Selling Secrets of Phone Users to Advertisers

Now, smartphones know everything — where people go, what they search for, what they buy, what they do for fun and when they go to bed. That is why advertisers, and tech companies like Google and Facebook, are finding new, sophisticated ways to track people on their phones and reach them with individualized, hypertargeted ads. And they are doing it without cookies, those tiny bits of code that follow users around the Internet, because cookies don’t work on mobile devices.

Privacy advocates fear that consumers do not realize just how much of their private information is on their phones and how much is made vulnerable simply by downloading and using apps, searching the mobile Web or even just going about daily life with a phone in your pocket. And this new focus on tracking users through their devices and online habits comes against the backdrop of a spirited public debate on privacy and government surveillance.

On Wednesday, the National Security Agency confirmed it had collected data from cellphone towers in 2010 and 2011 to locate Americans’ cellphones, though it said it never used the information.

“People don’t understand tracking, whether it’s on the browser or mobile device, and don’t have any visibility into the practices going on,” said Jennifer King, who studies privacy at the University of California, Berkeley and has advised the Federal Trade Commission on mobile tracking. “Even as a tech professional, it’s often hard to disentangle what’s happening.”

Drawbridge is one of several start-ups that have figured out how to follow people without cookies, and to determine that a cellphone, work computer, home computer and tablet belong to the same person, even if the devices are in no way connected. Before, logging onto a new device presented advertisers with a clean slate.

“We’re observing your behaviors and connecting your profile to mobile devices,” said Eric Rosenblum, chief operating officer at Drawbridge. But don’t call it tracking. “Tracking is a dirty word,” he said.

Drawbridge, founded by a former Google data scientist, says it has matched 1.5 billion devices this way, allowing it to deliver mobile ads based on Web sites the person has visited on a computer. If you research a Hawaiian vacation on your work desktop, you could see a Hawaii ad that night on your personal cellphone.

For advertisers, intimate knowledge of users has long been the promise of mobile phones. But only now are numerous mobile advertising services that most people have never heard of — like Drawbridge, Flurry, Velti and SessionM — exploiting that knowledge, largely based on monitoring the apps we use and the places we go. This makes it ever harder for mobile users to escape the gaze of private companies, whether insurance firms or shoemakers.

Ultimately, the tech giants, whose principal business is selling advertising, stand to gain. Advertisers using the new mobile tracking methods include Ford Motor, American Express, Fidelity, Expedia, Quiznos and Groupon.

“In the old days of ad targeting, we give them a list of sites and we’d say, ‘Women 25 to 45,’ “ said David Katz, the former general manager of mobile at Groupon and now at Fanatics, the sports merchandise online retailer. “In the new age, we basically say, ‘Go get us users.’ “

In those old days — just last year — digital advertisers relied mostly on cookies. But cookies do not attach to apps, which is why they do not work well on mobile phones and tablets. Cookies generally do work on mobile browsers, but do not follow people from a phone browser to a computer browser. The iPhone’s mobile Safari browser blocks third-party cookies altogether.

Even on PCs, cookies have lost much of their usefulness to advertisers, largely because of cookie blockers.

Responding to this problem, the Interactive Advertising Bureau started a group to explore the future of the cookie and alternatives, calling current online advertising “a lose-lose-lose situation for advertisers, consumers, publishers and platforms.” Most recently, Google began considering creating an anonymous identifier tied to its Chrome browser that could help target ads based on user Web browsing history.

For many advertisers, cookies are becoming irrelevant anyway because they want to reach people on their mobile devices.

Yet advertising on phones has its limits.

Drug Agents Use Vast Phone Trove, Eclipsing N.S.A.’s

The Hemisphere Project, a partnership between federal and local drug officials and AT&T that has not previously been reported, involves an extremely close association between the government and the telecommunications giant.

The government pays AT&T to place its employees in drug-fighting units around the country. Those employees sit alongside Drug Enforcement Administration agents and local detectives and supply them with the phone data from as far back as 1987.

The project comes to light at a time of vigorous public debate over the proper limits on government surveillance and on the relationship between government agencies and communications companies. It offers the most significant look to date at the use of such large-scale data for law enforcement, rather than for national security.

The scale and longevity of the data storage appears to be unmatched by other government programs, including the N.S.A.’s gathering of phone call logs under the Patriot Act. The N.S.A. stores the data for nearly all calls in the United States, including phone numbers and time and duration of calls, for five years.

Hemisphere covers every call that passes through an AT&T switch — not just those made by AT&T customers — and includes calls dating back 26 years, according to Hemisphere training slides bearing the logo of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy. Some four billion call records are added to the database every day, the slides say; technical specialists say a single call may generate more than one record. Unlike the N.S.A. data, the Hemisphere data includes information on the locations of callers.

The slides were given to The New York Times by Drew Hendricks, a peace activist in Port Hadlock, Wash. He said he had received the PowerPoint presentation, which is unclassified but marked “Law enforcement sensitive,” in response to a series of public information requests to West Coast police agencies.

The program was started in 2007, according to the slides, and has been carried out in great secrecy.

“All requestors are instructed to never refer to Hemisphere in any official document,” one slide says. A search of the Nexis database found no reference to the program in news reports or Congressional hearings.

The Obama administration acknowledged the extraordinary scale of the Hemisphere database and the unusual embedding of AT&T employees in government drug units in three states.

But they said the project, which has proved especially useful in finding criminals who discard cellphones frequently to thwart government tracking, employed routine investigative procedures used in criminal cases for decades and posed no novel privacy issues.

Crucially, they said, the phone data is stored by AT&T, and not by the government as in the N.S.A. program. It is queried for phone numbers of interest mainly using what are called “administrative subpoenas,” those issued not by a grand jury or a judge but by a federal agency, in this case the D.E.A.

Brian Fallon, a Justice Department spokesman, said in a statement that “subpoenaing drug dealers’ phone records is a bread-and-butter tactic in the course of criminal investigations.”

Mr. Fallon said that “the records are maintained at all times by the phone company, not the government,” and that Hemisphere “simply streamlines the process of serving the subpoena to the phone company so law enforcement can quickly keep up with drug dealers when they switch phone numbers to try to avoid detection.”

He said that the program was paid for by the D.E.A. and the White House drug policy office but that the cost was not immediately available.

Officials said four AT&T employees are now working in what is called the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area program, which brings together D.E.A. and local investigators — two in the program’s Atlanta office and one each in Houston and Los Angeles.

Daniel C. Richman, a law professor at Columbia, said he sympathized with the government’s argument that it needs such voluminous data to catch criminals in the era of disposable cellphones.

“Is this a massive change in the way the government operates? No,” said Mr. Richman, who worked as a federal drug prosecutor in Manhattan in the early 1990s. “Actually you could say that it’s a desperate effort by the government to catch up.”

Bits Blog: Samsung Throws Another Jumbo Phone Against the Wall

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Bits: I’m Still Waiting for My Phone to Become My Wallet

A truly mobile wallet — one that would let you easily pay for restaurant meals, subway rides or beers at a bar with a quick wave of your cellphone — has long been described as imminent. But it remains elusive. Some innovations have begun to bridge the gap, but most have been a disappointment or have not yet worked well enough for mainstream adoption.

In 2012, Square, which makes a credit card reader that can be plugged into an iPhone or iPad, worked on a credit-cardless system that let people pay for goods without ever pulling out their wallets or phones. When Square users walk into a store in its network, a Square-enabled register shows pictures of their faces, which are used as authentication for payment. But the app can be awkward to use.

Last summer, Apple introduced Passbook, a digital system for storing boarding passes, movie tickets, loyalty cards and gift cards on the iPhone. But it doesn’t do much beyond that, at least not yet. Google worked with major credit card companies and banks to create its Wallet app, which lets people pay for items at some stores by waving their phones but is available only for Android devices. Visa offers two digital wallets, payWave and V.me, but I’ve never seen anyone use them or signed up myself.  And the major mobile carriers in the United States banded together to form Isis, a mobile payments network, which has yet to roll out nationally.

Starbucks has arguably had the most success with the pay-by-phone idea in the United States. The company has persuaded millions of people to download an application that can be used to pay for their lattes. It works like a digital gift card — but only at Starbucks, obviously, so it’s limiting. (The company also invested $25 million in Square and is incorporating Square’s technology in its stores.)

When I complain to friends and colleagues about the inconvenience of fumbling around for my wallet when I’m shopping — and say I wish I could just use my phone instead — they often give me bewildered looks.

Apparently, that’s because paying with a phone today is rarely easier than paying with a credit card. Paying via phone often involves a series of awkward swipes and taps to start the transaction, and the process can be disrupted by spotty wireless connections, low batteries or other electronic hiccups.

“No one wants to be the guy holding up the grocery line at 6 p.m.,” said Joshua Reich, one of the founders of Simple, a banking start-up company that gives people free checking accounts and offers them data-rich analyses of their spending and saving habits. “You don’t want to look like that dork, the guy riding a Segway.”

Jan Dawson, an analyst at Ovum who covers the mobile industry, agreed.

“Mobile payments are trying to solve a problem that doesn’t exist for most people,” he said. “You don’t hear people moaning about how hard it is to pay with their credit cards or debit cards.”

The biggest problem for paying by cellphone is that so many kinds of businesses are competing to offer services. Companies as varied as phone carriers, banks, credit card companies and technology start-ups have had plans to get into the mobile payment business, but many are locking horns over who can profit the most, Mr. Dawson said.

“Everyone wants to be the primary payments provider,” he said.

Wireless carriers, desperate to bolster their revenue, are reluctant to hand over potentially lucrative streams to companies like Apple and Google, which already make billions from devices and the software that runs on them. Banks and credit card companies are also rolling out mobile checking services and applications, both to impress their younger users and to keep a hand in a game where billions of dollars are at stake annually, largely from the endless parade of small fees racked up with each purchase. And industry heavyweights like PayPal and Groupon are also scrambling to get their own offerings into the market.

It’s tough to persuade major retailers to spend money to work with Google Wallet or Apple’s Passbook, for example, when so many other options are still on the table. And what is popular today might be outdated in a few months.

Part of the reason that Starbucks’ own app works so well is that the company invested significantly to build out the infrastructure in its stores — sleek phone-scanning kiosks and mobile apps that work reliably and efficiently.

“There is a lot of reluctance in installing a lot of technology, especially if they aren’t sure it’ll take off,” said Rob von Behren, one of the lead engineers at Braintree, a payment services company that powers and processes transactions for popular services including Uber, the mobile taxi service, and Airbnb, the travel rental site. This reluctance leads to an “infinite waiting period and slows the growth of an industry,” he said.

Mr. von Behren was one of the creators of Google Wallet before he left to work at Square and later at Braintree. He said that while his Google team’s original goal was to simplify online purchases, it quickly realized that nudging mobile e-commerce forward seemed more urgent.

A large portion of shopping begins on cellphones, but getting to the final checkout remains a challenge because entering payment information on a small screen is clumsy. And most traditional big-box retailers that could build infrastructure to support mobile payments came of age “in an era where there wasn’t network connectivity,” making it harder to update their cashier software, payment methods or loyalty programs, Mr. von Behren said.

He ultimately decided that working with legacy retailers to create a system for in-store shopping with cellphones was a “tremendous juggling act.” He added, “It kind of worked and it kind of didn’t.”

BUT a new generation of innovation is coming, he said, so he thinks that wide use of pay-by-cellphone systems will arrive eventually. Braintree recently acquired Venmo, a company that lets people send money to one another via simple text messages. In addition, some promising newcomers say they are working on more complete alternatives.

Clinkle, a start-up, has persuaded a notable roster of venture capitalists to funnel $25 million into its mysterious and forthcoming mobile payment services. And a new company, Lemon, is working on its own digital wallet.

I guess I’ll have to wait and see. For now, I’ve come up with my own workaround for hot weather: securing my credit card and driver’s license to my iPhone with a rubber band. But it’s not what I had in mind when I pictured paying with my phone.

Bits Blog: BlackBerry Posts Loss, Despite New Phone

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App Smart: Phone Timer Apps Help You Stay on Schedule

You know that awful moment, while watching television, when you suddenly remember you left something on the stove? I know it well because I’m terrible at remembering things I need to do in, say, four or five minutes. But with a timer app on my phone, I could avoid burning dinner and keep track of any number of other events at the same time.

One of the most elegant timers on Apple’s iOS platform is Timeless, priced at $1. Its interface has large panels with clear typography and straightforward control icons. The main countdown timer screen, for example, is dominated by big white numerals in the center of a large blue display above a small icon bar.

Timeless is controlled by screen gestures. The first time you start it, the app explains how to swipe the screen or rotate the phone to switch displays. For example, swiping left and right on the main timer screen calls up different timers you have set, or lets you create a new one.

Setting up a new timer is simple: the app displays two columns of numerals, one for hours and one for minutes. Swipe these columns up and down to select the time interval you want, then start the countdown by tapping on the play icon in the icon bar. A bell icon selects which audio alarm is associated with the countdown.

The app can run numerous timers simultaneously; to see them, either swipe the timers one by one or turn the phone sideways to view them all in a list. You can even add a label to each timer so you know exactly what it’s for — like “boiled egg” or “important phone call.”

The app can also run multiple stopwatch timers that count up rather than down. You start a stopwatch by setting a new timer to 00:00 and pressing “play.”

The app does have some limitations. For example, the countdown timers count only whole hours and minutes — not seconds — and the stopwatch function has no option for split-timing laps.

An equivalent app for Android devices with similarly high design values is the $1 app Timer. The app is simple to use: to set a new countdown timer, you tap the little “+” icon, and up pops a setting for hours, minutes and seconds.

To set the seconds, you move your finger around a circular dial, then tap on hours or minutes if you need them. You can start the countdown straightaway or save it for easy access later.

Many timers can run concurrently — handy if, for example, you are cooking several dishes for a dinner party — and the app has clear controls for pausing, ending or deleting timers.

One slight irritation with this app is its method for setting labels on timers: you have to “long press” them in the list of running or saved timers, and that can be easy to forget.

You also cannot set different reminder tones for different timers — which means that if you have a group of timers running concurrently, you will have to check your phone to see which one the alarm is referring to.

Simpler timing needs may be met with the Ovo Timer, a free app on Android. Its clever design reduces countdown timing to a minimum.

The app’s screen is dominated by the time you have set, which is done by tapping on the screen and circling your finger clockwise or counterclockwise. There is also an option to have the time you want spoken.

The countdown begins automatically; you can pause it by touching the numerals. A colorful arc surrounds the countdown, disappearing gradually as the time ticks away. The app is simple and it’s free, but it can run only one timer at a time and cannot handle countdowns longer than an hour.

If you are interested in stopwatch timing rather than countdown timing, you may find it simpler to use a dedicated stopwatch app. Apple’s iOS has a useful stopwatch built into the Clock app.

You can also try the Stopwatch+ app, $1 on iTunes, a slightly more sophisticated timer that records lap events in detail and even lets you e-mail your list of times. The Ultimate Stopwatch app on Android features a clean and easy-to-use design, and includes all the basic stopwatch features. And it’s free.

And that smoke from your kitchen probably means you burned the toast while reading this.

Quick Call

The popular book Peterson Field Guide to Birds of North America has been turned into a “pocket” edition app for iOS. Called Peterson Birds Pocket Edition, it is just $1, and comes with illustrations, data and bird song recordings to help identify birds you’ve heard, if not seen.

State of the Art: Canon N Takes On Phone Cameras

Incoming waves: tablets, e-books, movies online. Outgoing waves: Desktop PCs, landline phones, anything on disc, tape or paper.

It’s fascinating to watch outgoing industries struggle to remain relevant. Take, for example, the outgoing wave known as pocket cameras. No wonder nobody is buying them anymore. Your phone takes pictures nearly as well and is far more convenient.

You always have your phone with you, and you can transmit the photos wirelessly as soon as you take them.

But Canon, the world’s No. 1 camera maker, has dreamed up an ingenious response to the phone-camera threat. It’s a camera designed to attack the cellphone threat on three fronts.

First, it emphasizes the features that a smartphone can’t match, like a zoom lens. Second, it imitates the workings and design features of a smartphone. Third, it can transmit new photos to your phone for immediate sending or posting online. The result, the Canon N ($300), is half pocket camera, half photo-taking accessory for your phone.

In the category of features a phone camera lacks, the Canon N starts by offering a powerful zoom lens — 8X, compared with zero X on a smartphone. Digital zoom, where the camera just enlarges a photo to make it seem as if you’re closer, doesn’t count.

The N also has a much bigger, more sensitive sensor and lens. Now, the N’s sensor isn’t very big for a camera — it measures 0.4 inches diagonally — but it’s much better than what’s in a typical phone. Finally, the N’s screen flips out 90 degrees, so you can take photos at interesting angles.

The second category, imitating a phone’s design and operation, is more intriguing. The Canon N is one of the weirdest-looking cameras you’ve ever seen. It’s a nearly square, nearly featureless block, in black or white.

It has only three physical buttons, all tiny: Power, Play and Connect to Phone. As on a phone, the rest of the controls are all on the touch screen.

Now, you might have noticed that that list does not include “shutter button”; this camera doesn’t have one. Instead, you take a picture by pressing up or down on the silver plastic ring around the lens, which budges slightly and clicks.

And what, you may ask, is the point of that design? Simple: This camera works equally well upside down or at 90 degrees. Like a phone, it detects which way you’re holding it and flips the screen image accordingly. Thanks to this ring-shutter system, you can take a shot no matter how you’re holding the camera.

Left-handers might also appreciate this setup; it frees them from the tyranny of right-side shutter buttons. The downside of the shutter ring is that it’s very skinny and right next to the equally thin zoom ring. Often, you snap a shot by accident when you’re just trying to zoom.

The upside-down feature also mitigates the limitations of the flip-out screen, which has a hinge that is far less ambitious than the ones on other cameras. When you hold the camera upright, the flipping out aids you only in taking photos of low-down subjects (that’s low down as in “children and pets,” not “yellow-bellied scoundrels”). But because you can use the camera in any orientation, the flip-out screen also helps you take pictures holding the camera over your head or even around corners.

Even so, the screen can never face you, so it’s no help when you’re taking self-portraits — a real shame.

There are other cellphone similarities. There is no external battery charger; you charge the battery in the camera, by connecting a USB cable to your computer or a wall adapter. The battery itself looks like a squared-off AA battery; it’s tiny. Canon says it’ll give you about 200 shots on a charge, which is very low.

Bits Blog: New Phone by Facebook to Showcase Its Network

Valentin Flauraud/Reuters Facebook has been putting increasing focus on its mobile products for over two years.

8:45 p.m. | Updated

Facebook users post more photos, write more status updates and hit the like button more often from mobile devices than they do from computers. So it was almost inevitable that Facebook would introduce a smartphone that put its social network front and center.

On Thursday, Facebook plans to unveil the first smartphone created to showcase its social network. The phone, made by HTC, uses a version of Google’s Android software, according to two people briefed on the announcement, which will be made at a news conference at the company’s headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif.

The software is designed so that some of the core features of the phone, like the camera, will be built around Facebook’s services, according to one of the people, who is a Facebook employee. Both people briefed on Facebook’s plans spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the product before the formal announcement.

Derick Mains, a Facebook spokesman, declined to share details of the event. But he said it would be a “significant mobile-focused announcement.” The invitation sent to members of the news media says, “Come see our new home on Android.”

For Facebook and any other online business that is supported by ads, mobile is a tough puzzle to crack. It is difficult to get people to look at advertisements on smaller screens, where display space is limited, without becoming too intrusive.

Facebook’s business strategy is to persuade people to congregate around its social network as much as possible and eventually show them more ads. That is why, over the last year, Facebook has been revamping its organization to be “mobile first.” Every team at Facebook is involved somehow in its mobile products. And the company has recruited engineers who specialize in mobile phone development, including former Apple employees who worked on the development of the iPhone.

The Facebook employee familiar with the announcement said that when the Facebook phone is turned on, it will immediately display a Facebook user’s home screen. A phone with a strong Facebook focus would prompt customers to use Facebook more than competing apps and services. But the success of such a device would depend on how much support the handset received from wireless carriers, said Chetan Sharma, an independent telecommunications analyst who consults for carriers. The carriers can choose which devices are sold in their stores, as well as how prominently to promote them.

“Unless the phone is in front of the consumers in stores, it’s hard to see how it will gain traction,” Mr. Sharma said.

He said it was difficult to imagine that big carriers like AT&T and Verizon Wireless would place a serious bet on a Facebook phone from HTC, because that manufacturer’s other phones have not been selling very well. HTC once made a phone called the Cha Cha that had a button for posting photos directly to Facebook, but it sold poorly.

The idea of a Facebook-powered Android phone is not new. In 2008, Inq, a phone maker based in London, released a phone called the Inq1 that integrated Facebook services into crucial areas of the device. In 2011, it said it would release an Android phone called the Inq Cloud Touch, which had some of Facebook’s services integrated into the home screen.

But early last year, Inq pulled the plug on theCloud Touch, saying it would instead focus on other products. Frank Meehan, the former chief executive of Inq, said in an e-mail interview that the Inq had felt too threatened by Samsung Electronics, now the biggest maker of phones in the world, so it abandoned its plans.

“Samsung was already on a path to crush everyone, and we decided to get out of hardware and turned the company into software only,” Mr. Meehan said.

Mr. Meehan said that if HTC released an Android phone with a focus on Facebook, it would still face the problem that Samsung is the dominant player on Android, Sony is gaining traction in mobile and Huawei, a Chinese handset maker, is dominant in Asia. He said it would be better for Facebook to create a special layer that consumers could install on Android devices so the social network would embed more deeply into Android apps and Google services.

“I would see this as a more radical way of providing the social layer functionality on mobile that would really bring the power of Facebook to Android,” he said.

The Facebook employee familiar with plans for the new phone said the stand-alone mobile apps it released over the last two and a half years were essentially experiments to see what worked on mobile devices before rolling them into a Facebook-focused Android phone. This year the company introduced Poke, a private messaging service, as a stand-alone app. Last year, it released a camera app that specialized in tagging and uploading photos to Facebook. In 2011, it introduced Messenger, an app for free text messaging, which was later expanded to include free voice calls.

Facebook has been exploring making its own smartphone for the last two years. But the project, which was at one time code-named “Buffy,” had stalled because the company could not decide whether to make its own hardware or team up with a phone maker.

Facebook’s approach to modifying Google’s Android software is similar to Amazon’s, said a former employee of Facebook who had been briefed on the product. For its Kindle Fire tablets, Amazon removed Google’s apps and promoted its own services, like the Kindle e-book store, Amazon’s video service and Amazon’s own app store. The tablet is essentially an Amazon-powered shopping console.

A smartphone that gives priority to Facebook services is good for Facebook, but it is unclear whether that is something consumers want. Jan Dawson, a telecommunications analyst at Ovum, said the concept was “a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist.”

“There are lots of people who love Facebook, but I doubt if any of them feel like they need a more Facebook-centric experience on their phones,” he said. “There isn’t anything obviously missing.”

He agreed that it was unlikely that wireless companies would put much support behind such a device, because they are already worried about the way Google and Facebook are supplanting carriers in people’s minds as providers of content and communication services.

Gadgetwise Blog: Can Your Phone Find Your Car?

From left: Find My Car, My StuffFinder and Sally Park.

Two years ago, my parents celebrated their 40th anniversary. Toasts were given, tears were shed and when the last of the dishes were put away, my mom surprised everyone with a slide show of never-before-seen photos of my parents skiing around the Western United States — she five months pregnant with my eldest brother — celebrating the last of their days sans children.

It was a delightful evening. But just two years later, their 42nd anniversary nearly ended in divorce.

My parents celebrated with a film and dinner in San Francisco. My mom was recovering from knee surgery, so my dad dutifully dropped her off at the restaurant and afterward went to pick up the car.

The way my mom tells it, she was left standing on a street corner, in the pouring rain, with men trying to pick her up (“I was dressed very nicely and they were honking,” she recalled) for 30 minutes before my dad called to report that he had lost the car.

Calls to towing companies were not fruitful: “We could only remember four of the numbers on the license plate and not in the right order.” They asked a cabdriver to drive them up and down nearby streets. “It was the end of his 12-hour shift and, after an hour, he wanted to go home,” my mom said. “But I can be very tenacious.” At midnight, they debated taking the train home but decided it was too late. Finally, after several of my mom’s motivational speeches to the cabdriver and a $70 fare, they found the car. (As to who spotted the car first, the debate continues.)

I suggested that, next time, they use Google Maps to mark their car’s location on a map. Other people suggested mobile applications specifically designed to help people locate their car. My dad and I gave six apps a whirl:

Find My Car. (Free, iOS and Android) Using the phone’s GPS, Find My Car locates your parking spot and fixes it on your phone’s map. You can take photos using the phone’s camera and jot down notes, which comes in handy if you park in a massive airport garage. But the app could be more intuitive. It lets you set a timer for a parking meter, which is useful, but it took five minutes to find that feature within the app. Also, my dad needed his reading glasses for the fine print — major point deductions there.

Find My Car’s developers recently unveiled a new app, called Find My Car Smarter, for the iPhone 4S and iPhone 5, that syncs with your car’s Bluetooth and automatically stores your car’s location when you park. The only time you need to open the app is if you misplace your car. I might be willing to fork over $1.99 for that, but my dad, who has never used Bluetooth, didn’t seem keen to start.

ICar. (Free, iOS) The iCar app offers everything Find My Car does, except it does not take photos. It also locates nearby gas stations and parking lots, but when we tested those features, we got an error message. This was one of our least favorite options because of all the apps we tested, this was the only one with annoying ads. Note to iCar advertisers: When someone is desperately searching for their car, they are probably not likely to click on a Sam’s Club ad.

Honk. (99 cents, iOS) Honk does everything Find My Car and iCar do, but charges you 99 cents for a much cuter interface. The app notes your location, offers directions when it’s time to go and lets you take photos and notes — which you can type using the phone’s keypad, or scribble using your index finger. Very cute. Like iCar, it helps you find nearby parking lots and gas stations, and also ATMs. And like the others, it lets you mark how much time you have left on the parking meter by swiping your finger along its parking meter icon. You can see on the screen how many minutes you have left, and the app honks when it’s time to go, or time to fill up the meter.

Hey Dude, Where’s My Car? (Free, iOS) This is basically a more complicated version of Google Maps with a clever name. Bugs crashed this app three times. The app promises you will “never ask ‘Dude Where’s My Car?’ again,” but it was difficult figuring out how to set the car’s parking location. When we looked for app instructions, we found a description of the app developer instead (a “pretty groovy guy in Austin, Texas”). “It may be dude friendly,” my dad said, “but it lost my car and we haven’t even parked it yet.”

Sally Park. ($2.99, iOS) This was the most costly but also the most intuitive of the apps we tested. All you have to do is open the app and touch the big “Park” button and it automatically sets your location. Sally Park also gives you the option to take a photo or write down notes about your location. Like Find My Car, iCar and Honk, it also includes a parking meter timer and reminds you when you have five minutes left on the meter.

My StuffFinder. (Free, iOS) This is the lost-and-found of apps. It not only lets you find your car, but your keys, glasses, wallet, shoes and purse too. Just save the location of various items and the app will direct you back to them. The app promises to get users within 16 feet of their item, but when we tested it in the Sierra Nevada mountains, it only promised accuracy within 596 feet — not ideal when you’re trying to find your car keys. But My StuffFinder also lets you take photos of where you left the car and jot down a reminder. One drawback: unlike the other apps, StuffFinder does not include a parking meter timer.

Because all the apps utilized the phone’s mapping and GPS technology, they all had the same level of location accuracy. Because of that, my dad said he would probably use the apps with the most intuitive interface and that included photo and note-taking abilities and a parking meter alarm, like Honk and Sally Park. Outside the city, where he doesn’t have to worry about meter maids, he said he would be more likely to use My StuffFinder, especially for my mom’s things. “Your mom is always misplacing her glasses and keys.” And with that, we’ll see whether they make it to their 43rd.

As Shoppers Hop From Tablet to PC to Phone, Retailers Try to Adapt

“I do use the iPad to browse sites,” Mr. O’Neil said, but when it comes time to close the deal, he finds it easier to do on a computer.

Many online retailers had visions of holiday shoppers lounging beneath the Christmas tree with their mobile devices in hand, making purchases. The size of the average order on tablets, particularly iPads, tends to be bigger than on PCs. So retailers poured money and marketing into mobile Web sites and apps with rich images and, they thought, easy checkout.

But while visits to e-commerce sites and apps on tablets and phones have nearly doubled since last year, consumers like Mr. O’Neil are more frequently using multiple devices to shop. In many cases, they are more comfortable making the final purchase on a computer, with its bigger screen and keyboard. So retailers are trying to figure out how to appeal to a shopper who may use a cellphone to research products, a tablet to browse the options and a computer to buy.

“I’ve been yelling at customers for two years, saying, ‘Mobile, mobile, mobile,’ ” said Jason Spero, director of mobile sales and strategy at Google. “But the funny thing is, now we’re going to say: ‘Don’t put mobile in a silo. It’s also about the desktop.’ ”

The challenges are daunting, though. It is technically difficult to track consumers as they hop from phone to computer to tablet and back again. This means customers who, say, fill shopping carts on their tablets have to do all the work again on their PCs or other devices. The biggest obstacle, retailers say, is that the tools used to track shoppers on computers — cookies, or bundles of data stored in Web browsers — don’t transfer across devices.

Instead, retailers are figuring out how to sync the experience in other ways, like prompting shoppers to log in on each device. And being able to track people across devices gives retailers more insight into how they shop.

The retailers’ efforts are backed by research. While one-quarter of the visits to e-commerce sites occur on mobile devices, only around 15 percent of purchases do, according to data from I.B.M. According to Google, 85 percent of online shoppers start searching on one device — most often a mobile phone — and make a purchase on another.

At eBags, customers are shopping on their tablets in the evening and returning on their work computers the next day. But eBags has not yet synced the shoppers across devices, so customers must build their shopping carts from scratch if they switch devices.

“That is a blind spot with a lot of sites,” said Peter Cobb, co-founder of eBags. “It is a requirement moving forward.”

At eBay, one-third of the purchases involve mobile devices at some point, even if the final purchase is made on a computer.

At eBay, once shoppers log in on a device, they do not need to log in again. Their information, like shipping and credit card details and saved items, syncs across all their devices. If an eBay shopper is interested in a certain handbag, and saves that search on a computer, eBay will send alerts to her cellphone when a new handbag arrives or an auction is about to end.

“They might discover an item on a phone or tablet, do a saved-search push alert later on some other screen and eventually close on the Web site,” said Steve Yankovich, who runs eBay Mobile. “People are buying and shopping and consuming potentially every waking moment of the day.”

ModCloth, an e-commerce site for women’s clothes, said that while a quarter of its visits come from mobile devices, people are not yet buying there in the same proportion, though they are becoming more comfortable with checking out on those devices.

“She’s visiting us more on the phone, but she’s actually transacting somewhere else,” said Sarah Rose, vice president of product at ModCloth.

For example, a shopper will skim through new arrivals on her phone while on the bus and add items to her wish list, then visit that evening on her tablet to make a purchase, Ms. Rose said.

State of the Art: Nokia Lumia 920 and HTC Windows Phone 8X Are Great, and Yet

Because competition drives innovation. Innovation leads to improvement. Improvement begets happiness.

In the tech world, some companies do their most innovative work when their backs are against the wall — especially Microsoft. Last month, it took the wraps off Windows Phone 8, the most polished edition yet of its beautiful, crystal-clear software for touch-screen phones. (My review of Windows Phone 8 is at http://j.mp/Qqfz2F.)

Unfortunately, as a Microsoft product manager told me understatedly, “We have an awareness problem.” Translation: Nobody is buying Windows phones. And since nobody’s buying them, nobody’s writing apps for them. And since nobody’s writing apps — well, you can see where this is going.

Still, Microsoft isn’t giving up. This month, Windows Phone 8 arrives aboard two fascinating new phones: the Nokia Lumia 920 ($100 with a new AT&T contract) and the HTC Windows Phone 8X ($200 from AT&T, Verizon or T-Mobile).

It’s funny about Nokia and HTC; they, too, are fallen giants. Nokia was the world’s largest cellphone maker for 14 years straight; not anymore. At the moment, it’s in seventh place among smartphone makers. It has shed tens of thousands of employees. HTC is struggling, too, having sold 36 percent fewer smartphones this year than last.

How intriguing, then, that HTC and Nokia have each chosen Microsoft as its savior, and vice versa. Loser + loser = winner?

Yes, actually. The two new phones have a lot in common — for one thing, they’re both awesome. For another, both have bigger, sharper screens than the iPhone’s famous Retina screen. (The HTC and Nokia phones have 4.3- and 4.5-inch screens. That’s 1,280 by 720 pixels, packed in 341 and 332 to the inch.)

Both have rounded backs and edges, which make them both exceptionally comfortable to hold. (The curve also makes it easy to pull them out of your pocket the right way.)

Both come in a choice of bright colors. Both phones have the same blazing fast processor. Both can get onto their respective carriers’ 4G LTE data networks (meaning very fast Internet), in the cities where those are available.

And get this — both of these phones can also charge without being plugged in. That’s right: magnetic charging is finally built right into phones. Come home at the end of the day, throw your keys in the bowl, set the phone down on the charging pad (a $50 option) — and a little chime tells you that it’s happily charging, even though no cable is in sight.

It’s pretty great. It will become even greater if this charging method (an industry standard called Qi, pronounced chee) catches on. Someday there may be charging surfaces at coffee shops, airports and hotel rooms. (Only the Verizon version of the HTC phone has this feature turned on — not the AT&T or T-Mobile versions.)

Both phones also have built-in NFC chips. These allow near-field communications, which means “this phone can do things when you tap it against another gadget.” The promise is that you’ll be able to tap on a cash-register terminal to pay for something; tap against an NFC-enabled bus shelter ad to download promotional goodies; tap two phones together to transfer a photo or address; and tap against a Bluetooth speaker to “pair” it with the phone.

In practice, there’s more to it than that. Unfortunately, the tap only introduces the phones; Bluetooth or some other technology is needed to complete the connection. And Microsoft’s coming tap-to-pay initiative is incompatible with the one Google has spent millions of dollars setting up at cash registers across the land. But we can always hope.

The HTC Windows Phone 8X is the smaller of the two new phones, but even so, it dwarfs the iPhone — it’s wider, taller, heavier and thicker. If you get the Verizon model, your Internet experience will be faster and better in more cities than on the Nokia phone, which is available only on AT&T.

The back panel is faintly textured, so you’re less likely to drop this phone than you are the shiny-backed Nokia. But the buttons — power, volume, camera — are skinny and utterly flush with the phone’s body; you practically need an ice pick to push them in.

State of the Art: Presenting the Nook HD, iPad Mini and Windows Phone 8 — Review

That’s usually the way it works with the tech companies, too, especially as the holiday shopping season begins.

This year, though, a barrage of huge tech announcements all landed within about a week. Windows 8. Microsoft Surface. The iPad Mini. Google Chromebook. The Barnes & Noble Nook HD. Windows Phone 8. A 10-inch Samsung tablet and a new Google phone.

All right, tech industry. You want splintered news coverage? You got it. You get to share this column: one-third of a column each for the three big touch-screen headlines of the week. Meet the iPad Mini, Nook HD and Windows Phone 8.

The iPad Mini

The rumors were true: Apple now has a smaller iPad.

The iPad Mini is half the weight of the big iPad (0.7 pounds versus 1.4), thinner (. 28 inches versus .37), shorter (7.9 inches versus 9.5) and narrower (5.3 inches versus 7.3). Those specs add up to one towering meta-change: you can comfortably hold this iPad in one hand. It’s still too wide for a blazer pocket, alas, but it’s certainly purseable and overcoat pocketable.

It’s available in white-and-silver and black-on-black, both with metal backs, both gorgeous.

Apple’s masterstroke was keeping the screen shape and resolution the same as on the iPad 2 (1,024 by 768 pixels). As a result, the Mini can run all 275,000 existing iPad apps unmodified, plus 500,000 more iPhone apps. The text and graphics are a little smaller, but perfectly usable.

Sadly, the Mini doesn’t gain Apple’s supercrisp Retina display. Nobody’s going to complain about the sharpness — it packs in 163 pixels per inch (ppi) — but it’s not the same jaw-dropping resolution as the big iPad (264 ppi). Gotta hold something back for next year’s model, right?

You pay $330 for the base model (16 gigabytes of storage, Wi-Fi connections). Prices run all the way up to $660 for four times the storage and the option to go online over the cell network.

By pricing the Mini so high, Apple allows the $200 class of seven-inch Android tablets and readers to live (Google Nexus, Kindle Fire HD, Nook HD). Those tablets also, by the way, have high-definition screens (1,280 by 800 pixels), which the Mini doesn’t.

But the iPad Mini is a far classier, more attractive, thinner machine. It has two cameras instead of one. Its fit and finish are far more refined. And above all, it offers that colossal app catalog, which Android tablet owners can only dream about.

Over all, the Mini gives you all the iPad goodness in a more manageable size, and it’s awesome. You could argue that the iPad Mini is what the iPad always wanted to be.

Barnes & Noble Nook HD

The redesign of this $200 e-book reader/video player focuses on the three things that matter most in a hand-held e-book reader: weight, size and screen clarity.

In those ways, the Nook HD trounces its nemeses, Amazon’s Kindle Fire HD and Google’s Nexus 7. The Nook is lighter (11.1 ounces, versus 12 on the Nexus and 13.9 on the Kindle) and noticeably narrower, despite the same-size screen, because it has a far slimmer bezel. You can wrap your hand around its back, even if you’re dainty of hand.

And the screen is much sharper: 1,440 by 900 pixels (versus 1,280 by 800). At 243 dots ppi, the Nook’s screen comes dangerously close to the iPad Retina’s 264 ppi. Wow, is this screen sharp. Movies, books and magazines pop.

Whites are so white on this screen, it could be a Clorox commercial; the Nexus and Kindle screens look yellowish in comparison. (A 9-inch, $270 version, the Nook HD+, is also available.)

The software continues to improve. You can now create up to six accounts, one for each family member, each listing different books and movies. (It doesn’t remember where each person stopped reading a given book, but B&N says that’s coming soon.)

The base-model, $200 Nook comes with only 8 gigabytes of storage — half as much as the Kindle; on the other hand, it has a memory-card slot, so it’s simple and cheap to expand. The Nook includes a wall charger (it can’t charge from a USB jack), which the Kindle doesn’t. And the Nook doesn’t display ads, as the $200 Kindle does.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: October 30, 2012

Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this column misstated the number of accounts a user can create on the Barnes & Noble Nook HD. It is six, not five.