Say you’re out in below-zero degree weather standing in Times Square for 8 hours waiting for the New Year to arrive. Taking your phone out of your pocket with gloves on in order to look at the screen is going to be very difficult and taking your gloves off is going to cause you to lose feeling in your hands within minutes.

Better just use Microsoft Voice Command with a Bluetooth headset! The Nextlink Invisio G5 is small enough to fit comfortably in your ear underneath a couple layers of hats and the wired headphones that came with your phone will work as well. Then with Microsoft Voice Command installed, you can set announcements, text messages, direct-push emails, and Caller ID names to be read aloud in your ear using text-to-speech as they arrive. Make sure to set up the proper options in Start>Settings>Personal>Voice Command so that you’ll hear everything you need to hear.

This also works great while snowboarding, bicycling, riding a motorcycle, etc. How all of those Blackberry, iPhone, Symbian, and Android users can live without this feature is beyond me.