We can all share one account, so we all have the same calendar, see the same contacts, look at the same photos and videos, track the same devices, enjoy the same apps and content, and otherwise have everything in perfectly synced harmony. But everyone can see your stuff and you have to dig through all their stuff to get to yours. Not ideal.

We can all have our own accounts, issue invitations to what appointments need attending, send what contacts need sending, share what photos and videos need sharing, track each device independently, each have different apps and content, and otherwise keep everything in its own little separate silo. But everyone has to push all that stuff all the time, and human error and overhead are annoying, and you'll be buying the same things multiple times for the same household.

Google, Apple, Microsoft, and BlackBerry try and make both approaches work to a certain degree, each doing a better job in some areas than others.

Google, Apple, Microsoft, and BlackBerry try and make both approaches work to a certain degree, each doing a better job in some areas than others. A patchwork of third-party players do too.

So, for now, we're stuck with whatever your platform supports and you can work out, both in terms of technology and family. You know the "You spent how much on Candy Crush?!" and "I'm not letting you track my location!" fights are coming sooner than later. Maybe some consensus rules on how purchasing, tracking, and sharing ought work with your family are in order.

Google and Apple and Microsoft and BlackBerry have had years to figure out how to better service families, from the living room to the cloud and back again. They've failed. They need to unfail.

Because information is incredibly important to the modern family.

Those of us who enjoyed individual unlimited plans decried shared data buckets on principle. "From our cold, dead hands!" we declared.

The gist is that, for a monthly fee, you get a set amount of data to share among individual users. One bucket, full of data, that everyone gets to draw from. But there's a monthly fee for each device that pulls from the bucket. It varies depending on whether you're using a smartphone or a tablet or a mobile hostpot, and it significantly increases the cost of the whole endeavor. And that's where we start to really get a bad taste in our mouths.

But, again, you have to do the math. You have to look at how much data you're actually using each month. Unlimited sounds great, and it's nice to have that safety net. But if you're on Wi-Fi all day, do you really need a more expensive unlimited plan? Might you be able to get away with 2GB, or 4GB, or 6GB? You'll need to do the math for your entire family as well. Once that's settled, it's a pretty basic equation.

If your family, as a whole, uses a total amount of data that's less than the sum of individual plans, why not go with a shared family plan? Why does everybody need their own unlimited plan when a big bucket for everybody will do the same. Forgo the individual meals and go to the buffet.

You just have to do the legwork yourself.

Children can learn accountability and responsibility with finances through mobile devices.

Georgia / Host, ZEN & TECH

The advantage of a single ecosystem home is obvious: it usually just works. But if you go with one ecosystem you miss out on things.

The truth is, every platform, ecosystem, and device has something to offer. They wouldn't exist otherwise.

Thanks to modern technology standards, APIs, and a proliferation of cloud services, it is definitely possible to run a multi-OS home. Not everybody needs to use Apple or Microsoft products for the household to function.

Third-party cloud services like Google Apps, Evernote, and Dropbox make it relatively painless to integrate everything you need for an entire family, even if you're all on different platforms. It's not as easy as working in one integrated ecosystem, but it still works.

Your family really can have it all. You might just have to work to make it happen.

If you are you family's IT manager, you know from experience that it's easier to have everything on the same ecosystem.

Derek Kessler / Managing Editor, Mobile Nations

The debate and research over technology exposure in early life is still fluid. Tablets aren't a substitute for active parenting, but they can serve as an introduction to technology and a tool for parents.

Tablets are also easing into schools, but they've been a challenge. Los Angeles distributed iPads to students this year, but they quickly circumvented the district's restrictions. Even with the tablet's software opened up, that they can replace schoolbooks and computers in an affordable, lightweight package is a leap forward for education.

That tablets can replace schoolbooks and computers in an affordable, lightweight package is a leap forward for education.

While not all women (or men, for that matter) get excited over advances in chipsets or the size of camera sensor pixels, they are huge drivers of mobile tech. In the early days smartphones they came in multiple colors (like the BlackBerry Curve and Palm Centro), but it seemed like shortly after the iPhone came out everything went monochrome. Color has been seeping back into the smartphone space recently, and that's something that all genders can enjoy.

One could easily argue that women have been sidelined or pigeon-holed in mobile technology. Verizon's advertising for the Palm Pre Plus blundered on the side of embarrassingly sexist, while HTC's attempt at building a smartphone for women (the purple Rhyme with a light-up notification "charm") was panned as both disappointing and misguided. Samsung's extravaganza unveiling the Galaxy S4 was blasted for its sexist demonstrations of otherwise gender-neutral features.

There's a lot of work to be done, especially on the media side of technology coverage, which is still predominantly male-run and male-orientated. That said, a lot of the social networks and services today are simply to be gender-neutral, and some are even geared towards (or just more appealing to) women, so things are improving.