Google Glasses : A Prescription for Disaster

Google’s augmented reality glasses are said to look a lot like the Thump MP3 player glasses from Oakley.

If bad cell phone etiquette annoys you, then Google goggles might just put you over the edge. Within the blink of eye, tilt of the head, a wireless connection to the Internet, and a pair of Google Android-based goggles your know-it-all friend is guaranteed to drive you crazy with random facts over coffee or movie trivia (compliments of IMDB) at the Cineplex.

Google will debut digital glasses by the end of the year, according to the New York Times. That’s right: Android-based lenses overlaying your world with information like maps and data. We all knew this augmented reality product was eventually coming, but it is now looking literally like a disaster (or more) waiting to happen.

How They Work

Here's how you MIGHT look in the Google glasses....We’ll apparently pay between $250 and $600 for glasses with one computerized lens, PCWorld’s Daniel Ionescu noted earlier Wednesday. The lens will be a contextual heads-up display that can tell you, for instance, how far you are from your destination. They aren't designed for continuous wear, however.

Like Android phones, these goggles will be licensed to third-party companies and will use a 3G or 4G connection to download data. And how will you control the menus? By nodding and bobbing your head.

Watch out for that tree!

Early reports say that the glasses aren’t designed for everyday wear, but that’s akin to saying that smartphones aren’t meant to be carried all day or home computers were only for certain tasks--before we carried our smartphones all day and used home computers for most tasks. I doubt that Apple planned on people texting while walking, either.

Glasses are actually the final piece to Google’s mission: To know what a user doing every single moment of the day. The search giant already is unifying some 60-odd products into one log-in for continuous online tracking. And, as we reported last week, it’s enticing you to use Google to come up with those web passwords.

Yeah, the digital glasses will be pretty strange and, at worse, pretty dangerous. Here are the very likely problems with Google’s ambitious product.

Google’s power, however, comes from knowing everything you do online. By wearing Android-powered glasses, you’re giving Google unprecedented access to:

• Your location at all times
• Your most common interactions
• Your closest companions through facial recognition
• Your eating, shopping, and traveling habits

Remember the fiasco with the Google van snooping on people’s Wi-Fi? You can imagine us having that same conversation about Google recording our movements, our moments, and our life without permission.

Grand Theft Sunglasses

As some commenters have pointed out, glasses theft could definitely rise once these expensive specs come out. If so, that might parallel the high number of iPod and iPhone thefts that occurred when those technologies first arrived.

Worse, imagine being the boy or girl at school with computerized lenses. Aren’t four-eyed school kids getting harassed enough without wearing Lt. Commander Geordi La Forge eyewear?

Coupons 24 hours a day--Now in Your Eyes!

It’s all about location, location, location, and Google's goggles will have a direct bead on you 24 hours a day. On one end are Groupon, Living Social, and other mass-coupon services, and on the other are FourSquare, Gowalla, and other check-in companies. Google jumped into the middle of the fight last year with its Google Coupons app and, more recently, with Google Latitude check-ins.

Both Google Coupons and Google Latitude aren’t making much of a dent in the competition, but having tracking data on users 24/7 would be a huge coup for both services. It would be automatic check-ins, pushed suggestions, and coupons. Lots and lots of coupons.

It’s easy to picture a major food chain, like McDonald’s-owned Chipotle, paying for a top spot on your eyeglasses, kind of like an ad on Google search.

The message could offer you a coupon every time a Chipotle restaurant is within a mile radius (which, at least in my neighborhood, is often). The Times estimates that the glasses will be priced like high-end smartphones, so you can bet that cheaper, subsidized goggles will come along for those willing to see tons of ads throughout each and every day.

LG Optimus 3D Cube

The next generation of 3D smartphones has begun to drop here just one year after we first saw similar devices drop at Mobile World Congress 2011. It appears that LG will be the first big manufacturer to come back swinging with a new Optimus 3D, this time called the LG Optimus 3D Cube complete with 3D video editing. At the moment it appears that this device is only set to be released in Korea, but afterwards we can expect this handset to hit at least one carrier here in the United States – bet on it!

This device continues the trend of adding more and more letters to the name of a device in order to make it seem more awesome, this time actually improving the specifications along with the name though as well. What we’ve got here is a massive 4.3-inch IPS display for brightness and beastly sharpness, a dual-core 1.2GHz processor from what we must assume is Texas Instruments OMAP line once again, and a very similar shape to the last Optimus 3D model all around.

This time around though the device is much thinner than before, it measuring in at a tiny 126.8 x 67.4 x 9.6 mm, this including an NFC chip as well. This device is coming with Android 2.3 Gingerbread with no word on a timeframe for Ice Cream Sandwich and does include a custom user interface like the first 3D model from LG with lovely 3D glasses-free excellence across the display.

This device also works with the awesome LG Tag system which allows you to make groupings of settings then attach those settings to an NFC-activated label. You can then switch the way your phone looks and acts by simply placing it near the card with the NFC tag in it whenever you wish. In addition, the LG Optimus 3D Cube has full 3D video editing software as well as a 3D mapping application right out of the box.

Source:http://www.slashgear.com

Best features of OS X Mountain Lion

RemindersReminders is a new dedicated app in Mountain Lion that looks just like the iOS 5 app. A relatively bare-bones app, it lets you record reminders, to-do lists, grocery lists, and the like. You can set a reminder date, change priorities, shuttle information within lists, and sort tasks by date. Reminders seamlessly syncs between iOS, Google, and Yahoo Calendar, as well as the other OSX apps. This is a straightforward program, but once used, if you lose the capability you will miss it.

NotesAll operating systems for personal computing have some form of note-taking app, however crude. Apple has again lifted their Notes app directly from another Apple product, this time the iPad Notes app.

Using Notes in OSX is straightforward - a click opens a note, while a double click opens a note in a standalone window which stays open even when you quit Notes. The standalone window can be set to stay on top of the screen stack.

Notes has flexible formatting choices, and also allows you to insert inline images and links. Your notes sync automatically with iCloud, and Notes can also be set up to also sync with Gmail, Yahoo, and other services that support notes.

NotificationsIt took what seemed like a lifetime to get a Notification Center onto iOS, and now here comes one for OS X Mountain Lion as well. It will work in a similar manner to its mobile counterpart with notifications being linked to their corresponding application: Click on it, the app opens and you can take care of whatever it is you need to look at. The notifications are said to only appear on screen for a brief time to minimize how much they intrude on whatever else you may be doing.

Twitter IntegrationApple has integrated Twitter into OS X Mountain Lion, the next-generation operating system for Macs announced Thursday and slated for summer release. The decision has profound implications for Twitter and will, should recent history repeat itself, help it dramatically increase signups and tweet volume across the world.

Twitter will be baked into the new Mac operating system in much the same way that is weaved into the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad experience today.

After signing into Twitter once, members can tweet links, photos, and content from the share button built into Apple’s Safari, Notes, Reminders, Photo Booth, and iPhone apps, and from third-party apps that update to support the integration. Twitterers will also receive notifications for Twitter mentions and direct messages on the desktop, and notifications will appear in the new Mountain Lion Notification Center.

iCloud integrationOne of the major new features in OS X Mountain Lion is greater integration with iCloud, with one of the additions being new Documents in the Cloud functionality. As noted by John Gruber, the feature expands significantly on the existing feature that allows limited syncing and transfer of iWork documents across their iOS devices and Macs.

Apple is of course already extending this functionality beyond iWork in OS X Mountain Lion, with the iCloud file storage showing up in other apps such as TextEdit. Apple is also releasing APIs to allow third-party apps to take advantage of the feature.

The functionality is naturally being compared to that of Dropbox, which allows users to save files directly to their Dropbox accounts for access anywhere, but Apple's new iCloud solution offers the advantage of displaying only those files intended for use with the app being used, helping to filter the list of documents and offering iOS-like folder organization of files.

Game CenterThe true purpose of most computers is, of course, testing one's skills in any one of a number of directions by playing games.

Apple reports that their social gaming network has over 100 million registered users who are provided with access to some 20,000 Game Center-enabled games. This community is only expected to grow now that the MacBook is getting Game Center support. MacBook gamers will now be able to find new games and challenge friends to play live multiplayer games, whether they're on a Mac, iPhone, iPad or iPod touch.

With the Game Kit APIs tapping into the same services as Game Center on iOS, developers will be able to create multiplayer games that work across Mac, iPhone, iPad and iPod touch. Expect mass porting of iOS games to Mountain Lion this year.

Share SheetsApple deeply integrated Twitter tools into iOS 5, and now it’s carrying that thinking over to Mac OS X. While Twitter won’t be the only sharing tool getting some love in the new “Share Sheets,” you will find lots of ways to share information in just about every Mac OS X Mountain Lion app. You can post images to Flickr, send videos to Vimeo or share Web pages from Safari with ease from here on out.

AirPlay MirroringConnecting your computer to a TV has been a nightmare in the past, usually involving a mess of cables. iOS 5 simplified that process for those who use Apple’s mobile devices, and now it’s coming to the Macs as well. You’ll now be able to project your computer’s desktop to a TV connected to an Apple TV and you’re off to the races. Whether it be wanting to use a gigantic monitor, showing a presentation in Keynote or sharing a family vacation video, a lot of the work will now be removed from getting that content and information to the TV screen.

Unified software update into Mac App StoreWhere one would normally hit “Software Update” from the Apple logo to update their machine with bug fixes, software updates, and even entire operating systems, the Mac App Store will become the central hub to all necessary updates.

The Mac App Store, introduced when the recently announced operating system’s predecessor ‘Lion’ was first thrust into the media limelight, was reserved for Apple products and third-party developer applications. It was in effect what iTunes was for music, but for applications and games.

GatekeeperOS X, like most of the Mac operating systems, has a reputation for being resistant to malware, viruses, worms, Trojans, backdoors, keyloggers, and the like. This resistance is partly due to program security, and partly due to the limited use of OS X compared to larger-scale targets - ie. Windows. However, Apple does take security concerns seriously. In adding Gatekeeper to Mountain Lion, Apple allows users to restrict the downloading and executing of unvetted apps.



There are three levels of security. The strongest is to allow access only to apps obtained from the Mac App Store. The next level limits access to the Mac App Store and the apps of vetted developers. The lowest level is essentially no added security, allowing apps to be downloaded from anywhere. Gatekeeper is still being tweaked to make it easy for users to understand and use without simply accepting the default settings.

What (or who) is a vetted developer? Called an "identified" developer by Apple, such a person simply has to sign up as a Mac app developer and pay a fee of US$99 per year. The apps of an identified developer are not screened or tested by Apple, so the additional security amounts to knowing that Apple will pull the credentials of a developer who issues bad apps,

Will Apple do this on the first bad app? Will they require a pattern of bad apps? Will requirements differ for major app developers as compared to a one-off developer? These and other questions concerning how Apple will control Gatekeeper's access to apps are somewhat controversial, and will in the end determine if Gatekeeper is a benefit or a detriment to OSX.

Other new features in OSX Mountain Lion include a Chinese language GUI, a search/URL bar for internet searches, similar to that found in Google Chrome, a VIP mail area for your favorite contacts, similar to Priority Inbox in Gmail, and a Re-open windows setting for Shutdown and Restart commands.

The operating speed of Lion and Mountain Lion are reported to be equivalent, but startup and shutdown speeds of Mountain Lion are currently considerably slower than those of Lion. This difference may reflect the beta status of Mountain Lion. Battery life is the same with the two OSX versions.

In summary, Mountain Lion is an incremental evolution of Lion, rather than an OS as different as Windows 8 will be compared to Windows 7. Apple has shipped some 20 million copies of Lion, many of which will probably be upgraded in turn to Mountain Lion, at a very low price point

Apple released a preview version of its new Macintosh operating system on Thursday, bringing some features of the iPad to the personal computer.

The Cupertino, California-based company said the updated operating system, called Mountain Lion, will be available to Macintosh developers immediately and Mac owners can upgrade to the new software in late summer.

Some of the highlighted features of the upcoming OS X Mountain Lion are -

MessagesMessages is a little like iChat, but it lets you send messages to iOS devices via iMessage, and if you have Mac OS X 10.7.3 on your computer, you can actually start using the Messages beta today. Just download it, install it, and start keeping your messages in sync across all your Apple devices.

source:http://www.hindustantimes.com

Kindle Fire Vs. iPad 2: Tablet Troubles

FixYa, a troubleshooting community website, has compiled an index of the most prevalent issues reported by users of Amazon's Kindle Fire and Apple's iPad 2.

Whether issues identified affect 1 in 100, 1 in 1,000, or 1 in a 1,000,000 iPad or Kindle buyers isn't clear. A spokesperson for FixYa said that its report doesn't try to make that determination.

But there may be some value in the FixYa's Tablet Index nonetheless, to give potential device buyers a sense of the most commonly reported problems. The company claims that its index was generated from tens of thousands of issues posted to the community Q&A site.

[ Apple's keeping specs on its upcoming iPad 3 close at hand. Read iPad 3: 9 Things We Really Want. ]

In general, the iPad 2 comes out ahead of the Kindle, which perhaps should be expected given the price differential. The iPad 2 starts at $499 while the Kindle Fire sells for $199. There is some truth to the notion that you get what you pay for.

FixYa says that the Kindle is plagued by more problems and is less secure than the iPad 2, due to lack of password protection. The company notes that Wi-Fi connectivity can be a problem for both devices, but more so for the Kindle Fire. The iPad 2 is more customizable than the Kindle Fire but buying things is easier on the Kindle Fire (that includes inadvertent purchases, which presumably isn't desirable).

For the Kindle Fire, the top complains are as follows:

Can't Turn Off One-Click Shopping (30%)
Why is this not surprising? FixYa says there's not much one can do to get around this other than setting up a Wi-Fi network password. Amazon is said to be working on a fix.

Wi-Fi Connection Issues (25%)
FixYa says this is a significant problem, given that the Kindle doesn't have a cellular connectivity option. The report suggests upgrading Kindle's software to Version 6.1 or 6.2, resetting one's router before logging on, and setting up a static IP address for one's Kindle Fire through the Advanced Settings menu.

No Parental Settings (15%)
FixYa again suggests setting a Wi-Fi password to deny network access to children and also advises parents to be more careful about leaving their Kindle Fire tablets lying around the house. Promises of punitive action may also have the desired effect.

Touch Troubles (15%)
Dissatisfaction with the precision of the Kindle Fire's registration of touch events also represented 15% of complaints.

USB Issues (10%)
About a tenth of the complaints had to do with trouble users had connecting their Kindle Fire tablets to their computers. FixYa suggests trying a different USB port--keyboard USB ports can be flaky or may lack power--or resetting the Kindle Fire or restarting the computer with the Kindle Fire attached.

Users of the iPad reported a different set of problems:

Wi-Fi Connection Issues (35%)
Like Kindle Fire owners, iPad owners report occasional Wi-Fi problems. While it could argued that this is a user problem rather than a technical flaw, FixYa offers some common remedies: turning Wi-Fi off and then on again; renewing the device's DHCP lease; selecting "Forget This Network" in the Wi-Fi Networks settings panel and then reconnecting; and selecting "Reset Network Settings" from the General>Reset settings panel.

LED Display Issues (15%)
FixYa suggests that while this is a hardware issue, users can minimize backlight bleeding by selecting a screen brightness appropriate for the lighting in their environment.

Microphone Quality (15%)
Complaints about the iPad's microphone can be found in Apple's support forums and have been documented elsewhere. Possible fixes: Hope your iPad 2 doesn't have this problem or wait for the iPad 3, which should be along shortly.

USB Issues (10%)
As with the Kindle Fire, USB connections aren't as reliable as one might hope. Powering devices off and on and plugging cables into a different USB port, preferably one with power, may be your best bet.

Screen Issues (10%)
iPads sometimes have screen problems. Not a lot, or Apple wouldn't have sold so many iPads. But for those unlucky enough to have received a bad unit, the Apple Store is your best bet. Screens and display electronics are not easy-to-fix components. 

source:http://informationweek.com

Touchscreen that works inside your pockets

Researchers have developed a prototype for a touchscreen that can allow its users to send text messages even when it is kept inside a jacket or pants pocket.

The stealthy screen works when it is touched through the fabric, whether it is silk, cotton or even thick fleece, the Sydney Morning Herald reported.

In classes or meetings of the future, with your hands tucked underneath the conference table or desk, the user may rest a fingertip tactfully on the pocket that holds the touch screen and handle a call by tracing a message like “Running late. In a mtg.” on the fabric above the hidden screen.

The touch screen will comprehend the message - it has a program to decode handwriting, even of the scrawling sort.

So even while a person is writing on his pocket, he can maintain polite eye contact with the group, no longer betrayed by those telltale downward gazes necessary to text with a standard screen.

The technology, called PocketTouch, is the brainchild of Microsoft researchers Scott Saponas and Hrvoje Benko with Chris Harrison, a PhD student at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

The prototype uses sensors similar to those used in most touch screens, and is mounted on the back of a smartphone case.

“There are a lot of situations where this technology could be useful,” said Jeffrey Bigham, an assistant professor in the computer science department at the University of Rochester, who chaired a conference panel on computer user interfaces where PocketTouch was demonstrated.

“It’s a way to send short messages when it is not socially appropriate to fish out your device,” he said, or in many other instances when people simply don''t want to go to the trouble of removing a device from a pocket.

“Most touch screens are calibrated in a static way, only responding to direct touch with a finger, and rejecting a slightly different signal,” Benko added.

On the contrary, PocketTouch calibrates continuously, adapting to different kinds of fabrics.

source: The Times of India