Google has confirmed that users will be able to control the upcoming Google TV through their iPhone or Android devices, not only that, but through voice control as well.
Product: Epic 4G Manufacturer: Samsung Wired Rating: 8 Got big pockets? And we mean that in both the physical size and money-carrying capacity sense of the word. At $250, it ain’t cheap — and you’ll pay extra each month for anything beyond basic service. But more to the point, Samsung’s new Epic 4G is a big phone: nearly 5 inches tall and over 2
Product: Note Taking Apps Manufacturer: Roundup: Wired Rating: 0 It can take a note-taking app just to keep track of all the note-taking apps out there. Until someone makes it, here are three of our favorites. 1. Simplenote WIRED 100 percent free. The only app that truly lives up to its name. Clean and simple UI looks and functions the same across all platforms. Automatic syncing keeps all your notes tidy and uniform. Recent update adds tags and word count to the mix. Time machine for notes! Awesome slider bar lets you go back in time and access multiple version of your notes. Dead simple e-mail sharing. TIRED Limited to Apple’s mobile devices: iPhone, iPod and iPad only (although there are 3rd party clients for other devices). New version requires that you sign up for an account. No SMS sharing. FREE, simplenote.com 2. Evernote
Music discovery tool Shazam has launched a major new update to its blockbusting iPhone and iPod touch app to incorporate iOS4 multitasking and much more. The app, which has been one of the most popular in the history the app store listens to tracks you don’t know the name of and searches a database to provide a song title, artist and album.
This week’s episode of the Gadget Lab podcast is heavy on fruits. High on vitamin A, Dylan Tweney gushes over the pluot, a plum-apricot hybrid, while yours truly dishes out this week’s announcements of brand new Apple gear. Apple’s iPod family all scored major upgrades. The iPod Nano has become a puny touchscreen badge with a built-in clip that should be ideal for athletes, and the iPod Touch is now up to par with the iPhone 4. The iPod Shuffle was refreshed as well — also a badge-like clippable form factor, but with the traditional click wheel rather than a touchscreen. Apple also announced a brand new Apple TV that’s about a quarter of the size of its predecessor. It streams movie and television rentals, but it faces one major limitation: only two television networks (Fox and ABC) are on board to offer programs for the device. For now, it’s not an adequate replacement for cable TV. However, in a future software update, iOS devices will be able to wirelessly stream their iTunes videos and music onto the Apple TV by using a feature called “AirPlay.” We ponder on the potential for Apple to reshape the TV industry if the company eventually allows you to beam content from third-party iOS apps (such as Hulu) onto the Apple TV. It’s wishful thinking, but not an impossibility. Finally, Samsung has officially launched a tablet to compete with Apple’s iPad. The Samsung Galaxy Tab is a 7-inch touchscreen tablet powered by Android OS 2.2, meaning it supports Adobe Flash. We share our impressions of the device after some hands-on testing. Oh, and those pluots? They come from Frog Hollow Farm , and they really are delicious. Like the show? You can also get the Gadget Lab video podcast via iTunes , or if you don’t want to be distracted by our smiling faces, check out the Gadget Lab audio podcast . Prefer RSS? You can subscribe to the Gadget Lab video or audio podcast feeds Or listen to the audio here: Gadget Lab audio podcast #87 http://downloads.wired.com/podcasts/assets/gadgetlabaudio/GadgetLabAudio0087.mp3
Interactive Map of Afghanistan for iPad. Image By/Used Courtesy Of Development Seed GPS maps for smartphones generally require a fairly high-speed wireless internet connection, consume significant processor resources, and are optimized for driving. But what if your 3G connection is unreliable or unavailable, and you still need to get from point A to point B — perhaps on foot? Last week, I spoke with Eric Gunderson and Ian Cairns at Development Seed, one of the companies developing tools to create custom maps that work in a wider variety of situations, like this one. It’s not that farfetched: In a natural disaster and in the developing world, mobile phones may be useful navigational aids, but only if they can work without a reliable data connection and are optimized for different kinds of transportation than just zooming down the highway to the nearest Starbucks. Development Seed caught our attention with a post that Cairns wrote for PBS’s MediaShift Idea Lab on custom maps for cyclists and drunken, late-night pedestrians . For StumbleSafely, DC Bikes, and DC Nightvision, a typical street map was overlaid with crime data, bike lanes, bar and bike shop locations, and municipal infrastructure: “Not just buildings and roads, but even crosswalks, medians, and topography lines.” In short, all of the data that actually helps you get where you’re going when you’re not in a car. These maps were built with TileMill , an open-source program the company created to help governments, NGOs, news organizations, and others easily create custom maps. The idea is to make map image tiles and Geographic Information System (GIS) data as easy to work with as RSS feeds or CSV databases are today. “We want to put these tools in the hands of the subject-matter experts and see what they can do,” Gunderson told Wired.com. Development Seed won a Knight News Challenge award for the project. Knight News Challenge: Tilemapping from Knight Foundation on Vimeo . One of the most-needed and currently most-poorly-served markets for mapping and data visualization support is in international development. As Gadget Lab reported this week, mobile devices are thriving in Afghanistan and elsewhere in the developing world, but data bandwidth and easy-to-find electricity aren’t. “You can’t get an application like Google Earth working in Afghanistan,” Gunderson said. Maps On A Stick offers full-fledged, data-and-image-rich maps on a USB drive for no-bandwidth or poor-bandwidth use. The company and clients have plenty of experience with those scenarios, mapping uncharted road data in Africa , or helping relief workers provide housing assistance after Hurricane Katrina. I think about those disaster scenarios often, just as I think about the people I love walking home alone in the city late at night. When Apple launched the iPhone, it made a big deal about how its software team had written its own Maps client, using Google’s data only for the backend. It had to work for the touch interface, but it also had to make sense for how people would be likely to use Maps on a mobile device. Now that easy mobile maps have become a natural part of our smartphone-carrying, 3G-surfing lives, it may be time for us to broaden our assumptions about the kinds of maps we’ll need and the conditions we’ll have when we need them. See Also: Google Maps Finally Adds Bike Routes Microsoft Adds OpenStreetMap Layer to Bing Maps Help Us Review Google Maps for Bikes Preparing for the Next Haiti, with Maps, Texts and Tweets Google Maps Adds Bike Directions Satellite Net Service Sued for Caps, Paltry Bandwidth Using Google Earth and GPS to Track Afghanistan Cash
After what has seemed like a small age the Samsung Galaxy Tab was finally unveiled today at the IFA tech show in Berlin. The Android 2.2 7-inch tablet has arrived amid a storm of hype over whether it could be the first real iPad contender.
It’s hard to argue that Nokia’s E-series isn’t Espoo’s crowning achievement of recent years. The business-based blowers pack in great design, fit well with the functional but hardly fancy S60 interface and rock battery life that draws envious glances from Duracell bunnies.
