Developer Inq Mobile has just announced a new version of a content discovery app, Material, now available for iOS users as well as those on Android. It’s a free app that aims to sort through millions of sites to find stuff you’ve already showed an interest in, via Twitter and Facebook.
Material grabs all of the sites you’ve linked to, shared, and re-tweeted to deliver a personalized, magazine-style collection of the online ephemera that you’re already checking out, but all in one place.
The app has been on Android for a while now, and has just come to iOS with a newly re-designed app for the iPhone, dropping updates twice a day to your chosen device.
Like bicycle streamers or rum, adding a wifi hotspot to pretty much anything will make it exponentially better. The tiny new Hyper iUSBPort Mini is a great example of this: It’s a $90 USB drive with a built-in WiFi hotspot that can be used to share files or stream movies or songs to an iOS or Android device.
One tip for the device’s marketing team though: Please come up with a better name.
While the iPhone 5C will certainly be cheaper than Apple’s high-end iPhone 5S, it’s likely to be too expensive still for many in emerging markets. But smartphone clone specialists Goophone already have an Android-powered alternative in the pipeline that will sell for just $100 in China.
Called the “i5C,” the device looks almost identical to the real iPhone 5C based on the leaks we’ve seen. Just don’t expect a Retina display.
Anyone dismissing the Sony MDR-X10 headphones as simply yet another bombastic, over-the-top, celebrity-designed fashion statement for teenage bass junkies would be wrong. Easily forgiven, but wrong.
While most of those descriptive terms ring true — the big, lurid cans apparently received design input from none other than big, lurid entertainment personality Simon Cowell, and they’re definitely aimed toward the bass-obsessed — the X10s differ significantly from their brethren, and actually stand out prominently against an ocean of boom.
In other words, if you’re looking for bass-heavy headphones, this is your first stop; but even if you’re not, the X10s are so good they might win you over anyway.
I love the Google Glass interface and I think it should be everywhere.
This interface is similar to a blog in that the basic organizing principle is time. When you tap the side of the Glass headset or tilt your head up, you’re greeted with the “right now” screen, which literally shows the time right now.
Scrolling to the left takes you into the future (today’s weather, directions to places Google Now thinks you might want to go, today’s birthdays, today’s weather highs and lows, your calendar and at the very end, Settings for Glass).
Scrolling to the right takes you into the past. The first item you encounter is the last thing you did — the last picture or video you took, the last message that came in, that sort of thing. The second card is the next-to-the-last thing that happened, and so on into the past.
Each of these items, of course, is a “card,” which has its own behavior when you tap and drill down. For example, if you’re looking at a photo you took, taping the touchpad offers up the options to Share or Delete. If you choose share, you’re given people and Google+ circles, again in reverse chronological order from the most recently used.
The interface is wonderful because it’s highly compatible with human psychology. We tend to organize discreet events in our lives in terms of time, both future and past. The human mind loves linearity based on time. That’s why blogs and social networks are popular.
This, combined with voice, through which we can conjure up anything out of time sequence and thereby insert it into the timeline, is a truly great user interface, and should be on many devices.
Microsoft has today announced that chief executive officer Steve Ballmer will retire “within the next 12 months.” Ballmer will continue to carry out his role while the company seeks a successor, aiding its transformation into a devices and services company — but he will depart once a suitable replacement is found.
I don’t think I’ve ever downloaded an app that comes with an instruction manual, but it seems BlackBerry felt the need to create one for its upcoming BBM releases for Android and iOS. We’re expecting the apps themselves to arrive any day now, but the user guides have been leaked and they are already available for reading online.
Google clearly has high hopes for Google Glass, and it’s confident that in the future, we’ll all be wearing one. In fact, you may be able to pick one up in your local Best Buy when you pop in for that new Justin Bieber CD. Rumor has it Google is renting 6,000 square feet of floor space inside every Best Buy store next year just to sell its new wearable tech.
Thieves in San Francisco are reportedly forming teams and developing new ways to steal your smartphone. The various schemes they’ve devised usually employ one person to create a distraction while another nabs your device and takes off with it. But a more recent trend uses a phony good Samaritan who will actually return your device in the hope of receiving a reward.
Dragon Age and its sequel (cleverly named Dragon Age 2) have provided PC and console gamers with deep, solid role playing set in an original fantasy world with engaging characters and a wide array of choices to make in storytelling and combat.
While the overarching story is what makes these games work so very well, the combat system, especially in the first game, is unique and compelling to play.
That makes the announcement of a new spinoff of the well-reviewed series, coming to Google Play and iTunes this fall, pretty darn spiffy, as Heroes of Dragon Age seems to focus solely on combat.
Google has updated its Google Maps apps for Android and iOS to add real-time incident reports from the Waze community. This means that when Waze users — or “Wazers” as they like to be called — report accidents, construction, road closures, and other delays, the alerts will be displayed inside Google Maps as well as Waze.
Dungeons and Dragons, the venerable tabletop role playing game that arguably started it all, is changing. Currently owned and operated by Wizards of the Coast, the entire game universe is transitioning from the 4th Edition rule sets to what they’re calling D&D Next, a holy grail of streamlined gameplay rules and mechanics that the publisher hopes to spread to all current media, including video games.
It’s with that bit of background that DeNA/Mobage announced the first teaser trailer for a mobile version of Dungeons and Dragons called “Arena of War.” Check it out.
The good people at Motorola will probably clock me in the head with a Droid Maxx battery for saying this, but shouldn’t Google open-source Moto X technology?
We first heard that Samsung may be planning to announce its new “Galaxy Gear” smartwatch at its September 4 Galaxy Note III eventearlier this month, but the rumor just got even stronger after it was confirmed by Bloomberg’s reliable sources.
They claim that the South Korean electronics giant will unveil a “wristwatch-like smartphone” powered by Android that will go head-to-head with the new Sony SmartWatch 2, and a potentially competing product from Apple, one of Samsung’s biggest rivals.
Almost half of the top 50 apps on iPad are unavailable or have not been optimized for competing devices that run Google’s Android operating system. That’s according to a new report from Canalys, which believes Google should be doing more to encourage top developers to build high-quality tablet apps for its platform.
But the company has today confirmed that it is on track to launch 4G during the fourth quarter of this year, and that it will come at no extra cost to consumers.
Dots is a ridiculously fun, simple game that has taken iPhone and iPad owners by storm (and reduced my fingertips down to bleeding little nubs). In fact, the game has been downloaded more than 5 million times and played almost a billion times in less than four months.
Wouldn’t you like to get that on Android and Kindle Fire? Sure you would. Good news! It’s coming to Google Play today. And a new game mode is coming to all devices, including iPhones.
Even without taking into account the unique, astonishing way it wirelessly connects with a smartphone, the Vaavud wind meter is pretty neat little gadget.
It will measure wind speeds up to 25 meters/second (the Vaavud is Danish, hence the metric measurements and strange name), can share recorded data with the world through its free app—and it’s been tested for accuracy in a wind tunnel.
But the real stunner about the Vaavud is that it doesn’t use Bluetooth, Wi-Fi or any other power-draining wireless radio to connect. Instead, it uses magnets.
After Google announced Hangouts at Google I/O back in June, we suspected that Google+ Messenger’s days were numbered — and we were right. In a new Google+ update rolling out now on Android, Google is killing Google+ Messenger for good, while the iOS version will get the chop at a later date.
It had to happen eventually, but now that it has, it feels weird: smartphones are now officially outselling dumb feature phones internationally for the first time ever. And what made it happen? Cheap Android phones.
O2 has today confirmed the price of its 4G price plans ahead of their rollout next Thursday, August 29. The carrier’s SIM-only plans will start from £26 ($40) per month, while those that are tied to a 4G handset start from £32 ($49) per month. All of O2’s 4G plans will also come bundled with free music, sport, and game content.
Facebook is reportedly working on a brand new app that’ll be strictly for celebrities. The app will allow the famous to better interact with fans in the hope that more will be encouraged to use the social network for sharing. It’s currently in testing with a small group of famous people, according to sources familiar with the project.
Steve Cheney is a pretty smart guy, with a serious background in technology and mobile marketing, both as a former TechCrunch author and the current head of business development for iOS and Android chat app, GroupMe.
Cheney’s written a fairly strong analysis of the current Apple/Android war for supremacy and, as he sees it, there’s a clear advantage for Apple in the actual mobile device arena. Cheney calls it “bang per watt,” and he attributes Apple’s dominance here to the vise-like grip the Cupertino company has on the vertical integration of hardware and software.
Over the last few years we’ve seen Apple’s competition start to really take it to Cupertino in TV ads. Sometimes it seems petty but according to Samsung’s marketing chief, Arno Lenior, the tsunami of ads mocking Apple fans were a huge boon for the company.
In an interview with AdNews, Samsung’s Lenior says that the ads were brilliant because they got Apple fanboys and Samsung fans to bash with one another over which beloved “brand” is better:
Continuing its expansion at roughly the same pace as the known universe, Facebook has just announced that they have acquired Mobile Technologies, the developer of Jibbigo, a universal translator app for Android and iOS.
