Recently I have personally upgraded from an iPhone 4 to a Galaxy SIII and I must admit I love this phone. I was a passionate iPhone advocate for many years but there is just no comparison to the control and features that the android OS to what the iOS currently offers. I don’t want to get into a mobile phone operating system rant right now, I just want to talk about this cool little smartphone accessory I ran across that will make all smartphone owners happy no matter what phone they own.
Portable Fast Action Kick Stand For Any Smartphone
There are many cool cases for different phones that will allow you to add a kickstand to your phone. This allows you to set the phone down and display it like a small monitor on a tabletop while you view videos or other content. The Evo has had a kickstand built in for a few generations, but not many other phones have ever offered this simple but powerful feature. The Flexi allows you to simply add a suction cup to the back side of any phone and use it as a portable stand for the phone. Like I said simple, but genius!
Check out this video to see the Flexi in action and me stumble through my first video in some time.
These are really cheap and are great to keep in your pocket or just your travel bag. If you like to watch movies and TV shows on your phone, this is definitely a must have and for a few bucks you simply can’t go wrong. Please leave your thoughts on this flexible rubber phone stand and let others know your own experience using such devices below.
Google I/O 2012 started yesterday and there are a lot of cool new gadgets, features and more coming your way all thanks to Google. The devices that were released were not so much of a big surprise considering most of the information was already leaked on the internet before the actual presentation took place. This doesn’t mean that Google doesn’t have some more tricks up their sleeves for the coming days of this developer conference. Today, the second day of the conference, there were a couple more newsworthy releases too, so go ahead and keep reading to see what is new from Google.
Along with all sorts of amazing updates to the android os, they have also made some new updates to how application updates work on the Android Market. Now when you update an app, you don’t have to download the whole file, just the parts that changes. Google hopes this will cut down your bandwidth and battery usage and that sounds like a pretty cool way to give you more out of a device you already own to me!
Google’s Social Streaming Media Device – Nexus Q
I must say to me this was probably the least exciting of the new products that Google released on the first day of Google I/O, but it is pretty neat all the same. Using this spherical shaped device, you can in effect allow all your friends to stream their own media from Google services directly to your device. It is setup for a party type queue. Everybody that you grant access to can use their own android device to queue their own music up on a shared playlist. It comes with a 25w amp and as cool as this sounds, it seems like it will never get off the ground with a $299 price tag.
New Google Tablet – The Nexus 7
The long awaited Google tablet is going to be available very soon. If you have been waiting for this one, it was well worth it. Asus has partnered with Google to create this very cool and very powerful 7″ tablet that will ship with the latest version of the Android OS (Jelly Bean). It would seem apparent that they are going to challenge the Kindle Fire market more than the Apple iPad with its smaller form factor. They are also going after a very competitive price point. The 8GB version will sell for $199 and the 16GB tablet will go for $249. When it comes to hardware this tablet offers a big quad-core Tegra processor and a 12-core GPU that should give this little mighty might enough power to run some amazing 3-d games and stream videos with no problems. Below you will find the original promo video, but you can learn even more about the Nexus 7 by watching the unboxing Nexus 7 video here.
Chrome For iOS Finally!
Here is another release that many Google fans have been waiting on for some time now. Their are so many browsers already available on the iPhone, but there is nothing like the Chrome browser and who wants a slow browser on their phone? The speed of this browser is yet to be documented, but many who have already downloaded this #1 free app in the iTunes App Store have already reported faster page load times than the Opera browser or Safari for iOS currently offers. This browser is forced to use the same backend code that Safari uses per Apple’s so called security measures, but for some reason the page loads seem much snappier.
Using this cool browser you can also sync your open browser pages from any computer that you are currently logged into Chrome on. This means from the office to the car is seamless now and that is a cool feature. Also the ability to have many tabs open simultaneously without bogging down the browser seems to be another big thumbs up for those that need 20 tabs open to feel like they are browsing.
Skydiving With Google Glass
Google Glass has been a project in the works for some time and these space aged looking terminator glasses are getting one step closer to being something that is very awesome, but not quite there yet. The current Google Glass models only offer audio and video recording which was showcased at the conference when skydivers wore them as they plummeted to earth and people repelled down the side of walls. With these first person views that were streamed to a Google Hangout, really did turn some heads. They offered to sell some to developers for $1500 but they would not be shipped until early next year.
I am very excited about all the cool new stuff Google has showcased so far and there is still one day left in the Google I/O 2012 dev conference so it will be interesting to see what else they have in store too.
Let us know what you think about the Google news below!
I have been using many different cases for my current phone, which happens to be an iPhone 4, no not an S yet. The fact that there are so many cases out there makes it easy to switch often and still feel like you are missing something. I have always been a fan of the bumper cases, especially the very thin ones, because they give you the most realistic feel and close to the original small form factor of the latest iPhone models. However, there some cases that actually add a little functionality besides just protecting these amazing gadgets.
So What Is The WipeCoin iPhone Case
The WipeCoin iPhone case is a new case that is manufacturered in Germany and in belief of full disclosure I will let you know that I was given one of these sweet cases for review and testing purposes. You can see everything I received in the package in the images below. Regardless of how
I came across this case, let’s get down to what does. This case has a small black or white (they come in both colors) round disc or coin, hence forth the name. This coin is lodged into a nice fitting location that does not impede the performance of the touchscreen nor does it get in the way of viewing. When you screen gets all smudged up, you simply slide the coin loose and wipe your screen, then return it to its parked position.
I think that no only the concept but the design of this new iPhone case are smart. The coin is covered with microfiber so your phone screen gets cleaned with no scratches and no lint left behind. the case does exactly what it is designed to do and it cost right around 20 bones on amazon.
Is The WipeCoin A Good Protective Case?
I think so, absolutely. The case is made of a rock solid material. I have ran not stress tests, but it seems like a very stable case that really keeps you phone locked in once you snap it into place. the case has a few contact points that grab the metal lip on the side of the phone. this also helps it stay very slim, because it almost sits completely flush with the front of the iPhone screen, I like this a lot.
Its Even Great For Gaming!
At first I thought that the small bubble at the bottom of the case where the coin sits would become a distraction, but much to the contrary, it became an obsession. I don’t know about everybody, but for myself, there are some games that have on screen buttons and as I play I just feel like I am always trying to get a good grip to reach the buttons while still holding on to the phone. The round “knob” at the bottom is great for games that you lay the phone on its side to play because you can wrap your pinkie finger around it like the bottom of a game controller. It is surprising comfortable and is an amazing and undocumented bonus for games.
As the battle between good and evil continues with the online file sharing world continues, out comes a totally new way to locate bit torrents. The BTDigg.org web site offers some very interesting technology that allows the end user to search for a bit torrent file without needing to connect to torrent trackers. This sounds like a great way to grab some cool stuff, however we would of course suggest that you only use this service to download and find legitimate files that do not go against any copyrights. The search is fast and easy, all you need to take advantage of the BTDigg search is a stand alone torrent download app and you are ready to go.
Have fun searching and downloading and please comment below and let us know how this bit torrent search engine works for you compared to other “old style” torrent finders.
About a week ago the buzz started building. All the tech sources were leaked information about Sprint’s up coming announcement. The Sprint release on February 7th promised to bring a big name to the stage “David Blaine” and a so called industry first. The tech critics were all all agreeing that they did not need to drag in a world famous magician to show off anything that was really amazing. It turns out that they really did have something that was worth showing and it also was truly and industry first.
The new Sprint Kyocera Echo is a totally new phone that is the worlds first dual screen cell phone. The new options of this phone are almost endless. Can you imagine viewing your favorite podcast on one screen and interacting with the chat room on the other? There are many different ways to use the dual screens on this phone and if you are a video lover, then use both screens together as one and enjoy a huge 4.7 diagonal screen. This new cell phone has a lot of potential and this may be the move that puts Sprint in the same spotlight as Verizon and AT&T.
In every new release of the Mac OS X there have been some secret back doors built in to allow users access to reset the administrator password. Some people consider these to be gaping security holes. However, for innocent users who need to reset the password on Mac OS X 10.5 or any other release of the Apple Operating Systems these have been very useful and come in handy more times than I would like to admit.
I recently ran into a situation where I needed to reset the administrator password on a Mac Mini that had been updated to the latest release of Mac OS X Snow Leopard and I did not have the install discs, if you have the install discs you can boot these and reset the password in the recovery console rather simply. If you are not so lucky as to have these discs there is a fairly easy way to bypass the administrator login and change the admin password. If you read online for ways to reset the admin password without a cd/dvd many methods will show you how to delete the admin account and to me this just sounds like asking for trouble. Here is the way I reset the admin password on my Mac Mini Running OS X 10.5.7 and it worked like a charm!
Secret Back Door Admin Reset For Mac OS X 10.5 Snow Leapard
Boot into single user mode (press and hold Command-S on boot)
Type fsck -fy and hit enter (this will assure the disk integrity before we begin)
Type mount -uw / (this mounts the file system so we can work with it)
Type launchctl load /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.DirectoryServices.plist (more files that must be loaded to use)
Type dscl . -passwd /Users/username password (you will put the admin user name and password in place of those words in this command)
That is it you are ready to rock with a new password. Once you reboot you will be prompted for your password. You can now login to Snow Leapard and rename the admin or make a new account to use.
This is not something you will want to try if you are not familiar with the Apple command line or if you have sensitive data on your machine. Of course you should always back up everything before you attempt to do something like this, just in case of a typo!
The Google Voice service has been one of the most anticipated Google services of all time, only second to the launch of Gmail. They have only been allowing users who have received an invite to take part in this beta and it filled up very fast! The Google Voice service allows people to use a myriad of very cool and useful phone services. You can forward phone calls to different phone numbers based on the caller id or the name of the caller. Another great feature offered by this service is the ability to receive your voice mail in your email. Google’s servers will actually translate voice into text for you. There are many other great features being offered and for now at least they are all free to use, except calling overseas.
There is no more waiting for an initiation, now you can simply go signup at the site : http://voice.google.com You can choose to get a new phone number to tie to your account or you can use an existing mobile number for your service. Both have their advantages, so choose wisely!
Recently I have personally upgraded from an iPhone 4 to a Galaxy SIII and I must admit I love this phone. I was a passionate iPhone advocate for many years but there is just no comparison to the control and features that the android OS to what the iOS currently offers. I don’t want to get into a mobile phone operating system rant right now, I just want to talk about this cool little smartphone accessory I ran across that will make all smartphone owners happy no matter what phone they own.
