Cheery smile-minister Zooey Deschanel has worn a lot of hats (uh, literally) in her brief public career: television and movie actress, indie songstress, HelloGiggles.com co-creator. (Yes, you read that correctly: Zooey Deschanel helped launch a site called HelloGiggles.com. That's your recommended sugar intake for the day).

Now, Ms. Zooey has found a new role for her sprightly self: Siri's Bestest Pal.

The actress can be seen in a current iPhone 4S advertisement for AT&T, which apparently debuted Monday night on ESPN and which has already been viewed over 100,000 times on YouTube in less than 24 hours.

The ad features Deschanel interacting with Siri on a rainy day, doing the things you'd expect her to do while home alone -- ordering in tomato soup, reminding herself to clean up (tomorrow!), and dancing by herself to some old-time rock and roll. Quirky!

As we have with past Siri ads, we decided to put this one to the test: Can the iPhone actually respond to all the prompts that AT&T's commercial says it can? Apple is currently being sued (actually, DOUBLE-sued) for misleading in its Siri ads, and we found in our tests on the Siri "Rock God" commercial that the sassy voice assistant had a whole bunch of trouble in real-life trials.

Our "Rock God" tests ended in total embarrassment for Siri; does Apple's Assistant fare any better at calling me Zooey?

As a reminder, the testing process remains the same:
- We only do one take of each prompt, to see if Siri can get it right the first time. What good is a voice assistant you have to prompt over and over again?
- Every prompt from the commercial is repeated word for word, here at the HuffPost office, no matter how stupid it makes me sound.
- Since the commercial takes place indoors, and Zooey Deschanel presumably has Internet in her home, we did the test over HuffPost's WiFi network.
- As always, I would like to apologize ahead of time, for my terrible, terrible Zooey Deschanel impression, which consists of me smiling a lot and trying to show as little chest hair as possible.

And now, here's our Zooey vs. Reality advertisement test. Watch below to see how Siri performed (SPOILER: Much better than last time):

After Facebook announced plans to acquire Instagram for a cool $1 billion, many users of the photo-filtering app and social network for iPhone and Android subsequently announced that they would delete Instagram from their phones -- they didn't want the privacy concerns that come with Facebook, for one, and now that Instagram had a corporate overlord it was totally uncool. ("Instagram is over!" you could almost hear them shout, as they whizzed by on their fixed-gear bikes).

If you're leaving Instagram, where do you turn? We've collected nine great photography apps for iPhone and Android here, all of them connected by their ability to add filters to pictures, either during or after the shot. Some of them, like Hipster, Tadaa, EyeEm, and Picplz, come with burgeoning photo-sharing networks built in; others, like Camera Awesome, Pixlr-o-Matic, and Camera+ simply offer powerful, advanced editing suites so that you can augment your photos any way you see fit. We've included photos of the apps in action (WARNING: I got a haircut at some point in between using all of these apps) so that you can better visualize the filter process on each app.

Most of these Instagram alternatives are free, so don't be shy: Give 'em a shot! Check out what these non-one-billion-dollar camera apps have to offer (below), then take a look at some more great photography apps available for free on the iPhone (here).

Want to impress your friends and/or have them accuse you of witchery? Well, if you own an Apple computer, you're in luck, because a new free app for Mac allows you to stop and start your music by just holding up your hand in front of your webcam.

The app is called Flutter, and it's available for download in Alpha mode right now at Flutter.io. As of now, Flutter has one use and one use only: Pausing and playing songs on iTunes and Spotify. Check out a brief demo video below:

Flutter does require that your webcam be turned on in order to work, which is a potential drain on the battery; if you're fidgety, move around a lot, or are an animated talker, you might accidentally trigger Flutter's pause or play function; I did just that while scratching my mustache this morning.

Also, if you are using Flutter on a work computer, your colleagues might ask why you are constantly raising your hand, and think that you're weird.

"Stop raising your hand all the time," they'll say. But you won't hear them, because your music will be playing.

Yes, Flutter is fun, and though it currently has limited functionality, it is at least neat enough for a free download, if only to see how gesture-based control of your technology might work in the near future. Steven Levy at Wired writes that Flutter's founders think the "sky's the limit" for the number of gestural controls that could be integrated in future updates; it's probably worth the space on your computer just to see what the team comes up with next.

Gesture technology is such an exciting field of computing because no one is quite sure what the next generation of operating system is going to look like. There are so many different, innovative ideas out there: You might be familiar, for example, with all of the many different prototypes of touch-less computers that Microsoft's experimental Research Labs have shown off in short videos on YouTube; many of those use technology from the Xbox Kinect, which allows users to control the screen using movements and gestures. We've previously covered a company called MicroVision, which can turn any computer or smartphone projection into a surface that can be manipulated without touch, as well as Tobii, which unveiled a version of Windows 8 that you can control using your eyeballs as the mouse. Companies like Samsung showed off gesture-controlled televisions at the Consumer Electronics Show this year and have made these TVs available for sale now; PC or laptop gesture-control, meanwhile, remains a relatively untapped, liquid market.

Flutter wants to have a say that, making its early-version app available for download here (it's free but for the price of your email). With both Microsoft and Apple working on 3D gesture recognition for upcoming devices, Flutter, and its touch-less control of the Mac, just might represent a wave of the future.

If you're a member of Nigerian royalty who buys Viagra and luxury wristwatches in bulk, you've probably been confused by how Gmail marks messages sent to you as 'Spam.'

Well, wonder no more, Your Bulk-Buying Highness: Google has announced that, from now on, Gmail will include a notification in each of your messages marked Spam that explains why that particular email has been flagged.

A "Why Is This Message In Spam?" information bar will appear above each Spam email you receive from now on. Here's one from my inbox:

(You know how I know this message is spam? The subject says that "Brooke is looking to make love," and then the body of the email is from someone named Kayla. Classic bait & switch!).

Now this may be fun, but Google, in the official blog post announcing the new feature, says this is about more than fun:

We hope that this is not only interesting, but also helps you learn about scams and other harmful messages that Gmail filters out. Whether you prefer to leave your spam folder untouched or do some educational digging, the information will be there for you.

The added feature is part of Google's larger push to educate its massive email user base about the dangers of Spam. The blog post also includes a link to a longer informational article about the ways in which spammers try to attack through email. That is in addition to Google's larger "Good to Know" campaign, a digital PSA of sorts that revolves around Internet privacy and safety in general.

Gmail's "Why Is This Spam?" notifications have already rolled out and should be in your Spam folder as of now. For answers to a bunch of commonly asked questions about Gmail -- including how to clear out all that spam at once -- check out our slideshow below:

UPDATE: Apple has responded to the allegations that their newest iPad gets too hot in a brief statement to The Huffington Post:

“The new iPad delivers a stunning Retina display, A5X chip, support for 4G LTE plus 10 hours of battery life, all while operating well within our thermal specifications. If customers have any concerns they should contact AppleCare.”

-----

Maybe they should have called it the Kindle Fire?

According to early user reports, the new iPad may be prone to becoming physically warm during use, especially in the lower left-hand corner when holding the iPad upright in portrait mode. The question of whether the iPad has a temperature problem has been asked on both the Apple Discussion Boards and in the MacRumors forums, and articles on CNET and Gizmodo have all brought unwanted attention to the new iPad's heat.

Typical of the complaints (via the Apple Discussion Boards):

Just got my new iPad. I'm loving the screen and speed but there's something weird about it. It gets rather warm/hot after 30minutes of usage. It has never happened on my iPad 2. Do you think it's harmless or .... ?

My 64gb, wifi/LTE new ipad is 96.8 degrees currently (and must have crafty artificial intelligence because it's as if it KNEW I'd brought out my laser temperature scanner and cooled down for reading). It has been very hot to hold, lower left side, since first use. I'll continue to monitor with scanner...

Mine is a 64 with WIFi and LTE - LTE not hooked up yet - got hot enogh that I measured with infared thermometer and it was 117 degree after 10 minutes - my little boy says its too hot to hold - (Great !) but seriously its not comfortable and I will be returning to the store

The uncomfortable heat has been attributed to the new iPad's larger battery and larger graphics chip. The iPad's new Retina display, with four times as many pixels as the screen on the iPad 2, as well as the optional 4G LTE chip, reportedly required a larger battery in order to maintain high battery life.

Apple did not immediately respond to request for comment. Until then, we will continue to monitor the iPad's hotness, both in consumer demand and physical, perhaps discomforting, warmth.

Take a look at critics' least favorite things about the new iPad via the slideshow below. Read on to find out what were reviewers' favorite things about the device.

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article stated that The Next Web had written an article about the third-generation iPad's heat problems. That article was about the first-generation iPad's heat problems, not the third-generation's.

Apple's Siri-centric commercials for the iPhone 4S are the focus of a controversy this week, as a man in New York is suing Apple for what he claims are "misleading" TV advertisements.

The lawsuit charges that Apple's ads show Siri doing more than it can in real life; there is a sarcastic jab at Siri on the second page of the suit that essentially sums up the complaint, in which the plaintiff argues ironically that Apple's ads indicate that Siri "performs useful functions and otherwise works as advertised." (The intimation being that the real Siri neither performs useful functions nor works as advertised. Ahem.)

As a kind of (non-)scientific experiment, I decided to take a look at one of these iPhone 4S ads -- the much-discussed, rather polarizing "Rock God" commercial -- and put it through its paces. The video that follows is simply me repeating every voice command prompt in the Rock God ad, word for word. Every shot you see is a first take: No do-overs, no second chances. This "first takes only" rule means that I often completely fail to point my iPhone at the camera at first. Nobody's perfect.

Speaking of which: Siri comes out looking -- well, not so good. Perhaps she was camera shy or had been up late the night before. Perhaps the Siri servers were overloaded, or my AT&T "4G" network was sputtering. Perhaps my perma-groggy voice and disarming Southern drawl were too much for Siri to process at once.

Whatever it was, I got decidedly different results from Siri than the young Chad Kroeger of the commercial did. It is perhaps not grounds for a lawsuit, but it's worth noting that Siri responded to only two out of seven prompts on the first try as it did in the ad, with one coming with serious time lag, not at all the instantaneity that the commercial suggests. One mistake was also fairly minor: In the text message test, Siri heard "Our" as "Are" -- a small error, but an error nonetheless.

Below, you can watch the video for yourself, with the commands on the original Siri commercial followed by my commands to Siri here in the New York HuffPost office. I apologize to my audience for the occasionally spotty video quality, and to my mother for my beard.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to reprogram my iPhone not to call me "Rock God" anymore.

Apple has made iOS 5.1, the newest version of its mobile operating system for iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch, available for download, announcing the update at Wednesday's iPad event. The latest version of iOS features support for a Japanese version of Siri, a new slide-to-open camera option on the lock screen, and a potential fix for battery problems that plagued many iPhone owners upon iOS 5's initial release in October.

Apple's first new version of iOS since November, iOS 5.1 is an update that Apple has been promising for several months, and which will supposedly address and fix the iPhone's much-noted battery issues. After iOS 5 was identified as the culprit for widely reported power problems on the new iPhone 4S back in October, Apple quickly issued iOS 5.0.1; that update, however, did not adequately solve battery issues for many users. Apple issued the following statement via email to HuffPost back in November:

The recent iOS software update addressed many of the battery issues that some customers experienced on their iOS 5 devices. We continue to investigate a few remaining issues.

iOS 5.1 is the result of that three-and-a-half month investigation. Aside from Japanese Siri and the camera button on the home screen -- users can now swipe up from home to open the camera app -- look for improved battery usage, as well as a fix to a well-publicized bug that was causing audio issues for some iPhone 4S owners, from the latest iOS update. The full list of new features, fixes and upgrades in iOS 5.1:

• Japanese language support for Siri (availability may be limited during initial rollout)
• Photos can now be deleted from Photo Stream
• Camera shortcut now always visible on Lock Screen for iPhone 4S, iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS and iPod touch (4th generation)
• Camera face detection now highlights all detected faces
• Redesigned Camera app for iPad
• Genius Mixes and Genius playlists for iTunes Match subscribers
• Audio for TV shows and movies on iPad optimized to sound louder and clearer
• Podcast controls for playback speed and a 30 second rewind for iPad
• Updated AT&T network indicator
• Addresses bugs affecting battery life
• Fixes an issue that occasionally caused audio to drop for outgoing calls

So, how can you download iOS 5.1? Well, if your iPad or iPhone is already running a version of iOS 5, and you're connected to a WiFi network, then you don't have to plug in a thing: Just follow the handy instructions in the slideshow below.

For photos from Apple's March 7 event, check out the slideshow (below).

Everyone has a defense against pre-roll ads, those video advertisements you are forced to watch before enjoying a YouTube video or online news report. Some mute their computers; others play a little Spider Solitaire until the ad is over; still others just force themselves to space out until the content actually begins, magically snapping back to reality once the pre-roll ad has finished.

Solve Media, a digital advertising firm, is trying to live up to its name, trotting out a new solution that aims to please both advertisers who want to get their message across as well as online video watchers who hate the ads that delay their chosen content.

Aol Ventures, whose parent company, Aol, also owns HuffPost, is an investor in Solve Media.

Solve Media's newest idea is simple: Users can skip pre-roll ads and get straight to their video by typing a few magic words into a box and pressing enter. Those magic words? The slogan, jingle, or "brand message" of the company whose advertisement they're currently watching.

In other words, if you're faced with (hypothetically) a 30-second GMC ad before a YouTube video, you can type in "We are professional grade" and be done with it.

If a Marshall's ad pops up before footage of last night's debate flub, type in "Never pay full price for fabulous" and get to the gaffes.

If Apple bombards you with a Siri ad when you're just trying to watch the slam dunk of the night, type in "Call me Rock God" and get to the dunk-age.

Solve Media's "pre-roll insurance technology" rolls out immediately with pilot partners AOL, Expedia, General Motors and more. Peter Kafka of AllThingsD points out that this is not Solve Media's first attempt at making web users input ad slogans: The company also launched an advertising product that replaced CAPTCHAs -- those random numbers or letters you occasionally have to type in to prove you're human when signing up for an account or leaving a comment on a website -- with branded messages.

Solve Media joins other high-profile advertisers searching for ways to improve advertising on online videos. Streaming behemoth Hulu rolled out its Ad Swap in October 2011, which allows users to choose which companies' advertisement they'd like to watch along with their web videos; advertising group AdoTube unveiled the "Polite Pre-Roll" in September 2010, which let users "minimize" the pre-roll ad and go straight to the video, with a pop-up reminding them to watch the advertisement later.

For advertisers, the stakes are high. A report from AccuStream Research found that advertisers spent about $1.56 billion in pre-roll advertising in 2011, a number expected to increase every year into 2014. Solve Media (who -- caveat! -- also has a stake in proving that ineffective pre-roll advertising is costing companies money) also estimates that companies are wasting up to $33 per second on "skipped or ignored" pre-roll ads in the United States; since YouTube began allowing its users to skip pre-roll ads, meanwhile, it has seen average skip rates of around 70 percent, and up to 80 percent, according to 2011 research by YouTube cited by Solve.

For consumers, meanwhile: Well, the stakes are low. We just want our video to start, right? To that end, web entrepreneurs have been waging a battle against online ads for years, recently setting their sights on video advertisements. Firefox add-on AdBlock Video, for example, was developed solely to block video ads and can stop pre-roll ads on YouTube, CNN, Fox News and the video players of the four major networks; the AdBlock Plus extension for Google Chrome added video ad blocking capabilities in September 2011. Hulu fought back against these extensions later that month, changing its site and rendering the ever-popular AdBlock ineffective at blocking its pre-roll ads.

That defensive change in Hulu's website is indicative of just how important these pre-roll ads are to both advertisers and the websites that depend on them for revenue. And with the war between advertisers (Watch our ads!) and web surfers (Just show us the video!) raging on, Solve Media is seeking a middle ground: We'll show you the video immediately, but you have to type in this advertising slogan first. If they are successful, you can practice typing "Call me Rock God" as quickly as you can starting right now.

You can try out this technology for yourself -- by which we mean, you can go watch an advertisement using type-to-skip -- at Solve Media's website here. And for an overview of the technology itself, and why it might be useful for both advertisers and consumers, check out this snazzy video that Solve Media put together below:

Solving the Pre-Roll Blues from Solve Media on Vimeo.

Mobile World Congress, the annual celebración de los smartphones in Barcelona, Spain, has come to an end. Almost 70,000 people attended the tech convention, where 1,500 tech firms showed off their latest smartphones, tablets, mobile apps and software. It was just three companies, however, that together made the biggest splash in the MWC piscina: HTC, Samsung and Nokia.

Sure, Microsoft sent PC users racing to grab the free Consumer Preview of Windows 8 (there were over a million downloads of the Win8 Consumer Preview on the first day of availability alone), and Google Chairman Eric Schmidt captivated the crowds with his wide-ranging rant against Internet censorship (despite being mistakenly interrupted -- ahem -- by the announcement of an invitation to a certain Apple event). But it was HTC, Nokia and Samsung that told the most compelling, and most controversial, stories at Mobile World Congress. Nokia and Samsung both showed off innovative and divisive gadgets, unveiling a smartphone with a 41-megapixel camera and a 10-inch tablet whose main selling point is a stylus, respectively. HTC, meanwhile, announced a total reversal of course, revealing that from now on, all of its smartphones would be united under one single brand name: All For One And One For All, as a trio of literary swashbucklers might have said.

Which of these three musketeers of smartphones and tablets (and phablets) had the best, most exciting, most game-changing 2012 Mobile World Congress? Read on to find out more about the Nokia 808 Pureview, the Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1, and the HTC One series, all of which have the potential to transform what our mobile gadgets are capable of in the future, and shift the landscape of handheld devices as we know it:

As much as I love it when one company viciously pummels another company's product in a slickly-made advertising spot, I had to pause when I saw Motorola's attack ad on Siri the other day. In case you missed it, Motorola has now unleashed four of these flame-throwing videos, all of which show Android's Voice Actions on a Motorola phone sprinting past Siri on an iPhone 4S as they race to see who can complete four basic voice-activated tasks the fastest.

The Motorola phone, and Android Voice Actions, won each time, their victories met with the sustained cheers of a canned applause track that was, at best, lukewarm about the results (By the way: Seriously, Motorola? You just defeated the top-selling iPhone 4S in a head-to-head competition against its most prized feature! Can't you find a fainting lady sound effect, screaming cheerleaders, an Andrew W.K. guitar riff -- something to get the blood pumping a little bit??).

Anyway, because of all the disclaimers, fine print, and rampant accusations of video doctoring in the comments sections of tech blogs across the Internet, I decided to try replicating the Motorola vs. Siri ad word-for-word on my own Motorola and Apple phones.

The video below is the result. It was filmed in one take, and on the first take. Please excuse the slight rattling sound toward the middle of the test; I blew most of my production budget on hair and makeup.

One final disclaimer: I was unable to track down an Atrix 4G, so I was forced to use my Motorola Droid X instead. Please insert complaints about how this invalidates the test in the comments section below.

Also, for those who haven't seen the original advertisement, you can check it out below.

And now, away we go. Which is really faster: Android Voice Actions on the Motorola Droid X or Siri on the iPhone 4S?

My take:

Motorola's take:

I think the video, and the results therein, speak for themselves. Android's Voice Actions is simply much faster at processing, transcribing and enacting voice commands. The draw of Siri, of course, is that it attempts to understand natural language and can act on a wider variety of prompts than Voice Actions. For example, if you want to tell your Android phone to call Dorothy, you have to specifically say the words "Call Dorothy Foster." With Siri, you can say "Call Dorothy Foster" or "Can you call Dorothy Foster for me?" or "I need to talk to Dorothy Foster," and the iPhone will dial Dorothy's number for you.

I also did speed tests on the Motorola Droid Razr Maxx, the Samsung Galaxy Nexus, and the HTC Evo 4G, and all three easily outpaced the iPhone 4S. At this point, then, the choice between Siri and Android's Voice Actions seems like a trade-off between speed and functionality: Either memorize the commands and go really fast, or speak naturally and prepare to wait a little bit.

Every week the numerous blogs covering the machinations of the Apple empire float tons of unconfirmed rumors, futuristic speculation and questionably-sourced reports on what the company might be unveiling in the near or distant future. Let's take a look back at what the Mac blogs were excited about during the week of February 5 - 11. Check out our last edition of Apple rumors here, and for all the latest follow me on Twitter.

Ladies and gentlemen, prepare to be horrified.

There is now a plastic surgeon in Northern Virginia offering a "FaceTime Facelift," a medical procedure that, very specifically, aims to improve the way you look when video-chatting using the FaceTime app on the iPhone.

Yes, this is a real thing, and yes, you can get your own FaceTime Facelift right now. If you're afraid your neck looks flabby or fatty during video-chats, you can just drive on down to see Dr. Robert K. Sigal, a plastic surgeon at The Austin-Weston Center for Cosmetic Surgery in Virginia: The doctor has invented a procedure, which he has dubbed the "FaceTime Facelift," that ensures that your unsightly neck flab never embarrasses you in front of your FaceTime friends again.

As the doctor notes in a press release, hating the way you look while FaceTime-ing is a totally common complaint, and one that can be fixed with a simple nip-and-tuck:

Patients come in with their iPhones and show me how they look on [Apple’s video calling application] FaceTime. The angle at which the phone is held, with the caller looking downward into the camera, really captures any heaviness, fullness and sagging of the face and neck. People say ‘I never knew I looked like that! I need to do something!’ I’ve started calling it the ‘FaceTime Facelift’ effect. And we’ve developed procedures to specifically address it.

Dr. Sigal came up with the iSurgery idea after his wife bought her iPhone 4 in 2011.

"She got an iPhone-- I guess around 6 months ago, 8 months ago -- and she didnt like the way she looked while she talked on her iPhone," Dr. Sigal says, in a promotional video. "It tends to draw their chin in a little bit and accentuates any fullness they have in this [chin] area."

Now, the FaceTime Facelift is essentially a special kind of neck-lift. What makes it special, you ask? Well, let's talk about how neck-lifts are normally done, and how they're done with the FaceTime Facelift.

Normally, you see, the surgical incision for a neck-lift goes under the chin, as Dr. Sigal explains in a promotional video. This is a problem for FaceTime users, of course, because if you're pointing the iPhone up at yourself, the scar from the incision would be totally visible -- Everyone knows you got a neck-lift! The FaceTime Facelift, meanwhile, moves the incision point to under the ears, which is totally invisible to your FaceTime partner! Now no one will know how superficial you are -- at least, not just by looking at you when you're talking to them on FaceTime.

Fun side note: A friend at CNN told me that one way to avoid the neck flab issue on FaceTime entirely is to point the iPhone's camera straight on and then to point your chin down, making the neck invisible. It's an old Larry King trick, she assured me, and works well for anyone concerned about how they look on their smartphone's front-facing camera.

If that trick doesn't work for you, however, there's always the FaceTime Facelift. Here's Dr. Sigal himself pitching his procedure. (We're not sure if the video was shot on an iPhone camera, but let us here note that his neck looks fantastic.)

WATCH:

THE SAMSUNG GALAXY NOTE: OVERCOMPENSATING FOR SOMETHING?

Any review of the Galaxy Note -- just like any discussion of Dirk Diggler or Ron Jeremy -- must begin and end with its size.

The Galaxy Note has roughly the shape and dimensions of a flattened black Pop Tart. It is bigger than your cat's face. It has been suggested, by a pair of Internet pranksters, that the Note could be used in a pinch as a basketball backboard, a bedside lamp or a surfboard. I would add to that list: bulletproof vest, replacement microwave door, makeshift air hockey tabletop and portable runway for small aircrafts making emergency landings.

Yes, it's fun (and easy!) to mock the Galaxy Note's enormity. Though Samsung is publicly pushing the gargantuan Note as an Android smartphone, it is often referred to in the tech press as a phablet: half-Android-phone, half-Android-tablet, all-humongoid mobile Android device, complete with stylus. The display is precisely 5.3-inches diagonal: Think of it as almost exactly halfway in between the 3.5-inch iPhone and the 7-inch Kindle Fire or BlackBerry PlayBook, and you've got your Galaxy Note.

So, yes, the Galaxy Note is one huge phone, probably the biggest smartphone you've ever laid eyes on. But is it worth its $299 asking price? To find out, let us attempt to answer the question posed by an old poet (I believe it is Eliot? Or perhaps Spenser): Is it the size of the boat, or the motion in the ocean?

The iPhone 4S and the Samsung Galaxy Note, dancing side-by-side.

WHAT WOULD A FANBOY SAY IS THE BEST THING ABOUT THE GALAXY NOTE?

"Size matters. Name one thing you do on your phone that doesn't immediately become easier on a larger screen. It doesn't matter who owns the patent on pinch-to-zoom -- I'll never have to zoom again with this baby. Watching movies, reading books, looking at websites, sending text messages, writing emails, checking in on Foursquare -- all of this stuff is much, much easier to do when you're not cramping your thumbs together to get at a tiny keyboard or some ridiculously small icon or link on a webpage. Ever heard of the Fat Fingers problem for smartphones? My fingers could be the size of double-stuffed Cheez Doodles and I'd still be able to use this thing with 99 percent accuracy.

"Also, speaking of doodles: Check out my stylus. Jealous? Look, but don't touch, friend-o. I can draw doodles, take real notes, scribble genitalia on almost anything. Try to do that with your phone: You can't, because you don't have a digital pen. The stylus was cool and then it wasn't and now it's cool again -- My S-Pen is like the Electric Light Orchestra of smartphone accessories."

"And do you know what won't bring you down, Bruce? The display. So bright! So colorful! So wonderfully dazzling and vivid is every image on the Note -- especially each illustration and animation coming from the MS Paint-like Memo app -- AND all on that 5.3-inch screen! What is not to love, I ask you? What could you possibly not love about this phone?"

WHAT WOULD A H8R (HATER) SAY IS THE WORST THING ABOUT THIS PHONE?

"Hey, newsflash, this is Christiane Amanpour with an exclusive report from in front of your face: You look like an idiot. Do you have any idea how silly you look holding that thing up to your ear? Do you really need a phone that can only be held in one hand by people who can also palm a fully-inflated basketball? Do you realize how silly that looks in your pocket? It looks like you shoved an uneaten s'more down your pants.

"Nah, I'm just kidding -- there are benefits of having such an unwieldy, unnecessarily ginormous phone. At least now when you're driving to work you can put it in the passenger seat and take the carpool lane."

From left to right: The Kindle Fire tablet, The Samsung Galaxy Note phablet, and The iPhone 4S smartphone

SO, WHO IS RIGHT: THE FANBOYS OR THE H8RS?

I have to side with the H8Rs, but not for the reasons you might think.

I do not side with the H8Rs because of the battery life: The battery life, despite the phone featuring a huge Super HD AMOLED screen and power-sucking 4G LTE, was surprisingly solid. With 4G turned on, the battery lasts from 9 a.m to 5 p.m. without a charge (and then some) quite easily, and compares quite favorably with competing (much smaller) smartphones; the Galaxy Note clearly inherited its battery life genes from the tablet side of the family.

Nor do I side with the H8Rs because of the phone's weight: Most people immediately assume, when they see the Galaxy Note, that it must weigh as much as an anchor: It simply does not. It's about an ounce and a half heavier than the iPhone 4S: The difference is really negligible. In fact, the Galaxy Note feels practically feathery in your hand and/or hands.

And finally: It's not even the Galaxy Note's elephantine size that ruins it for me. (Perhaps it is because I'm either stationary, reclining, or outright recumbent for such a huge majority of my days, using my phone while sitting at a desk or lying on a couch.) For most of my time with the Note, a 5.3-inch phablet meant easier typing, easier-to-read webpages, and easier-to-watch videos. Returning to my iPhone, and even my Galaxy Nexus, was frustrating after a week with the Note.

(Yes, there were times -- especially out on the town -- when I was self-conscious about pulling what must have appeared to be a gigantic glowing Bible from my pocket. If you own the Note, prepare for everyone to stare slack-jawed at your phone when they see it for the first time. Yes, you do look ridiculous when talking on it; frankly, I'm not much of a talker, so this was never an issue.)

The Galaxy Note, a smartphone that, at the very least, will never be confused for any other phone.

No, it was not the size, nor the weight, nor the battery drainage. No, no, and no. It's not even the awful pre-loaded AT&T/Samsung flavor of Android Gingerbread that comes standard with the Note, which ships with a default SEVEN homescreens and far too many bloated, pre-loaded apps. (Do we really need AllShare, AT&T Code Scanner, AT&T Family Map, AT&T Messages, AT&T Navigator, AT&T Ready2Go, Kies Air, Live TV, Media Hub, myAT&T, Polaris Office, Qik Lite, AND a YellowPages search bar widget taking up space when we take a pristine phone out of its box? Does anyone use these things?)

Rather, what disappointed me about the Galaxy Note was the surprising, almost counterintuitive lag of the touchscreen. The Galaxy Note suffers from a noticeable touchscreen responsiveness problem, a pause from when you touch an icon or a link, or press your fingers down on the keyboard, or run the stylus over the screen. (CNET also noted a "delayed response.") This lag is counterintuitive, of course, because Samsung touts the Galaxy Note as a jotter, a scribbler, a note-taker, an artist's easel -- all of which it struggles at.

Now, I never really found any occasion to use the stylus or any of the built-in apps offered for jotting or scribbling or note-taking, but touching the screen with the stylus or my fingers was always disappointing. There are much smoother, lag-free options for smartphones out there, from Apple's iPhone to Nokia's Windows Phone; heck, even Samsung itself makes a very responsive smartphone called the Galaxy Nexus (which also, I might add, is mercifully free of the bloat-y apps mentioned above).

I don't know what is causing this lag (The processor is dual-core 1.4 GHz, which should be up to the task). Amazon managed to fix the loudly bemoaned touchscreen responsiveness issues on its Kindle Fire with an OS update about a month after initial release, and hopefully Samsung will be able to, too. Until it does, I cannot with any conviction recommend the Note to anyone -- even those who have been exceptionally well-endowed with large hands, those who find their iPhones getting lost in the folds of their palm fat, and those who find themselves squinting at their screens even with the font enlarged as far as it can go.

There is a niche market that a phone of this size seems destined to find: Smartphone users with large pockets -- or, as was suggested to me by a Samsung spokeswoman, a pocketbook or handbag -- who don't want to carry around both a tablet and a phone could fall in love with a slim phablet with a beautiful display like the Note. Until Samsung can deliver a simplified, speedier experience for these users, however, the massive Galaxy Note comes up a wee bit short.

THE CAPTAIN GADGET FACT SHEET FOR THE SAMSUNG GALAXY NOTE

Carrier & Cost: AT&T, $299 with two-year contract
Display: 5.3-inch, Super AMOLED
Weight: 6.28 ounces
Wait: This thing is really big.
Dimensions: 5.78 x 3.27 x 0.38 inches
Types of Pants It Will Fit In: Carpenter, Cargo, MC Hammer
Operating System: Android 2.3.5 Gingerbread
Operating Table?: Could serve as one in pinch
Network: 4G LTE
Battery Life (stated): 26 hours talk time, 40 days stand-by
Fun Thing You Can Do If The Battery Dies: Hollow out the center of the Note and use the Note's shell as a coffin
CPU: 1.4 GHz dual-core
Memory: 1GB RAM
Storage: 16 or 32GB internal; MicroSD card slot allows for 32GB additional storage
Additional Storage : I was able to stack about 800 Nacho chips, including cheese and salsa, on the Note's surface
Camera: 8MP rear-facing with flash; front-facing 2MP
Noise Most People Will Make When You Pull It Out Of Your Pocket For The First Time: HAHAHAHAHA
Special Feature: "S-Pen" stylus for note-taking, doodling, drawing genitals on things
Phone It Is, To Samsung's Credit, Absolutely Nothing Like: The iPhone

Last weekend, a friend of mine (we'll call her "Tiffany," because her name is Tiffany) posted on Facebook that she was off to buy an iPad. "Finally getting one!" she wrote, and her choice was affirmed by dozens of Likes on her status and comments like "!!!!!" and "wooooooo." One of Tiffany's pals, in fact, was so excited that he could only manage an "OMGGGGGG," being so shocked that he was apparently transformed into a polytheist.

Well, I hate to be the bear of bad news here, so to speak, but Tiffany: There is no worse time than right now to buy an iPad.

This goes for the rest of you, too, and not just friends of mine who happen to be named Tiffany: Unless you really, really need one, you should NOT buy an iPad this month. Don't do it. There will almost certainly be a new iPad announced on March 7, and you are going to feel somewhere between silly and stupid if you spend $500 on an iPad 2 when you could have gotten a superior iPad 3 (or iPad 4G, or iPad 2S, or whatever it's called) for the same price or less if you had waited a few weeks.

At this point, we know enough about the release timeframe of the next iPad that paying full price for an iPad 2 is just a foolish way to part with your money. Unless you're also buying a $131,000 smartphone this February, wait until March rolls in to get your iPad.

Here's why: