Eli Milchman - page 30

What’s been rumor, speculation and a good way to fill blog space is now…well, still all of the above; but the rumors are beginning to sound more and more like hard fact — that Verizon has bagged the iPhone.

Just days after the iPhone arrived at Apple stores, and one day after on the same day it hit AT&T’s outlets, Bloomberg News says “two people familiar with the plans” claim that Verizon will begin selling iPhones next year in January. The two sources spoke anonymously; not surprisingly, neither Bloomberg News nor anyone else running the story has been able to get an official comment from either Apple or Verizon.

When a buddy of mine suggested (insisted, actually) I try using HeyTell, my first feeling was that using it was like having a ridiculously slow-mo phone conversation: short staccato bursts of talking interspersed by long, frustrating periods of having to wait for a response.

Well, that feeling lasted all of about 10 minutes; the more I played with it, the more I realized that — besides the fact that I could already call, text, tweet, email, IM and use Facebook — yep, here’s another method I’ll use semi-regularly to blab with.

This new gadget is called a “Bringrr,” but we think that’s only because “Hey, Don’t Leave The Prototype in a Bar Next Time, Dumbass Device” wouldn’t fit on the box:

Pair the little Bluetooth-equipped plug with a phone, pop it into a car’s cigarette-lighter port, and it’ll have a conniption (alarm, flashing lights) if the car is started without the phone in close proximity.

Bringrr is $35.

Still haven’t gotten that geeky dad of yours anything for Father’s Day? Here’s a late last-minute suggestion: Run out to your local bookshop and grab a copy of 62 Projects To Make With A Dead Computer. It’s a sort of $15 Maker Faire for dummies that’ll keep him busy for months, get rid of some of that junk lying around and maybe save him a little moolah in the process.

I’ve never been quite convinced about the prudence of combining the spatial-awareness requirements of augmented-reality iPhone activities with benders — but if I were in NYC, this pretty cool use of AR might just have made me risk barfing all over my iPhone.

Metaio, the company behind augmented-reality app Junaio, has partnered with the iconic NYC nightlife rag TimeOut New York (TONY) to point users toward hot offers at bars throughout the city via a new “TONY Summer Drinking channel,” included in the 2.0 version of the free app. Of course, tips on where to find these deals is available via less hip methods — aka “the Internets” — but that’s so 2009.

Oh, and keep your eyes peeled next week for another surprise from Junaio.

The flow of apps through the App Store is thicker than a swarm of locusts in a Biblical plague these days (though somewhat less icky, and considerably more beneficial).

So on August 24-26, a bunch of app developers and the sort will gather in the desert at the Paris Las Vegas Hotel & Casino for the inaugural Appcon to discuss mobile app development across all major platforms, hear speakers from, for example, Chicago-based NAVTEQ (the guys who provide all those cool maps for the likes of Garmin and Magellan), and probably indulge a little too much at all-you-can-eat buffets and the craps table.

And who knows — we might be seeing the birth of something close to an E3 if the importance and revenue gathering ability of the app market continues on its upward trajectory, right?

If, like me, you walk around all day executing random karate hand-chops to the theme of Mission: Impossible running through your head, then you might consider adding this next app to your quiver.

Just like the messages sent to IMF (Impossible Mission Force, for all you non-spies),  Self-Destructing Message will erase evidence of clandestine texts, on both the sender’s phone, and the recipient’s — just so long as you both have a copy of the app. It also has a “black book” feature that hides the actual identities of your contacts.

My birthplace, South Africa, has shared some cool stuff with the world. Rooibos tea, Ladysmith Black Mambazo, Dave Matthews, J.R.R. Tolkien — all hail from South Africa.

However, judging by comments I’ve encountered in the media, on Facebook, in bars, on the phone and elsewhere, there seems to be a large contingent of ungrateful sods who are less than enamored with the country’s latest gift — the Vuvuzela horn (if you’ve watched a World Cup match, it’s the reason for that noise in the background that sounds like a swarm of apoplectic bees climbing up into your head through your nose).

That sentiment has spilled over to the iPhone/iPad, because there’s now a $1 app — Vuvuzaga — that joins the throng of protests against the yellow horn, this time in the form of a game that lets the user wander around a 3D arena hunting down horn-blowers. Of course, there’s also a variety of free apps that transform your iDevice into a Vuvuzela, should you wish to see how well your iPad mimics a frisbee when grabbed from your hands and flung out the window by the person sitting next to you.

With Motorola behind one of the main challengers to the iPhone (at least, the current ones, anyway — the emerging iPhone 4, for now, seems fairly peerless), one doesn’t get much chance to observe the iPhone and the Motorola M in close proximity outside, perhaps, some smartphone cage match, or on the bedside table of two star-crossed lovers.

Not content with the standard definition on their X170 action-cam, Drift Innovation has just revealed their new HD version, capable of thrilling the pants off viewers with first-person shenanigans rendered in 1080p.

The 170-degree viewing-angle-lensed HD170 — kudos to their marketing department for the refreshingly self-explanatory name — also sports a ton of slick features: RF remote, 300-degree rotating lens, night-mode, an LCD screen and more mounts than a Texas rodeo competition.

The HD170 will be available in late July for $330.

There’s no shortage of wisecracking about the iPad; its introduction left us wading through a glut of humor (both insipid and genuinely funny). Wisecracking from the iPad, however, is much rarer.

That’s Adam Kontras — also known as the guy with the longest-running vlog, now plugging along for ten years — in the clip above, arguing with his iPad about which one of them is the “iPad comedian,” not coincidentally also the name of his new project.

After watching the back-and-forth, we’re still not clear which of the two can claim the title — but we’re pretty certain the whole thing is hilarious.

Update: Some of you may have noticed the name of Adam’s gig is actually “The iPad Comic,” and not the “iPad Comdedian” as claimed above; laughter can be disorienting.

Apps that use GPS to peg a user’s location on a map are nothing new — but an app that works with the user’s own maps — of say a college campus, airport terminals or the sprawling San Diego Zoo — now that’s a pretty neat trick.

Snap + Map by FogTechnologies is a $2 app that lets you does exactly that, by superimposing your GPS location onto a user-defined map — either downloaded in the form of a pdf or from a picture taken with the iPhone’s camera. The app calibrates the iPhone’s GPS receiver with the map by asking you to enter your current location, then move a short distance and enter it again. Of course, much of this app’s usefulness depends on the iPhone’s somewhat spotty GPS capabilities.

Brilliant idea though — especially for ephemeral locations like Burning Man, where I can totally envision this app saving my life during my next visit; possibly quite literally.

Take Smule’s Glee or I Am T-Pain popstar-forging apps, strip away the Auto-Tune (and some of the polish), stir in a little Simon Cowell and bam — you’ve got Music Idol, a dollar-app that creates a virtual American Idol community on the iPhone, complete with the ability to rate other would-be star’s performances.

The app — which has also been formatted for the iPad —  gives users the ability to upload 20-second performance, then show off their talents through the app’s searchable database or post clips to the user’s Facebook page. The developer claims a 2000-member user-base (culled partly from an earlier version of the app called Riff Raters).

While the Smule apps are collaborative in nature, this one seems like more of a way to introduce the world to your unique talents — or perhaps invite a hailstorm of abuse. Either way. to prod talent in the app’s direction, the developer is giving away $10 iTunes gift cards every week.

Y’know those popular kids in high school? The ones who get along with everyone, are easy on the eyes, fun to hang out with, good at everything without being exceptional in any one area, and don’t ever seem to run out of energy?

That’s Casio’s EX-H10. Aside from one ridiculously high-performing attribute, the EX-H10 isn’t really exceptional in any one arena; rather, this point-n-shoot is a collection of quality and smart features brought together in a relatively high-value, good looking — if stoutish — container.

Panasonic just announced the addition of a new wide-angle, 5x zoom camera to their line, the slim Lumix FX75.

Somewhat notable here is the ultra-wide 24mm lens equivalent on this camera, but we like the wide-open f2.2 aperture even more — definitely on the fast side of the spectrum for a PnS, and pretty nifty for creating shots with a shallow depth-of-field. A souped-up Venus Engine HD II image processor should help keep things snappy, and the camera also shoots HD video video in AVCHD Lite at 720p and 30 fps. And of course, like the other models toward the high-end of Panasonic’s range, the FX75 is equipped with a Leica lens.

Panasonic also festively included a “Happy Mode” in the FX75, a setting that adjusts the brightness, saturation and color to ramp up an image’s cheeriness (presumably for tourists visiting London). No word yet on ship date or pricing.

On the increasingly small off chance your computer doesn’t have it’s own webcam (or you’ve blowtorched it because those aliens from Tau Ceti II were spying on you), German developer Drahtwerk has a clever solution: an app that lets you turn your iPhone into a wifi-tethered webcam.

iWebcamera ($5) includes a pause-mode, two quality options and a “send drivers by e-mail feature,” which is apparently some BS that Windows users need to deal with.

The bad news is that iWebcamera is only for Windows boxes; the good news is it’ll work with any iPhone, even the Original.

Skype’s been teasing us with the promise of this for a while now, and we postulated they’d add the feature after Apple revealed iPhone OS 4 would include background VoIP — and yesterday it finally arrived: Skype’s iPhone app now works over a 3G network.

No, you can’t play as one of Bruce Lee’s more credible doppelgangers — the venerable Tekken series’ whip-quick Marshall Law — until Namco gets its act together and releases an iPhone version. But y’know what — nothing compares to the real thing.

Bruce Lee Dragon Warrior — which according to its press release has been given the official stamp of approval from the Bruce Lee Foundation (run by Lee’s daughter, Shannon) and even models the computer-generated Lee using motion capture from one of Lee’s students — is probably as close to Enter The Dragon as anything on the iPhone or iPad is going to get. At $5, the iPhone version’s a little on the pricey side, but the reverse is true for the iPad’s HD version — which is, oddly enough, also $5.

And if we can work up enough nerve to channel Bruce through one of our devices, you might just see a review here soon.

It’s always bugged me that I can’t change my Twitter account settings, see who I’m following/being followed by or tweak my bio on my iPhone without the pain of having to visit Twitter’s website.

Enter Tweep: it lets the power-tweeter do all that behind-the-curtain stuff, and more — fine-tune location settings, examine fellow tweeps with excruciating detail and a whole bunch of other stuff that, frankly, I’ll never mess with. About the only thing it doesn’t let the user do is tweet.

And though Tweep has actually been around for a few months now, the developer has just cut its price from $5 to free, as a promotional ploy to coincide with the app’s  support of the iPad.

Update: As noted by Toolate in the comment section, it should be plain to any daft twit (meaning me) that many of the functions offered by Tweeps are actually available through Twitter’s official iPhone app (although the more obscure functions, like fine-tuning how accurately tweets report a user’s location, are not available on Twitter for iPhone).

Raise your hand if, like me, you think iPad apps like Netflix are far too blithe about letting users indulge their every movie-viewing whim, allowing access to videos whenever they damn-well please.

Put your hands down. You’re not like me at all. But I know there are movie purists out there for whom cinema is an experience, rather than just two hours spent killing time while waiting for a significant other’s root canal to finish.

For the purists, then: Cinema for iPad, a $3 app that screens movies on its own schedule, with a virtual “theatre lobby” that lets users discuss the movie they’ve just experienced. Once the app is purchased, the movies are free, but we’ve no clue what the developer‘s tastes are like, or how frequently the movies are rotated.

We’ve raved about Hippo Remote Pro so enthusiastically, one would think it were made of gold-pressed latinum; that’s because it’s probably one of the (if not the) best soft-remote app currently available for the iPhone.

And now it’s better: Its developers have added a heavily customizable gamepad function — cool for watching the life being sucked from that annoying Blood Elf rogue on a 52-inch HDTV while laying about on the couch with a mojito (or a rootbeer float, if you’re so inclined/underaged). Of course, that’s in additon to the trackpad function and oodles of application-specific profiles for Hulu, Plex, Chrome, and the rest it already comes with.

Hippo Remote Pro is $5; there’re also Basic ($2) and free versions, but neither of those include the gamepad.

In the biggest iPhone OS news since Apple unveiled the fourth iteration of the phone’s OS — and as a possible result of the rumored, forthcoming pitched battle between AT&T and Verizon for the souls of iPhone users — it looks as though the iPhone will now gain the ability to tether.

The screencaps above, which floated up in a developer’s forum, are clear evidence that Internet tethering through the iPhone will likely now be supported with the release of OS 4.0.

I’ll eat any old crap — and I mean, any; even hot dogs from an NYC hotdog stand.

But not everyone is as cavalier about what they put in their mouths. Try being vegetarian for a bit, or eating only food that is halal — Islamic law that describes how food must be prepared — and things get significantly more complicated (but yeah, accepting that NYC hotdog stand visits are a no-no is probably a good place to start). So an Auckland, New Zealand-based developer created two slightly different apps that’ll make life easier in both cases.

Think of it as Craigslist — but on steroids that give it super-speed and spidey-senses, and without the alarming hey-why-is-hair-growing-there side effects.

Just like Craigslist, users can trade goods or services; but Anttenna (no, that’s not a typo) also leverages phone tech like geotagging to create local micro-marketplaces based on the location of users, and then connects them through social-network tool Twitter — which the app is built on — for more immediate buyer-seller communication than Craigslist’s increasingly snail-paced-seeming email system.

It doesn’t yet have the massive throng of participants that makes Craigslist such a powerhouse, and its sophistication may actually hurt it, as one of the appeals of Craigslist is its simplicity. But who knows; a year or two from now, we may all be hearing things like “so hey, did you ant your old MacBook already?”