It had to happen sooner or later: last year smartphones finally reached the tipping point and accounted for the majority of Google Internet searches. Although traditional desktop, laptop, and tablet searches are increasing, smartphone use has been expanding much more rapidly. Of course, Poe research on smartphones can be regarded as simply a continuation of decades of Internet inquiries on PCs, but smartphones must also be regarded as a radical departure in their ubiquitous presence, their limited size, and their more intimate rapport, paradoxically offering delightful convenience at certain times and, unexpectedly, maddening inconvenience at others. Always at hand, your smartphone eagerly awaits your bidding—assuming you have not forgotten to take it along, have charged it up, have arranged and paid for a wireless connection, and have acquired the special skills (intuitive to children) to manage the little fellow. Some Poe site managers, proud of their full-screen sites but aware of what lies ahead, have made welcome adjustments for the cohort of smartphone users that lies ahead. Some have not. Here are a few observations on smartphones in Poe research that may prove interesting and even useful, whether you are a veteran, a newbie, or a nonuser.The obvious advantage of smartphones is their great portability and versatility, but they are physically constrained by their small screens and their limited memory and storage capacity. Lacking a mouse, they cannot respond to mouse clicks or mouse overs; their miniaturized keyboards require for many an unaccustomed effort for extensive data entry; and their file operations, such as saving, retrieving, editing, moving, and printing, must be relearned, being fundamentally strange for the user accustomed to the personal computer. On the other hand, countless “apps” of every imaginable purpose are now available for scholarly purposes, allowing us to escape from the confines of the traditional desktop and its hardware and software: the built-in camera can supply images for scanning and text conversion; and the built-in microphone can capture voice to be converted into text or commands.It is worth trying Siri, the virtual assistant on the iPhone (or its Android equivalents), which accepts commands and voice queries and uses the Bing search engine. It can answer many Poe questions even without extensive training (just speak clearly and distinctly). Overly simple queries do not always do well: asking for “poe addresses” produced the wrong Poe; “edgar allan poe addresses” did a little better; and “what were edgar allan poe addresses in 1845” did best of all. On my smartphone tests, I received identical results from a voice query in Siri, a typed query in Google, and what I got from the Google Now voice service, using the microphone on a Windows 10 desktop. The takeaway: first, try using voice input, and second, make the search engine do the work—think of it accessing a global concordance of all texts on the Internet. Incidentally, I did not do nearly as well using the Cortana voice virtual assistant on Windows 10 (it uses Edge browser and Bing search engine). By the way, avoid using just “poe” in searches—by voice it is hard to discriminate and when typed will yield too many hits on “poet” and “poetry”; instead use combinations of “edgar.” Be warned that searches that include the word “research” may bring up paper mills. Keep in mind, too, that you cannot reliably test mobile versions of websites on a regular computer—nor vice versa.In the United States, smartphone ownership is becoming almost universal. According to Pew Research, about two-thirds of people now own a smartphone; moreover, they are apt to be younger, richer, and better educated than other Internet users. Yet there is a persistent digital divide, as those who are the most dependent on smartphones (having the fewest other options) are likely to be younger, poorer, less educated, and less white. The most frequent activities for all smartphone users are text messaging, with 97 percent of users engaging in it; voice calling, at 92 percent; accessing the Internet, 89 percent; and e-mail, 88 percent; the lesser activities are social networking, at 75 percent; taking pictures or video, 60 percent; watching news, 55 percent; watching video, 50 percent; games, 47 percent; maps, 41 percent; and music or podcasts, 41 percent (see http://www.pewinternet.org/2015/04/01/us-smartphone-use-in-2015/). Needless to say, statistics are not available for how many among the 89 percent who use smartphones to access the Internet are doing academic scholarship, least of all those working on Poe in particular! However, Pew Research has discovered on Google Scholar more than eight hundred published items of academic research in 2015 that hired a programmer for a specific task through Amazon's crowdsourcing service known as the Mechanical Turk—a name derived from Poe's “Maelzel's Chess Player” (see http://www.pewinternet.org/2016/07/11/research-in-the-crowdsourcing-age-a-case-study/#fn-15902-1).What research can you do with a smartphone that you cannot do with a desktop computer? First of all, you can always have it with you in a research library so that you can scan pages or images, type or dictate notes, or ask Siri (or equivalent) to pursue your simpler research questions. There are also teaching opportunities: most students have smartphones, creatively extending the classroom to wasted time on the bus, as Catherine Waitinas of California Polytechnic State University argues, explaining her imaginative matching of Poe's critical theories and poetry manuscripts (in this case by Whitman) by means of digital technology (see http://54.85.133.54/wordpress/paleography-became-the-rage-putting-students-in-whitmans-hand-by-catherine-waitinas). The fact that students often use mobile phones for texting and social networking purposes or for games and diversions should not detract from the opportunity those devices offer to students and teachers. It is impressive to realize today's smartphones are more powerful than the seventy-pound guidance computer used on Apollo 11 for its July 1969 lunar landing.In the matter of page design, smartphones may be forcing designers to make a 180-degree turn. Until the last few years, many Poe websites were moving toward greater sophistication and complexity, exploiting powerful desktop computers, their greater storage capacity (both on and off the cloud), their cleverer media devices, and their faster network connectivity (both wired and wireless). As a result, some Poe sites added extensive scripting, heavy graphics, and media enhancements, all striving to make the reading experience more dynamic and thus more enjoyable. Unfortunately, what was rendered as beautiful on a big, up-to-date desktop computer could be simply unreadable when viewed on a small smartphone. Suddenly full-featured Poe sites are encountering the constraints of smartphone access: very small screens, keyboards that are both diminutive and virtual, limited system processing power, a lack of the usual desktop software, and no wired peripherals (e.g., mouse and printer).To see how smartphone and desktop searches actually compared, I ran a test for “edgar allan poe” on both an Apple iPhone 6S and a Windows 10 desktop, using the same search engine (Google) and browser (Chrome). The results were similar but not identical: both reports had general information about Poe at the top (a Wikipedia snippet), some images of Poe publications, selected quotes (or a link to them), and, at bottom, the same list of suggested Poe sub-searches for his poems, quotes, “The Raven,” biography, short stories, death, “Annabel Lee,” and “The Tell-Tale Heart.”Almost half of the sites that popped up on the critical first screen of results for the search of “edgar allan poe” on the smartphone were designated as “mobile-friendly.” On both Google and Bing, “mobile-friendly” designates sites with readable content, that do not demand excessive zooming or scrolling, that provide buttons of adequate size with separations for finger tapping, and that do not demanding special desktop software such as Flash. (Incidentally, the search for “edgar allan poe” on Bing yields different results from Google and also adds sections for news, trending social networks, and videos.)Which Poe sites have the mobile-friendly badge, and how much does it matter? On the first Google screen, only two of the first five Poe sites have the mobile-friendly badge, which therefore does not seem to determine page rank. Here are my impressions on a smartphone of the pages on the first screen of results for a Google search of “edgar allan poe” (numbers added): The Poe Museum (Richmond, Virginia): http://www.poemuseum.org/. Top ranked but not updated for the smartphone, it contains three awkward columns of unreadable tiny text with very small images and links that were hard to locate and select.@poemuseum: https://twitter.com/poemuseum. Unexpectedly, a sub-page for the Twitter account of the Richmond Poe Museum, ranked just below it; fortunately its open space is more suitable for smartphone use than the museum's own home page.Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgar_Allan_Poe. Deservedly mobile-friendly, this go-to source for basic information on Poe has been adapted for the smartphone with well-organized and readable text, well-shaped images, and workable links. It also contains highly useful texts of Poe's works, ordered by date and showing their first publication, available through links ordered by genre: to proceed, click on “Selected List of Works” and then on “Edgar Allan Poe bibliography.”Poe Biography: http://www.biography.com/people/edgar-allan-poe-9443160. Marked as mobile-friendly but the text columns are too narrow, the margins are too wide, and the advertisements are too heavy for research use.PoeStories: http://www.poestories.com/. A genuinely mobile-friendly site that contains links not only to Poe tales but also to poems and essays, with readable text (white on black), prominent links in light blue, and features for students, such as how to use MLA style citations. The site also provides an interesting discussion of how it created and now operates itself, a feature of interest to other Poe webmasters.Academy of American Poets: https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/edgar-allan-poe. Although not marked as mobile-friendly, this site, which has a section on materials for teachers, is very readable on a smartphone.Poe biography: http://poestories.com/biography.php. A sub-page of PoeStories.com for Poe biography.Poe Society of Baltimore: http://www.eapoe.org/. On a desktop computer, unrivaled as a source for Poe texts, versions, scholarship, and other information, currently further enhancing itself page by page with colored frames and backgrounds to give pages “a sense of visual continuity.” However, on a smartphone these wide frames push away the text, despite the mobile-friendly badge.Poetry Foundation—Poe: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poets/detail/edgar-allan-poe. Mobile-friendly, searchable, with two sections, biography and texts with criticisms and an extensive bibliography.The (Still) Mysterious Death of Edgar Allan Poe: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/still-mysterious-death-edgar-allan-poe-180952936/. The excessive ads and self-promotion undermine the Smithsonian name.“The Raven”: https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/raven. The text of the poem on a sub-page of poets.org.Marilynne Robinson, New York Review of Books: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2015/02/05/edgar-allan-poe. The site has many unexpected distractions, such as self-promoting ads, intrusive audiobook promotions, and too much emphasis in colored buttons leading to the social networks.In summary, the smartphone Google test produced mixed results. Some sites that were marked as mobile-friendly were actually not very readable on a smartphone, while others without the badge were quite accessible. Unexpectedly, three of the sites on the first page of results were sub-pages to other sites, and one of them was a link to its Twitter page. Have these several sub-pages earned high rank on their own? The standard algorithms used for some time by Google in determining page rank, while previously quite useful, seemed ineffective at times during smartphone access, leaving a programming void to be filled.Meanwhile, library research on academic uses of smartphones is beginning. There's a survey of literary research on smartphones in the Educause online library at http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ss15/ers1510ss.pdf. Several literary academic journals are available on smartphones via BrowZine with a login through your research library. The managers of HathiTrust—a favorite archive of literary researchers—realizing that their main page is too huge and complex to be viewed on a smartphone, have created a simpler alternate interface for mobile phones at http://m.hathitrust.org/. To exploit the new opportunities, some subscription databases (they are available only through participating libraries) have created their own apps, such as Gale Cenage's AML (Access My Library) at http://solutions.cengage.com/gale/apps/; see also EBSCOhost on iTunes and ProQuest mobile at http://m.search.proquest.com/. Does social media traffic affect Google page rank? The question is taken up in light of two hundred possible factors at http://backlinko.com/google-ranking-factors.As one might expect, there are interesting articles on computers in academe in the “Professor Hacker” blog on the Chronicle of Higher Education website, where two editors and a dozen writers explore teaching, software, hardware, conferences, classroom use of media, syllabi, and personal experiences at http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/. Among university libraries that have begun to create online bibliographies, MIT offers a useful introductory survey of “Apps for academics” at http://libguides.mit.edu/apps, which has sections on productivity, library research, taking notes, and writing. See also the MIT pages on library research at http://libguides.mit.edu/c.php?g=176092&p=1158704 and its guide to literature at http://libguides.mit.edu/lit.The problem of making existing Poe websites more readable on smartphones has produced several solutions and strategies. Google recommends the RWD (responsive web design) approach in which one HTML code works for all devices by responding to the screen size of each device. If you're curious, the key is a viewport statement encoded in the head section of the site, <meta name=viewport content=“width=device-width, initial-scale=1”>. In another approach known as dynamic serving, the page senses the user's browser and generates the appropriate version of HTML. In still other cases, where sites have low smartphone use and the labor of adaptation is impractical, the creation of two entirely separate URLs might be appropriate.For those who wish to go further in pursuing the question of website adaptation to smartphones, there's a useful overview at http://www.atomic74.com/click/responsive-vs-mobile-friendly-websites-whats-the-difference#sthash.fLcc8M08.dpuf. Google's concerns over multi-device issues are introduced at https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/articles/building-websites-multi-screen-consumer.html. Going still further, Google has posted several informational pages on how to make the choice among various approaches. One first step, to see if a site is mobile-friendly, is explored at https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/. If the site was created with WordPress or another CMS (content management system), follow the suggestions posted at https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/. Before hiring a web developer, review the ideas at https://developers.google.com/webmasters/mobile-sites/get-started#hire-developer. For those webmasters who are also do-it-yourselfers, there are suggestions at https://developers.google.com/webmasters/mobile-sites/website-software/. Finally, for those who must have the fastest web pages, there are special tools offered at https://developers.google.com/speed.In recent years we have been hearing bold pronouncements of revolutionary changes on the Internet, changes that rarely seem to live up to expectations. Thus, in 2012, the New York Times famously declared “the year of the MOOC” (massive open online courses), but four years later educational practices still have not changed much. Last year, Google sounded the alarm for the mobilegeddon—evoking the biblical Armageddon—looming ahead when rising smartphone use overturns current search engine ranking results, but as yet the impact is still unclear. This year, in the wake of several genuine global epidemic scares, it is impossible to take seriously the reported plague of the “smartphone pinky,” allegedly resulting in the malformation of the small finger, for which the obvious cure is simply not overdoing texting.Poe in Cyberspace columns are archived at eapoe.info.