While driving, it’s tempting to hit the gas when one of your favorite jams plays on the stereo, but a new iPhone app discourages music-induced speeding.
Shown in the video above, the app Slow Down uses the iPhone’s sensors to track how fast you’re driving. If you go a few miles over the speed limit, it slows down the tempo of any track playing from your music library. And if you exceed by more than 6 miles per hour, the music stops completely until you resume driving at a normal speed again. Goofy but clever, though I’d imagine it getting annoying when you need to pass people up on the freeway.
A 30-year-old Texas man claimed this week that he was talking on his Motorola Droid smartphone when it exploded in his ear.
Wearing a bandage over his head, Texas resident Aron Embry showed broadcast reporters his Droid 2 phone, which appears to be cracked with a burn.
“I heard a pop, I didn’t feel any pain initially, I pulled the phone down, I felt something dripping,” Embry told Fox News in a video interview.
Motorola has said it’s investigating the claim. The company has not acknowledged a manufacturing defect.
Incidents of exploding mobile devices have made rounds on the web in the past, and often times the cause seems to be faulty batteries. For example, amid incidents of iPod Nanos catching on fire in Japan, Apple in August 2008 issued a recall for a small number of iPod Nanos (0.001 percent) containing defective, potentially hazardous batteries. Also, in 2006, Apple issued a recall for iBook G4 and PowerBook G4 notebooks, because their batteries contained cells manufactured by Sony, which were causing batteries to explode.
Apple’s latest mobile operating system update introduces a much-demanded feature: wireless printing. Problem is, it will only officially print from printers labeled “AirPrint-compatible,” which you likely don’t own. However, if you want to print from just about any printer, there’s a mod for that.
AirPrint Hacktivator offers a solution for Macs to set up wireless printing with iOS 4.2 with any printer shared on your network. Here’s how to set it up, with instructions courtesy of the hack’s maker, Netputing.
You will need:
Mac OS X Snow Leopard 10.6.5
iTunes 10.1 (if you have neither, select the Apple icon in the upper-left corner of your screen and click “Software Updates” to download the latest software.
iOS 4.2.1 on an iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad (click “Check for Updates” in iTunes if you don’t have the latest iOS.)
In London, it’s hard to find a restaurant without a gimmick. And Inamo has probably the biggest gimmick of all. If you’re a hungry, tech-loving nerd, that is.
The restaurant, which just launched a new venue on London’s, tries to do away with almost all waiterly duties, apart from actually carrying plates around. A projector sits above each table and turns the table into a computer-screen (the projector is hooked up to a Windows XP machine). Using a touchpad, you can browse the menu and place your orders, and when you select a dish, a picture of it is projected onto an empty plate already on the table.
Whilst dining, you can choose various “wallpapers” (table-cloths?) to be displayed on the table, and there are even some games, although not any you’d actually play – the folks from UK tech blog Pocket Lint headed over to a pre-launch party and report that one of the games is Battleship. Really?
When you’re done, you can order up the check and call a cab, all from the comfort of your table.
I just hope the bosses at Inamo have some fallback plans. Tech has a way of failing in the catering industry (I was in the game for 15 years), and that’s robust, purpose-built gear. Imagine the poor customer trying to place an order and getting the dreaded Blue Screen of Death. On the other hand, at least a PC can’t come to work drunk.
Somebody at Pentax has just plain lost it. Here you see the forthcoming limited-edition K-r, a custom version of the regular 12 megapixel DSLR. It seems to have been built from eye-searingly bright children’s building blocks, and somebody has even wedged a robot-head into the hot-shoe.
Pentax has a history of colorful experimentation, from the “world’s reddest DSLR” to the rainbow-colored K-x which “requires sunglasses to use”. But with this Korejanairobomoderu, or Korejanai robot edition, Pentax has reached a new high. And I mean “high” in the drug-smoking sense.
Other than its candy-coated shell (and decapitated robot head), the camera is unchanged from the stock K-r. It does have a matching lens, though, a special-edition version of the 35mm ƒ2.4, which equates roughly to the length of a 50mm when used on a crop-frame body.
The price for this Willy Wonka camera will be ¥99,800, or $1,190, and only 100 will be made (that’s precisely 100 too many). Pre-ordering opens at 12PM on December 24th, for delivery in January.
Over in the UK, something is happening that will bring cheer to the miserable, heavily-drinking denizens of that gray, cold land: Competition. To be precise, competition in iPad plans.
3G operator “3″ has entered the iPad subsidy game, going squarely up against Orange, which announced its own plans earlier this week. The prices for the iPad itself are the same as Orange is asking – £200, £250 and £350 for the 16, 32 and 64GB models. The difference is in the data plans. 3 offers a massive 15GB per month, or around 500MB per day. To get these prices, you’ll need to sign a two-year contract.
When I’m not trapped in my elevator-free apartment by a broken leg, my iPad is in constant use on my own 3G data plan. Even then, I have never come close to hitting the 2GB cap. So unless you watch a lot of streamed video, 15GB may as well be unlimited.
This is what happens when you have a lot of equally good operators all chasing the same customers. In the US, a Verizon iPhone can’t come fast enough.
Looxcie, the ear-mounted, sci-fi styled video-camera now works with your iPhone. The Bluetooth camera is like a Tivo for your real life. When running, it is constantly filming. When something happens that you might want to keep, you hit a button and the last 30 seconds of video are dumped into your iPhone.
The only problem is the quality, a rather poor 480×320 at just 15fps. This is no Canon 5D MkII. But that’s hardly the point. The idea is that you don’t have to sit back and observe. You can join in the action and shoot clips after they happen.
The companion app, which first cam to Android, can be grabbed at the App Store. With it you can view the live video streamed from the Looxcie, and organize, edit and upload clips. This is the part we like the most: why carry yet another screen around when you already have a perfectly good one. The Looxcie also doubles as a Bluetooth headset, although really you should never use one of those anyway.
The app is designed for the small-screen of the iPhone, but you can also use, pixel-doubled, on the iPad. That makes this one way to add a camera to Apple’s tablet.
The app is free, on Android and iOS, and so it should be: the camera itself is a crazy $200.
Christian Kim’s DreiX shelf brings a little bit of the fairground to your living room, in the form of three spinning, rotating cubbyholes. His concept features three boxes. The central box is fixed to the wall and the other two are joined on by a pair of metal beams, which allow them to move around the central section whilst remaining upright.
You can choose to have the shelves lined up vertically, horizontally or diagonally, which is likely what gives it its name: DreiX translates to Three X. And you can even give the thing a yank and see where it ends up.
If these could be bought, I’d give one to the biggest OCD sufferer in my life. Not only could they worry about old-school obsessions like alphabetizing and color-coding their books, but now they would have to consider the books’ weight to keep the shelves nicely balanced.
Apple has updated its Universal Dock for iPods and iPhones. Now, instead of being a $50 box full of plastic parts, it’s a $60 box of plastic and aluminum.
Gone is the old white remote, the one that was the exact size and shape of the little cookies that come with coffee in certain cheesy hotels, replaced by the hefty new aluminum model that comes with the AppleTV.
The plastic inserts are all still there, with adapters for the iPhones 3G/S and 4, all iPod Touches but for the first one, and the previous-generation Nano (the new touch-screen Nano is too small for a dock, it seems.
There is also one addition which should have been included from the beginning: a USB power adapter so you can charge the device as it plays it’s sweet music (or video, with yet another adapter kit).
Available now. And I have one question: why isn’t there a remote-control dock for the iPad, huh?
RIM clearly plans to use the Swedes' talent to beef up future versions of the BlackBerry user interface, which despite the addition of touchscreen tech in the last year still seems clunky and quaint compared to iOS, Android and Windows Phone 7. That could make future BlackBerry phones -- not to mention the upcoming Playbook tablet -- a whole lot more exciting.
That got us wondering: What might the future, TAT-enhanced BlackBerry UI look like?
We have no idea, but if these concept videos produced by TAT are any indication, we're guessing your next BlackBerry might have:
A touch- and motion-sensitive UI that reponds to your body's movement as well as your fingers on the screen
Eye-tracking technology to provide enhanced 3-D effects
A slicker, easier-to-manage interface for switching between multiple apps
Eye-popping 2-D and 3-D visuals
What do you think the future holds for BlackBerry? Let us know in the comments.
This page: TAT's vision of the "Future of Screen Technology" video (also embedded below) includes some pretty eye-popping examples of touchscreens embedded into every aspect of daily life. A man wakes up and checks the news on a stretchable screen that starts out iPhone-sized, but which he pulls on to make it nearly iPad-sized. A woman brushes her teeth while reading headlines and checking her calendar on a touchscreen mirror. A man composes a sport publication on a translucent touchscreen display whose images he can flip around, so coworkers on the other side of the screen can see them. Cool stuff!
Over in the UK, something is happening that will bring cheer to the miserable, heavily-drinking denizens of that gray, cold land: Competition. To be precise, competition in iPad plans.
