There’s an old and very accurate adage that says the second you drive a car, it begins losing value the second you drive it out of the showroom. It also immediately becomes an ongoing expense. The biggest sign of that expense is the number of trips to the gas station. Most of us tend to tend to just pay for the gas, regular maintenance, and monthly payments and not think about whether we’re getting the best gas mileage possible.

Tracking fuel economy and other car expense data can ultimately save you a fair amount of money. Tracking gas mileage and common maintenance tasks can help you optimize when to have your oil changed for maximum oil life and fuel economy, encourage you to check your tire pressure, and even plan more fuel-efficient routes for your daily commute and other regular trips. All of that can add up to real savings over the long-term.

I test a lot of gadgets, and so I inevitably have stacks of USB cables left over. I’m pretty sure that a geek like you also has more than his or her fair share of wires. But I’ll be that none of them is as handy as the Twig, a bendable, pose-able iPhone cable that doubles as a tripod.

Owning an iPhone is a great thing, but the plans sure aren’t. Favoring the carriers more than the consumer, up until now, if you wanted to use an iPhone in the United States, you had to sign yourself up to have your bank account drained for nearly $100 a month for the next twenty-four months.

Last week’s announcement that Cricket Wireless was entering the iPhone game radically changes the carrier landscape in the United States, at least as far as we customers are concerned. The prepaid carrier isn’t some regional oddjob: they service $7 million customers in all fifty states. For $55 a month, you get unlimited voice, unlimited data, unlimited texts… and no contract. The only rub? You have to lay out $500 for the iPhone up front.

It’s worth it. I decided to sit down with my calculator and figure out how much users can save if they get their next iPhone through Cricket instead of one of AT&T, Verizon or Sprint. The answer? A LOT. Here’s the data.

Unlimited data plans are becoming scarce options for smartphone and tablet users. Sprint remains the only carrier to offer an unlimited data plans. Most Verizon and AT&T customers, however, need to make do with tiered data plans. Tiered data plans get more cash from customers and deter customers from overloading mobile networks with excessive data use.

As a result, a lot of us try to avoid excessive data use by limiting the types and amount of content that we access when using a device’s 3G or LTE connection. That, in turn, blocks many content companies from capturing ad or subscription revenue from mobile users. That reality is leading major content companies to complain to the carriers and which AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson recently said may lead to “toll free” data plans.

Along with Instapaper, the iPad gets another big app update today. Comic Zeal — long my favorite comic-book reader — has gotten Retina support for the new iPad, along with a few interface tweaks which makes organizing your comics easier and sometimes a little less confusing.

Newer Macs, both portable and desktop, come with keyboards that have shortcut keys on the top row, where the F keys are. These F keys allow you to increase or decrease the brightness of the display, control iTunes playback, and raise and lower the volume.

You may also know that these features have associated preference panes in System Preferences as well. You can find them by opening System Preferences, which can be found in the Applications folder. Then you can click on the specific Preference pane you need, like the one for brightness or Mission Control. There’s also a way to get directly to these preference panes with a keyboard shortcut.

According to pre-WWDC scuttlebutt, iOS 6 won’t be a huge departure from what we’ve got now, at least when it comes to stand out system features. What we will see, however, is a total revision of Apple’s core apps, most noticeable in Apple’s totally overhauled, Google-free Maps app, along with a sexy new silver UI.

What will it all look like in action, though, on the new, possibly elongated iPhone 5, when it ships in September or October? Over on the Apple Core forums, user gizmosachin created some nice mockups of what all the pieces will look like when glued together.

According to the latest data from comScore, Android might have peaked. Meanwhile, iOS is still going strong.

New smartphone users — individuals trading in their own feature phones for their first touchscreen, Android’s core constituency — are at their lowest level since 2010: just 300k new smartphone users a week in the last quarter, compared to 1.5 million in November.

It gets worse for Google. Android added the fewest number of new users than it has since 2009. It’s effectively an all-time low for Android growth, which, as Horace Dediu points out, equals four straight months of decline.

The friendly skies have been cozying up to the iPad for awhile now. First, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration allowed pilots to replace hundreds of pounds of flight manuals and log books for Apple’s tablet, and now a new airline is promising to save fuel, increase profits and make their customers happier by phasing out the in-flight entertainment system in favor of a fleet of iPads.

Instapaper just got yet another update (developer Marco Arment seems to be on roll these last couple of months) and it brings a very neat new feature – when you arrive at any chosen location, Instapaper will automatically update your articles in the background. This should mean that never again will you be without your latest saved articles when you rush of to catch a bus.

It happens to all of us. You’re at your computer, ready to work, and you’ve forgotten your password. What should you do? Don’t worry, all hope isn’t lost. In this video, I’ll show you how you can reset your account password in OS X Lion, in just a few easy steps.

It’s the future, already, right? While we may not have flying cars or jetpacks, we do have computers ad mobile devices that we can speak to and that can speak to us.

Here are a few ways to make your Mac speak to you in a variety of ways. Make it read books to you right from the Kindle app, change text documents into audio files for easy transport, and even let you know when your Terminal session is finished. If that isn’t enough, we’ll even show you how to get better voices to do all this with, even in different languages. So settle in and let us know what you think in the comments below.

If you’ve ever wanted to build apps on the iPad, then keep reading, because we’ve searched high and low for a solid iPad development course…and we’ve finally found a great match. Cult of Mac Deals is offering an informative iPad programming video course is amped up with more than 9.5 valuable hours of iPad development training.

And we’re offering it to you for a limited time for only $49.

Kicking off this week’s must-have apps roundup is a beautifully simple timer app for the iPhone that could mean you never need to set timers manually again. There’s also a terrific app for beaming your photographs to almost any display — without additional hardware or software. Plus lots more.

Summer time is travel time for a lot of folks here in the US and abroad. In the US, at least, it’s a time for families with kids home from school to head out into the great wide world and see places, people, and resorts across the country.

Traveling with an iPhone is inevitable. If you’re heading abroad or staying in your own country, there are tips, tricks, and potential pitfalls when using your calling and data plans. There are lots of apps, cases, and extra power solutions out there, as well. We’ve spent a little time figuring some of this out so you don’t have to. Keep reading for some great tips on using your iPhone when you’re traveling. As always, let us know what you think in the comments, as well – we love a good conversation.

MG Siegler posted a scoop on TechCrunch yesterday about the “relationship status” of Apple and Facebook.

Now the echo chamber is talking like Facebook is suddenly BFFs with Apple, similar to Apple’s relationship with Twitter.

That’s not true, and would be bad news if it was true.

Facebook is a lousy partner for Apple. Here’s why.

Opening this week’s must-have games roundup is a stunning first-person shooter that has you protecting planet Earth from invasion from the “Xenos,” who are on a mission to infect every civilian that gets in their way. We also have a crazy dual-stick shooter that has made the leap from Xbox LIVE to your pocket, an update to Angry Birds Space, and lots more.

The future of the ukulele is here with Futulele! I’ve been playing around with this app from Amidio this afternoon and it’s great. It’s the first app as far as I know that lets you play with both your iPad and iPhone simultaneously! Here’s a video demonstration….

It’s June 1st, and that means Apple’s deadline for when Mac developers need to have their apps sandboxed has come to pass. After months and months of extending the deadline to iron out technical details, all apps submitted to the Mac App Store must now obey Apple’s sandboxing requirements. All existing Mac App Store apps cannot be updated until they meet the guidelines.

While sandboxing will mean safer and simpler Mac apps, there are some negative effects developers have to consider.

Those MADFINGER guys are at it again! After their blockbuster third person shooter SHADOWGUN essentially became the poster child for console quality gaming on mobile, they’ve gone ahead and teased us with their next project: DEAD TRIGGER. MADFINGER has worked hard at optimizing their games to showcase the graphical prowess of NVIDIA’s Tegra 3 quad-core mobile processor as well as supporting iOS’s new iPad, and DEAD TRIGGER is no different. Featuring:

Google sent out invites to certain publications this morning for a mysterious Maps event that will be taking place on Wednesday, June 6th. With the plea to come see the “next dimension of Google Maps,” the company plans to show a “sneak peek” at upcoming features for its mapping technology.

Sure, the event sounds interesting, but the fact that Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference is taking place 5 days later really adds fuel to the fire.

A decade ago, your mobile phone number may not have meant much. In the days before number porting, mobile phone numbers were transient. If you switched carriers or moved, you got a new number.

Things are a bit different today. You can take your number with you from one mobile carrier to another, you can port it VOIP services like Vonage, or forwarding services like Google Voice, and you can even port it to a landline phone. Your phone number, much like your personal email address or Twitter account, belongs to you for as long as you want to keep it.

That can create a problem for companies implementing BYOD programs. If an employees bring their own phones, they also bring their own numbers. For many employees, particularly those that are mobile professionals, their mobile number is the go-to number to reach them. When such an employee leaves that company, what happens to his or her phone number?

Apple CEO Tim Cook recently told the world to “stay tuned” to what his company has planned with Facebook. The social network has been rumored to appear in iOS for years, but 2012 looks to be the year Apple and Facebook finally join forces.

iOS 6, internally codenamed “Sundance,” will feature Facebook integration, reports MG Siegler of TechCrunch. The integration will be similar to the way Twitter is currently implemented in iOS 5, although Apple has yet to iron out the kinks in how sharing will work.

Last week’s release of the much anticipated Absinthe 2.0 jailbreak didn’t just benefit iPhone and iPad owners: it also gives a new lease on life to the second-gen Apple TV. Now Firecore has released a major update to their aTV Flash software, and the new goes far to supercharge your set-top box with great new functionality the stock firmware doesn’t offer.

Apple is hell bent on detonating their MobileMe service on June 30th. If you’re still using it, they want you out, and now. Earlier this morning Apple sent email notices to customers who still use MobileMe, iWeb, and iDisk instead of iCloud and told them to pack their lovely treasures and head over to Me.com before everything gets lost in a digital fireball of destruction in 30days.