you're off to the races. But what if you need to ping them and you're not within reach of a cell phone yourself? Maybe you need that message to get through but you're sitting in front of, sigh, a computer. Great: use email. Oops; what's their email address?

Well, it turns out that's often pretty easy to figure out. Generally the phone number (with area code) is part of it, but what about the part that comes after the "@" symbol? For a list of email formats for the big deal carriers, check out the Mobile Phone Email Address Format page. They've listed many of the names you'd recognize. Some of them have separate addresses for MMS (media, like pictures) so double-check that you're getting the right one. Also, since these types of things can change over time, it might be handy to send a test message to your recipient before you really have to get in touch with them.