As I stood in the corner of a small, cluttered optics lab at MIT, the professor flipped a switch. The room filled with an electrical buzz, and suddenly a holographic video popped out at my face.

The 3-D image was of a human rib cage, and it rotated in midair. And the holographic rib cage rattled me.

It was my first experience with a Display Of The Future, and it set me on a mission. In the subsequent years, I’ve been hunting down display prototypes, talking with experts, and visiting labs. In short, I’ve been on a quest for the perfect display.

Now You See It

Even though holographic video blew me away when I first saw it, I quickly composed myself. It’s simply not the sort of thing that will be commercially available any time soon.

I talked to Gregg Favalora, 3-D expert and founder of Actuality Systems, about the commercial viability of high-resolution 3-D video. His company broke resolution records with its display-a 100-million-voxel (3-D pixel) device that made images for radiologists and engineers hunting for oil reserves. The details of these 3-D images look eerily realistic, but Actuality had a heck of a time finding the right market for it.

In the end, the company only sold 30 systems at $200,000 each and it has now ceased engineering operations. And that MIT holographic video system I saw in a few years ago is still trapped in the lab. The lesson: no matter how extraordinary your technology, it’s impractical for the people unless you can efficiently manufacture it in large numbers.

I See Practicality

At the opposite end of the price spectrum is LCD. It’s cheap as dirt thanks to the billions of dollars of factories built over the past two decades. I wanted to get a look at the way LCDs are made and try to find clues for how a more interesting or useful display-like a reflective e-reader or an OLED screen-could scale up and become cheap.

So I took a trip down to Applied Materials in Santa Clara, California, a company that supplies 90 percent of the LCD industry with manufacturing equipment. What I saw was impressive: the newest fabs are built around sheets of glass—backplanes of LCDs—that are the size of a garage door. They’re only as thick as six sheets of paper, and each one can yield eight large screen TVs.

The machines that deposit electronics on the glass are behemoths-taller than I can reach and with an area slightly larger than a garage door. In a fab, six of these machines are arrange circularly, and from above they look like a giant mechanized flower. The sheets of glass slide in like a floppy disk into a drive, and come out coated with thin film transistors.

The bigger the glass, the more displays can be pumped out of a factory, and the cheaper all sizes of LCD displays become. According to Sid Rosenblatt, the CFO of Universal Display Corporation, a big fab can make six 50-inch LCDs every three to four minutes. At that volume, how can anything else compete with LCD?

Fitting In

Well, instead of beating them, startup Pixel Qi decided to join them. The company’s screens are all LCD—built on the same lines and with the same materials as any other liquid crystal display—but with an additional mode in which the power-hungry backlight is off, and the display reflects ambient light.

I’ve seen Pixel Qi’s displays and visited with Mary Lou Jepsen, the startup’s founder and the former CTO of the One Laptop Per Child project. Jepsen spends most of her time in Taipei, the capital of Displayland, but on a sunny day last fall, I caught her at her houseboat in Sausalito. It was the perfect time and place to try out an LCD that is most impressive in bright light.

In its reflective mode, the display is black and white, similar to a Kindle or Sony Reader except it’s faster-capable of video, albeit in monochrome. The first batch of Pixel Qi screens is scheduled to come off the line this month. Jepsen says more designs that further reduce power consumption are on the way. In one, she explains that the screen, when not needing to refresh, should be able to shut down the central processing unit(and wake it up within milliseconds when it’s in use).

As for a color reflective mode, Jepsen says it could be possible in a couple of years. The concept, which involves a particular arrangement of liquid crystals, is based on her PhD thesis, but it’s admittedly a more complex design than the first Pixel Qi screens. Her first priority, she says, is making sure that Pixel Qi can ship its first products quickly and successfully.

Bright and Beautiful

While Pixel Qi might be making cheap displays that are easy on the eyes and energy efficient, they can’t compare to the beauty and simplicity of OLED screens, in which each pixel emits its own light. The whites are whiter, the blacks are blacker, and the overall image is just gorgeous.

Even better, the manufacturing process is as simple as it gets. It’s layer of organic material that can be printed between two layers of electrodes. This means that OLED displays have the potential to fold, roll, and be built over large areas.

Concepts I’ve seen: a paper-thin, flexible display slammed by a hammer without breaking, a display that’s see-through when the power’s off, and large area OLED coating that act as a window, a wall, or a display, depending on its mode.

In terms of touch, I’m keeping an eye on a new type of technology that’s being integrated into the electronic foundation of OLED displays and LCDs too. It’s called in-cell technology, and there are a number of variants, but one type incorporates photodetectors into the pixels of a screen. It’s ideal for OLED displays, because it can be added without adding thickness, allowing them to maintain their sleek good looks.

If there were ever a perfect display, OLED is it.

The Holdup

In a conversation with Vladimir Bulovic, a professor at MIT (and star of the famous light-emitting pickle video) we waxed poetic on the possibilities of OLEDs. Bulovic believes that it’s only a matter of time before OLEDs take their rightful place at the head of the display industry. The reason we have to wait is simply bad timing. “If back in the 1970s, we had OLEDs, no one would even know what an LCD is today,” he said.

The widely understood problem with OLED displays, however, is that the technology doesn’t exist to mass manufacture them on large sheets of glass like those I saw at Applied Material. Therefore, their beauty is relegated to smaller screens like cell phone displays, Sony’s 11-inch (expensive) TV, and concept demos.

Engineers are working on the problem, of course. Bulovic told me about a former student of his, named Conor Madigan, who has an OLED-printing startup in Menlo Park called Kateeva. I got a hold of Madigan who said his company, which uses a hybrid approach to printing large-scale OLED display, is well funded (even in these difficult economic times) and the display industry is really starting to push large-scale OLED technology.

While it’s true that big display makers are promising big OLED screens in the next couple of years, I’m not holding my breath. Even when the technology for printing large-scale OLED displays arrives, it will still take significant investments to scale up manufacturing. It’s difficult for companies to justify investing too much money in OLED displays while LCD sales are still doing well and continue to get cheaper. Besides, these large-screen OLEDs will still be made on glass, just like LCD, which keeps things rigid, fragile, and heavy.

Past Glass

In order to have a light, flexible, rugged OLED display, it’s obvious that display makers must go with plastic instead of glass. Plastic Logic, is promising the world’s first plastic-backed screens with printed organic transistors, by early next year.

I’ve handled a proto-version of Que, Plastic Logic’s e-reader, at the company’s Mountain View headquarters and was impressed by the form factor. While it’s still rigid, it’s light as a thin stack of papers. And because it’s made of plastic, it’s robust. I felt like flinging it across the boardroom where I sat with the head of marketing and a public relations handler. I didn’t.

Here’s the bad news for Plastic Logic: it all comes back to scalability. At the recent Printed Electronics conference in San Jose, I had lunchtime conversations with people who just shake their head at Plastic Logic’s challenges. A number of them expressed skepticism that the manufacturing process could scale.

Printed organic transistors currently can’t compete in speed with amorphous silicon transistors used in LCDs and OLED displays. And the company’s printing technology is done in a single fab in Dresden, which could make it difficult to produce the e-reader in large volume. In other words, it won’t be cheap or widespread, at least in the near future.

Roll With It

However, the folks at HP Labs think they have a scalable way to make plastic-backed displays with fast silicon transistors. On a recent tour of HP Labs I saw the proof: sheets of plastic, tens of meters long, are rolled onto tubes and are loaded and locked into a system that imprints silicon transistors onto the material.

Carl Taussig, the director of HP’s information surfaces lab, walked me through the process of the so-called Self Aligned Imprint Lithography. Plastic, with a shiny coating, spins on a series of cylinders, where it is exposed to chemicals, ultra-violet light, etching solutions, and ionized gasses. The roll-to-roll setups are compact, and they don’t require clean-room level purity that other display processes do.

Taussig, who is also responsible for inventing the DVD-RW, showed me prototypes, built with HP’s silicon-on-plastic transistors. One of these plastic backplanes controlled an E Ink display. Some of the pixels that were supposed to be black appeared gray, but these prototypes help the researchers find the problems in the roll-to-roll process. If they see a blown-out pixel, they retrace their steps to find where in the process the problem arose. 


In another demonstration, I saw a new type of reflective display developed at HP that was about the size of a smart phone screen. It has color and video and is one of the best-looking reflective screen I’ve seen. Technical details were sparse (they will come out early next year), but Taussig told me that part of the trick is to make a pixel out of three layers of color dyes that take incoming white light and reflect specific colors of it back at you, something like the way that butterfly wings reflect light.

Within Two Years

While Taussig doesn’t think roll-to-roll will replace LCD processes anytime soon, he hopes it can help plastic become the foundation for reflective displays as well as emissive displays like those made of OLEDs. HP has licensed its roll-to-roll technology to PowerFilm, a thin film solar manufacturer. And recently, PowerFilm’s subsidiary Phicot has started to commercially developing the process for electronics. The first products will be displays for soldiers that may be integrated into clothing or wrap around their arms.

Combining HP’s roll-to-roll manufacturing with OLEDs and a reflective reading technology is the closest thing to the perfect display that I’ve seen. So I ask Taussig how long it’s going to take to make the process reliable. He’s optimistic that Phicot can iron out the problems soon. “To be successful we need to roll this out within two years,” he says, since the first plastic displays will hit the market in 2010.

In talking with Taussig, it’s clear to me that even though he’s a researcher, he’s focused on making plastic displays practical. He knows the only way to do that is with solid, cost-effective manufacturing. Once the manufacturing problems are solved, he says, plastic displays become inevitable. “My grandkids will never believe that we made displays with glass,” he says. “Everything will be on plastic.”

I can’t wait. The perfect screen will be lightweight, energy-efficient, and able to take various forms—flexible, transparent, and with touch or some other form of gesture recognition. I want colors so vibrant that images look real enough to grab. Still, I want to read on it without feeling like I’m staring at a flashlight. And it’s got to be cheap.

So far, the displays I’ve seen come close. And while nothing yet gets it all right, there are some up-and-coming technologies-and, crucially, emerging manufacturing processes-that give me confidence that the perfect display is on the way.

Kate Greene spends most of her day staring at the screens of her MacBook Pro and iPhone. She became a journalist by way of physics, where she worked in a basement lab with lasers and a lot of liquid nitrogen. Currently, she writes for publications like The Economist and Technology Review and goes on display hunts for Gizmodo. She can be found on the Internet at kategreene.net and on twitter

Nobody likes staring at a boring desktop when they fire up their computer every morning. Keep your wallpaper fresh with the five most popular sites Lifehacker readers use to satisfy their wallpaper needs.

Photo by goincase. Wallpaper on monitor available here.

Earlier this week we asked you to share your favorite wallpaper site. We quickly learned that—while not everyone has a strong opinion about Linux distributions or encryption software—everyone has a favorite wallpaper site; readers logged nearly 500 votes for their favorite wallpaper sites. Now we’re back to share the five most popular sites used by Lifehacker readers to dress up their monitors with fresh wallpaper.

VladStudio

Vlad Studio features the work of Russian wallpaper artist Vlad Gerasimov. He cranks out hundreds of great wallpapers, ranging from holiday themes to abstract art. Vlad Studio has wallpaper in a wide range of sizes suited for everything from your mobile phone to a multi-monitor setup. Mobile wallpaper and desktop resolutions at 1600×1200 and below are available for free. Images larger than that are available only to registered users. If you want access to the larger resolutions, now is a great time to pick up a subscription. Vlad is running a Christmas-special where the $30 lifetime membership is available for $20.

4Chan Wallpapers/General/

4Chan is an image-based forum where anyone can anonymously post and share images and comments. It’s divided into sub-boards devoted to all sorts of topics like Anime, video games, etc., but has gained notoriety for some of its more unsavory sub-boards. The /Wallpaper/ board, nonetheless, is bustling and updated nearly 24/7 with images from around the web. Since the 4Chan boards are a bit kludgy to use if you’re not trying to comment and just looking for images, a variety of scrapers have sprung up to help you pick through all the images in /Wallpaper/. You can visit 4Chan directly at the link above or you can use services like Nik.Bot and 4Walled to browse through the wallpapers available through 4Chan. Be strongly forewarned, however: although the /Wallpaper/ forum is much tamer than other areas of 4Chan, you’ll still find a large number of Maxim-level NSFW wallpaper images and the occasional Playboy-level NSFW images when you’re browsing. If you’re not prepared to explain some really awkward internet memes to your boss, you’d better save 4Chan /Wallpaper/ for home.

Social Wallpapering

Social Wallpapering borrows the vote up/down model used by many social aggregators (Reddit, Digg, etc.) and applies it to desktop wallpaper. Users vote up their favorite, vote down their least favorites, and upload their own images to be ranked by other users. You can browse by rank, category, view random images, and sort by screen size to help you drill down through the huge collection to find the wallpaper you want. Prefer to grab everything and sort it out later? Social Wallpaper makes their entire wallpaper collection available for download via BitTorrent. If you’re looking for a site where you can not only find fresh wallpaper but participate in helping your fellow wallpaper lovers find the best images, Social Wallpapering is a solid choice.

Interfacelift

Interfacelift is an enormous repository of wallpaper images. Thanks to the button-based layout at the top of the screen, you can easily drill down through wallpapers using factors like rating, number of comments, screen type, and so on. Once you select your screen type—widescreen, full screen, dual monitors, etc.—you can pick from available resolutions so you never end up clicking on an image and finding out it’s not available in the resolution you want. Every search result gives you information about the image plus a drop down menu for size selection and a quick download. Interfacelift has recently added a feature called “The Loupe” which allows users to vote on incoming submissions to accelerate the process of new materials being added to the database.

DeviantART Wallpaper

If you’ve visited your fair share of wallpaper sites and gotten tired of the endless stream of glowing line-art and video-game wallpapers, then you’ll enjoy browsing the wallpaper archives of DeviantART—a subdivision of the artist-centric site. You’ll find everything at DeviantART from the more common glow-lines variety of abstract wallpaper to quirky paintings, photographs, and computer-rendered images. Most of the users at DeviantART are prolific contributors, so if you find a wallpaper you really like, make sure to check out the user’s gallery to see if they have any other gems to share. DeviantART doesn’t have the advanced wallpaper-oriented search features that many of the other wallpaper sites have, but you can still search by image size and sort by popularity.

Now that you’ve had a chance to look over Lifehacker readers’ favorite wallpaper sites, it’s time to cast a vote for your favorite:

We have two honorary mentions to hand out this week to extremely deserving sites that have contributed a multitude of awesome wallpapers over the years: Digital Blasphemy and Mandolux. Got more to say about your favorite (or a favorite that didn’t make the list)? Let’s hear it in the comments.

The Apple tablet is almost here. We hear. Actually, we’re hearing a whole lot lately. With this exhaustive guide to every tablet rumor, we’ve got the clearest picture of the Apple tablet yet.

Uh, What’s It Called?

The iPhone was called the iPhone years before Steve Jobs ever took the stage to announce it. We don’t have the luxury of such clarity here. I would think the name has no more than two syllables, personally.

Overwhelmingly what “evidence” there is points to some form of Slate. Not only did Apple register the domain iSlate.com through an intermediary to keep it a secret (discovered by Mark Gurman), they’ve trademarked it through a shell company called Slate Computing (signed for by Apple’s Senior Trademark Specialist) and registered domains and trademarks in Europe through their usual IP law firm, utilizing their standard secret trademark practices, last used with the iPhone. They’ve also registered “Magic Slate” through the same company. And, while we initially blew off NYT editor Bill Keller referencing an “Apple Slate” in a speech as meaningless, it’s a whole lot curiouser now.

Update 12/29/2009: Another shell company, iGuide Media—using Apple Senior Trademark Specialist Regina Porter as the signatory—applied for a trademark on iGuide, which seems, from the trademark description, to a be service less so than a piece of hardware:

Downloadable electronic publications in the nature of books, magazines, newsletters, journals, and blogs in the fields of entertainment, sports, science, history, culture, celebrities, news, current events, politics, technology, and education

Borders referenced an “Apple iPAD” in a survey, but it sounds like the sad invention of a survey copywriter who hit caps lock instead of shift, not to mention a digital feminine hygiene product. Apple also registered a trademark for TabletMac, but most likely to protect the Mac brand name from modders (it sounds unwieldy and gross).

Apple’s put a lot of effort into iSlate it seems. Is that the name of the Apple Tablet?

When’s It Coming?

Well, obviously everybody who picked a day before today is wrong. Which leaves everyday after today! The overall consensus is that’s being announced in late January—note, though, that a lot of the people who’re part of the new January cabal were the same people convinced it was coming in the fall.

iLounge predicted awfully specifically back in September that “Apple is currently planning to announce it on or before January 19, 2010.” The Financial Times
said two days ago that Apple is expected “make a major product announcement on Tuesday, January 26th” at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, where Apple’s rented a stage for “several days.” Silicon Alley Insider says that Apple is going to demo a tablet in January.

But when can you actually hold one? From most to least specific: The Wall Street Journal says the tablet is actually going to ship in March, and an analyst said it’s coming in March or April. iLounge says it’ll hit stores in May or June, like the iPhone. Digitimes reported Foxconn is supposed to have almost half a million of ’em shipped by April. Little emperor of Apple analysts Gene Munster says the first half of 2010. A bunch of connected Mac people just say 2010.

Everybody from the WSJ to Apple fan sites are convinced the tablet is being announced sometime late next month, shipping 2-6 months afterward, so hype and development can bloom, like the iPhone. (Though most of ’em were wrong three months ago.)

How Much Is It Gonna Cost?

The iPhone was $600. Then sales stopped being a-mazing and it dropped to $400. When the iPhone 3G came out, it went to $200 and everybody bought one. So, uh, how much is the tablet gonna be?

Everybody says roughly the same thing: AppleInsider has said it’s “expected to retail for somewhere between the cost of a high-end iPhone and Apple’s most affordable Mac notebook.” Our insider told us it would “cost $700 to $900,” or “more than twice as much as a netbook.” Taiwan Economic Times says it’s between $800 and $1000. China Times, while they got the date pegged to the price horribly wrong, said 800 bucks. And then there’s DigiTimes, who says the whole reason the tablet was “delayed” was because it was getting an OLED upgrade, so it’d be a whopping $1500 to $1700. The final word comes from Steve Jobs who said “we don’t know how to build a sub-$500 computer that is not a piece of junk.”

Survey—and logic—says it’ll be pricier than an iPhone and more expensive than a MacBook. Which doesn’t say a lot. If you had to pick a number, $800ish seems like the safest bet.

How Big Is It?

The most important spec—and maybe the biggest mystery—is, well, how big the tablet is. Three sizes dominate rumors, tied to the size of panels produced by display manufacturers: 7 inches, 9.6 (or 9.7) inches, and 10.6 inches.

Let’s go from least to most specific. Apple reportedly told publishers it’s “small enough to carry in a handbag but too big to fit in a pocket.” A company discovered in its traffic logs an “unannounced Apple product with a display somewhere between an iPhone and a MacBook,” reported the NYT. The WSJ reported it’s “smaller than [Apple’s] current laptop computers but bigger than the iPhone or iPod Touch.”

Apple analyst king of the dweebs Gene Munster, after speaking to “component contacts” in Asia, says it’s between 7 and 10 inches. TechCrunch says it’s 7 or 9 inches. Digitimes says there’s two tablets, one that’s 9.6 inches (with OLED) and another that’s 10.6 inches. Taiwan Economic News says 9.6 inches too. Actually respectable news organization Dow Jones says Apple ordered displays from Wintek that are “between 9.7 and 10 inches.” Oh, and there might be ginormous tablets somewhere out there.

The Financial Times and Reuters both say it’s 10 inches. So does our insider.

iLounge presents a unified theory of the tablet universe that would explain the multiplicity of sizes: There have been three prototypes, and the initial one had a 7-inch screen, which was too small, so the latest version is 10.7 inches. Whatever the exact size, they say, it has “7x the touchable surface area” as the iPhone

Let’s just stick with bigger than an iPhone, but smaller than a MacBook.

What’s Inside

There’s been surprisingly little discussion of the actual specs beyond the size of the screen—storage, memory, processor, etc. Most of what little talk there has been has revolved around the networking capabilities.

There could be versions with 3G and without. Specifically, HSDPA (meaning it would only work on AT&T or T-Mobile in the US). Oh look, a SIM card tray! But maybe it’ll be on Verizon said BusinessWeek. Hey, maybe even Verizon LTE 4G wireless!

As for the processor, Intel Germany CEO passed gas about a bigger “version of the iPhone” powered by Atom. Dean Takahashi says that the tablet will be the first device using chips that Apple’s designed in-house through PA Semi, the chip company Apple bought a while ago, and that the chips are possibly ARM-based.

Aaaaaannnd it coooooooould have an OLED screen, if it cost 1500 bucks.

A 3G option seems very possible, as does a secret-sauce processor, but who knows?

Who’s Involved?

Um, Steve Jobs, duh. A whole bunch of new multitouch engineers. Oh, and the Newton guy is back.

Quanta might be making it. Or Foxconn (who makes the iPhone and got a guy killed over a leaked prototype). With a display made by LG (who makes the gorgeous, if flaky, panel inside the 27-inch iMac.) Or maybe the display’s from Wintek, according to Reuters and Dow Jones. The battery might be made by Dynapack.

Besides Apple, again, who knows?

Patent Soup

The thing about patents is that, besides the fact they’re patenting something, they don’t say a whole lot, at least not about actual products. But here’s a few interesting ones pertaining to a tablet.

This patent for a “display housing for a computing device” sure sounds like a tablet, which might fit into the tablet docking station in this patent, and you might use two hands, as shown in this patent, to interact with a multitouchable OS X, generously illustrated in this patent, unless you use a pen (ha ha ha). And it might be bumpy, in a cool way.

Patents don’t mean a whole lot, so don’t expect any of them to actually make it into a tablet. They could, though.

The Backstory

It’s fairly well known the iPhone was born from efforts to develop a touchscreen tablet computer. It was simply miniaturized, and uses tech from FingerWorks, a touch interface company Apple bought. The NYT reported Apple’s been working on it since 2003, when they built several prototypes using a battery-slaying PowerPC processor. Our insider said that Apple’s been working on it for 4-6 years, and that the first prototype of the current version was developed in 2008. Steve Jobs killed the PowerPC tablet, according to the NYT, because Jobs asked what tablets were good for besides surfing the web while sitting on the toilet. The WSJ reported he’s killed it twice already.

What’s It Going to Do?

Perhaps the most important question of all: What’s it actually like?

Well, it depends on the OS. iPhone OS 3.1 had clear traces of new Apple iProducts, and some people say it’s a bigass iPod touch, or at least running iPhone OS, which sorta fits with iPhone app developers supposedly being asked to make higher res versions of their apps for demonstration. It apparently fits in with the iTunes remodeling Apple’s got going on.

The NYT reported “You will be very surprised how you interact with the new tablet,” whatever that will come to mean. As much as Steve Jobs saying they’ve got some “interesting ideas” about small computers, presumably. Martha Stewart is hyped about it, maybe ’cause it has something to do with diners.

Most of the excitement lately is that it’s going to redefine newspapers, books and magazines, which we heard from some publishers, and maybe textbooks, which an insider told us. We’re not the only ones who’ve heard it’s got an ebook bent.

Everybody pre-conceived the iPhone based on the iPod and, to a lesser extent, the Newton. Everybody was wrong. Today, most everybody is pre-conceiving the tablet based on the iPhone. Maybe we’re all wrong again, or maybe the leaks are better this time.

Your Turn

You know our mantra about rumors: Never trust them. But putting all of them together, we’ve definitely got some ideas now.

If there’s any rumor we missed—or you have a tip (we’re good at keeping secret identities)—let us know.

It’s Christmas day, so we’re asking you to go a little easy on Peek here, but we’ve got a sneaking suspicion that our request will be cutely ignored in comments below. This week’s episode of How Would You Change features Peek’s latest handheld — you know, the one that only does Twitter. We didn’t find the creature too incredibly useful / valuable during our time with it, but that’s not to say it couldn’t be molded into a pristine object of desire. Speaking of which, how would you go about tweaking or overhauling the TwitterPeek? Make the screen resolution higher? Change the user interface? Add support for apps, email and calling? Make Peek pay you to use it? Sound off below!

How would you change the TwitterPeek? originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 25 Dec 2009 23:12:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The moment you unpackage a new smartphone is a magical one. Don’t let the moment right after that, when you realize that it’s practically useless out of the box, cancel that out. Here’s everything you need to know:

What You Need to Buy

There are plenty of smartphone accessories that are worth considering, and a few that you actually need. Proceed with caution, but don’t be afraid to treat your new smartphone, and yourself, to a few goodies.

A Case: They look goofy, Jason hates them, and they screw with your device’s carefully designed curves. But here’s the thing: smartphones are fragile. They aren’t like dumbphones, and a single fall—especially with devices with a glass screen—can poop all over your new smartphone party. Until you’re trained, play it safe. Wrap your unit. Case brand isn’t important, so just take your pick from your local Best Buy or wherever. Just make sure your device’s corners are covered, because it’s edge impacts that break the most glass. Just remember, you’re stuck in a multi-thousand dollar contract with this device, which itself would costs hundreds of dollars to replace. It’s actually kind of terrifying! Pretend it’s a baby, if that helps.

Headphones: Your smartphone is now your primary media player, too, so you’re going to need to ditch the headphones or headset it came with. Yes, they all suck; no, your phone’s aren’t the one exception. If you don’t care about a microphone, treat yourself to a decent pair of in-ear headphones. If you do, get a midrange wired headset.

Storage: Phones either come with internal storage, like the Pre or the iPhone, or taunt you with “expandable” storage, which pretty much means they’ve got an empty microSD slot. If your phone comes with less than 2GB of space and has said slot, you need to fill it. Buying a microSD card is a little different than buying a regular SD card, because speed doesn’t really matter, and nothing you’re using your phone demands particularly high transfer speeds. This is a place to store your music, photos and videos—that’s it. Buy these online, where branded 8GB cards regularly dip below $20—in stores, you’ll pay much, much more. Also, don’t worry too much about getting a full-sized SD adapters, as pictured above. Most phones will allow you to mount your smartphone’s microSD card as mass storage when they’re plugged into a computer, so removal is rarely necessary.

Cables: Pick up a spare charging cable for your phone. For most smartphones this is a simple mini/microUSB cable, while for iPhones it’s an iPod dock connector. Why worry about the spare? Think of it this way: if you lose your only iPod cable, you can’t listen to music until you buy another one. If you lose your only iPhone cable, you’re out of touch with the rest of the world in a matter of hours.

What You Don’t

Of course, the temptation of new accessories is great, and there are legions of companies waiting to seize on your post-transactional bliss. When buying smartphone accessories, proceed with caution.

A dock: Again, people have a tendency to confuse their PMPs with their phones, which may look and act similar, but are used in a completely different way. Unless you want to dock your smartphone near your bed to use as an alarm, it’s going to be charging—and syncing—with your computer whenever it’s not in your pocket. An impulse-purchased dock will, in all likelihood, live a lonely life. Don’t let this sad thing happen!

A branded navigation mount: These are almost always overpriced, and all they really do is hold your phone in your line of sight. Just buy a dirt-cheap windshield or dash mount, buy a 12v DC converter to plug your USB charging cable into, and you’ve got all the functionality you need for about $20.

Cleaning Kits: Cleaning your smartphone isn’t hard, and it shouldn’t cost you much at all. Just follow our instructions, and avoid any smartphone-specific cleaning kits. They’re a guaranteed waste.

Bluetooth anything: Bluetooth headsets can make anyone look like a dweebish soccer dad, and while they might make chatting on the phone while driving more legal, they don’t really make it much safer. Just hold your phone like a normal human, put it on speakerphone, or take the call later. You should avoid Bluetooth headphones too, but for a different reason: they suck. They sound terrible, they’ll drain your phone’s battery and they’re overpriced. If you have to buy a pair, spend as little as possible.

Getting Started

If your smartphone is a newborn, this is where we teach it to walk.

Contacts: Somehow, in over two decades of cellphone development, we haven’t settled on a simple way to transfer contacts from one phone to another. Here’s how you should proceed through this somehow-still-painful process:
• Get your carrier to do it. If you’re upgrading handsets on one carrier, they should be able to transfer your contacts, and probably for free. If you’re switching carriers, there may be a small fee. Don’t spend more than five bucks.
• Use your SIM. Are you on AT&T or T-Mobile? Is your smartphone on the same carrier as your old dumbphone? Most phones will have an option to write all contacts to a SIM card, which is the little chip that your phone uses to identify itself on a cell network. Do this, pop your old card out, pop it into your new smartphone, and transfer all your contacts from the old SIM onto your new phone’s memory. Sadly, this won’t work with Verizon or Sprint phones, which are CDMA-based, and therefore don’t have SIM cards at all.
• Google Sync. Through a protocol called SyncML, Google Sync supports quite a few features phones, and can pull all your contacts into your Google account. Your new smartphone can then yank them back down from the cloud. Bonus: they’re now backed up to Google server’s, too.

Email: Email, you’ll find, is one of the best things about owning a smartphone. Setting up your email varies from smartphone to smartphone (iPhone, Android, Palm Pre, Windows Mobile) and service to service (Exchange and Gmail setups will be completely different, obvious) but there are few rules of thumb to keep in mind during account setup. For example, use IMAP (versus POP) whenever you can—this will keep your messages and their read/unread statuses in sync with your desktop clients. And since most of your email downloading will be happening over 3G, set the individual message size limit at or below about 10kb. This will ensure your messages come in quickly, but also that you have something to read once they arrive.

Calendars: If you keep a Google Calendar, having it sync with your smartphone is a revelation. Android phones will automatically sync with your default Google account’s calendars, as will the Pre, while the iPhone will need to be configured with CalDav. If you don’t keep a calendar, your new smartphone is a good excuse to start.

Media and Syncing: Most smartphones rely on some kind of desktop software to transfer personal info, music, video and photos to and from the handset. For the iPhone, this basically means downloading iTunes—which you have to do anyway. For BlackBerry, this means downloading BlackBerry Desktop Manager. Windows Mobile phones are best served by Windows Device Center, while Android and Palm phones—and optionally Windows Phones, iPhones and BlackBerrys—play nice with doubleTwist, a cross-platform music player/media syncing app.

Converting Video: You can’t just copy your torrented videos or home movies over to your smartphone; you need to downsample those videos, stat. Just download Handbrake for this—it’s basically magic, and it works on Windows, OS X and Linux. These instructions are iPhone-centric, but videos converted to 320×240 h.264 will be suitable for most new smartphones.

Apps! Apps! Apps! Apps!

Without apps, smartphones are nothing. With apps, they’re practically anything. Every smartphone platform has an app storefront now, from Apple’s pioneering App Store to BlackBerry’s App World to the Android Market, and they’re all, to different extents, treasure troves.

iPhone: First stop, Gizmodo’s Essential iPhone Apps Directory. These are the best of the best, and everything you need to make your iPhone into a mobile powerhouse. If you’re averse to spending money on your new iPhone—this thing wasn’t cheap, after all—check out our Essential Free Apps. We do regular posts and weekly roundups around here too, so just keep an eye out.

Android: It’s got the second best app selection, which is to say there’s some really great stuff out there. Our Essential Android Apps roundup cuts through the noise of the App Market, while our monthly roundups keep you up to date with the latest additions to the store.

BlackBerry: We cover the biggest new additions to App World, but it’s best to defer to a specialist site like CrackBerry for this one—they have their own app store too, which isn’t really much better or worse than BlackBerry’s janky official shop.

Palm: We’ve just pulled one of our patented “Essential” roundups fresh out of the oven, so consult that first. Beyond that, PreCentral’s official app reviews are fairly fantastic. Also worth checking out is their extensive homebrew app gallery, which has about as many decent apps in it as the official Catalog.

Windows Mobile: App development for WinMo isn’t exactly picking up nowadays but there’s a tremendous backlog of useful reviews and materials at WMPowerUser, WMExperts, XDA and MoDaCo. And yeah, we occasionally still do Windows Mobile app roundups, though until things get exciting again, expect less, not more.

Living Happily Ever After

Lastly, a few odds and ends to make sure your metal’n’plastic darling lives a happy life, at least before the end of its two-year contract.

How to back up your smartphone: Your smartphone probably contains as much personal data as your computer, and it’s subjected to way more physical risk. Preempt the pain. Back it up.

How to keep you smartphone clean: These little machines are fantastic at collecting fingerprints, dust and grime. Wipe them off every once in a while.

Any other tips for new smartphone owners? Chuck them down in the comments. Happy Holidays!