Kevin Purdy

As iPhones and Android phones get more powerful and gain more enterprise support, many folks are leaving the rounded realm of the BlackBerry for the two big touchscreens. Most BlackBerry owners have built up an extensive list of contacts from their many, many texts and emails, and they might wonder how they'll survive the trip. But take heart: You don't need to pull out your SIM card and pray, or load cumbersome transfer software. In fact, you're one text message away from transferring your contacts to nearly any smartphone.

Research in Motion offers desktop syncing software, imaginatively titled BlackBerry Desktop Manager, that can import your calendar and contacts into Microsoft Outlook, Windows Calendar, Lotus Notes, and a few other organizer apps. If you're planning to sync your new iPhone or Android with Outlook or another one of those apps, you might do well to go ahead and bring them onto your PC or Mac, load them into Outlook or the like, then rely on that app to pass them on to your next phone.

I write about Dropbox quite a lot, but for a good reason. Tech writers and industry insiders have to keep and organize drafts, research, photos, and files related to app and hardware testing, and most of us use Dropbox to keep it all accessible and organized across all our hardware. Sometimes the love gets a little unseemly, and someone goes and does something like declare Dropbox a future $40 billion company. At that point, the urge to pop the bubble proves basically irresistible.

[ More reasons why Dropbox has won so many geeky hearts ]

Google has all but acquired Motorola Mobility, having won Department of Justice and European Commission approval. Okay, so now what? Good question.

Say what you will about Google, which is moving toward a new model of privacy and coming under lots of scrutiny over their iPhone, but they offer at least a novel concept of freedom: a smartphone platform they built, but which doesn’t necessarily require their own apps to run. It’s not easy, and you might actually have to slightly endanger your phone to get there, but there exists an Android phone that doesn’t give Google personal data, ad revenue, or anything else.

So, how, exactly, do you trick Google into giving you the foundation without allowing them to look through any windows? Here’s how to set up an almost entirely non-Google-powered Android, in practice:

It’s a weird thing, a service that’s either free or $50. But the way today’s wireless customers are expected to pay for data plans today, that’s how it stands for anyone who wants to use their phone to connect a laptop or another device to the web.

That connection is usually termed as either “tethering” when it involves a cable connection between phone and laptop, and as a “hotspot” when the device creates a very small Wi-Fi access point that multiple devices can connect to wirelessly. To anyone who’s had to pay painful ransoms for working Wi-Fi at a hotel or airport, or found their coffee shop’s connection unusably bogged down, this sounds like a nice little preparedness tool. (See "Wi-Fi Tethering 101: Use a Smartphone as a Mobile Hotspot.")

Apple's doing it. Google's getting there. And Microsoft is quietly moving toward it. Big names in tech are trying to leave Adobe's Flash plug-in behind, citing stability and energy efficiency concerns. Can the average web surfer take the plunge? Not entirely, but with the right tools, you can mostly forgo Flash.

You may still need Flash for the rare site that absolutely refuses to work without it, so don't uninstall it from your system. Instead, use an add-on to keep Flash blocked from your browser unless you specifically allow it. Firefox has FlashBlock, as does Google Chrome. Internet Explorer users can install Toggle Flash, and then right-click their toolbar and select "Customize" to ensure its little red button is visible. Mac users who roll with Safari can give ClickToFlash or SafariStand a go. Chrome has also recently picked up a "Content Settings" button in its Options dialog that allows users to block use of plug-ins on every site except those they manually approve -- it's worth investigating if you really only need Flash working on a handful of sites.