When I reviewed the Wi-Fi iPad for our June cover story (4.5 out of 5 stars), it was a little tricky coming up with bona fide complaints about it--call me fangirl all you want, but I was smitten, as was the rest of the Mac|Life staff. With the iPad Wi-Fi+3G, my rose-colored glasses are covered with smudgy fingerprints of regret. After two days of failed 3G account activation and a good 90 minutes of phone calls (first with AT&T, who passed me to Apple, who told me to talk to AT&T, who transferred me to Apple, who transferred me back to AT&T), the 3G iPad’s luster was fading--fast. I even considered returning it. And that’s saying a lot for someone who loves the iPad as much as I do.

Apple haters love to trot out the fact that the iPhone and iPod touch lack a physical keyboard. And of course, the first feature iPhone users notice about any rival keyboard-equipped smartphone is usually the microscopic keys. 4iThumbs attempts to bridge that gap, offering some of the tactile feedback of a hard keyboard without giving up all the benefits of the iPhone’s virtual keys.

Imagine being put at the helm of a gargantuan Federation ship, zooming from base to base, relying on your allies as you gun down a Romulan fleet before laying siege to their luminescent base. Sounds fun, right? Well, Star Trek D-A-C didn’t get the memo, or at least it didn’t get the budget to pull “fun” off. D-A-C stands for Deathmatch, Assault, and Conquest, the three main modes. And if that name seems weak, just try playing this unimpressive game.

Losing data sucks. Your spreadsheets from work are one thing, but the truly heart-wrenching losses are the things you can’t replace: pictures of your kids at Disneyland, the Great American Novel you’ve been working on since college, or your 300GB iTunes Library that you’ve been lovingly curating for the last decade. Luckily, tools like Prosoft’s Data Rescue can help get your data back whether you lost it to file corruption or simply to being overzealous with the Empty Trash command (we’ve all done that at least once).