The Rise of the Super Smartphone - Better processors, software and screens due on devices that mimic PCs
Samsung
Samsung’s Wave is the company’s first smartphone using Samung’s new operating system, called “bada.” The Wave, announced in February, also has an FM radio, as well as “virtual 5.1 surround sound” and can record high-definition video. Oh, yeah — you can use it to make calls, too.
It’s one thing to DVR your favorite show or the big game when you’re stuck late at work, but what if you won’t be going home later that night, or even that week? When travel takes you far, whether for work or pleasure, you still need to see your local teams or that award-winning home video sitting in your DVD player.
The Slingbox Pro-HD allows you to control and watch video from a gaggle of high-definition* and standard-definition sources, including your cable box, DVR or DVD (Blu-ray too!) player, all through the magic of the Internet. You can tune in from your laptop or mobile device and even access couch-potato features like the SlingRemote, which looks and works exactly like the remote control you have at home, and the Live Video Buffer*, which allows up to 60 minutes of DVR-like program-editing.
Using a Slingbox, you can watch TV through your Windows Mobile device, BlackBerry, Palm, Symbian or iPhone using the SlingPlayer Mobile application (sold separately). Fret not, Android users: Sling is hard at work on an application for you too.
*Some features, including HD viewing and the Live Video Buffer, are supported only on Windows machines, though Mac support is reportedly on the way.
Clear out your bookmarks. You’re going to need the space for 50 offerings that are indispensable to navigating, enjoying yourself, shopping or just killing time on the Web.
Computers don’t handle visual imagery with the same native ease with which they parse text or crunch numbers. Flickr was the first site to solve this problem with something called collaborative tagging. The idea is that if everyone is allowed to tag everyone else’s uploaded photos, then a rough-and-ready categorization will naturally emerge from the wisdom of the crowd. It works because it has to — there aren’t enough librarians in the world to look after Flickr’s archive of 3 billion photos, much less file them away for future reference. But it also works because the many really is smarter than the sum of its parts. The Library of Congress has even started to poll the Flickr hive mind when cataloging its own photos.
The countdown is almost among us. Friday marks one week until we get all holly and jolly for a day, and if you’re anything like us, you’re not anywhere close to being done buying gifts. (Note: This is where we come in.) If you’re in search of a gift for your geek, (young and old, guys and gals) we’ve got a few ideas. We even found the perfect nerd wrapping paper (Robots! Zombies!) to boot.
And if you need even more assistance, we put together a list of the best apps to get you through the rest of the holiday shopping season.
Google has updated their Google Sync app to give iPhone and Windows Mobile users the ability to push-sync their Google Calendar and Contacts wirelessly, just like Microsoft’s Exchange OTA push feature.
