GADGET REVIEWS Just another GADGET NEWS

If bricks and mortar retail stores were vampires, then Amazon is a vengeful, ruthless Peter Cushing intent on destroying them. With the latest update to its iPhone app, Peter, er, Amazon has added a sharp wooden stake to the already dangerous tools contained therein: Amazon Mobile now does barcode-scanning.

Simply point the camera of you iPhone 4 or 3GS (running iOS4) at the barcode of a product in-store and you will be swept off to the appropriate product page of the online retail giant’s store. Thus, you can take a long, leisurely demo of that fancy new camera you want down at the local photographic emporium, thanks the salesman for his time and save a few bucks by ordering it from Amazon right there in the store. Hell, if you live in a city with same-day shipping it may even arrive at home before you do.

Amazon’s isn’t the first iApp to scan barcodes, and you have have been able photograph an item and have Amazon’s team of worker-monkeys ID a similar item for you in moments. But by integrating the reader into its own app, Amazon is clearly positioning itself as the default store for pretty much anything. Really, why bother carrying something home unless you have to have it right now? Let Amazon deliver it and save some money, too.

Amazon Mobile is available now, as is Dracula, starring Peter Cushing.

Amazon Mobile [iTunes via TUAW]

Follow us for real-time tech news: Charlie Sorrel and Gadget Lab on Twitter.

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Sony on Tuesday launched internet-connected HDTVs and Blu-ray players powered by the new Google TV software interface.

With Google TV, Sony says users can “watch television while tweeting about what theyre watching, checking their fantasy football scores, or finding related content on the web.”

As the video above shows, Sony’s emphasis with Internet TV is less about delivering stand-alone content over the web than recasting the television set as a multitasking device.Prices range from $400 to $1,400, and all models will be available for purchase Oct. 16.

Image by Sony

Sony’s Internet TV HDTVs will come in four sizes: 46-inch ($1,400), 40-inch ($1,000), 32-inch ($800), and 24-inch ($600). All four will have Intel processors, 1080p resolution and LED backlighting (except the 24-inch HDTV, which has a CCFL backlight). They will all have four HDMI and four USB inputs. (The press release has no information about component or composite inputs.)

They all have Wi-Fi, will come with the now-famous QWERTY RF remote with integrated mouse, and of course will have Google TV built-in. (Each Internet TV model has the NSX prefix and a GT1 suffix; for example, the 46-inch Internet TV is the NSX-46GT1.)

Sony will also be selling an Internet TV Blu-ray player, called the NSZ-GT1, for $400. It will have the same remote, a similar Intel processor, and will be able to play back Blu-ray discs. The Blu-ray player will have one HDMI input, one HDMI output and four USB inputs.

Google first presented its new Android-powered search, information and application platform for television at the I/O Conference in May. Last week, they launched a new Google TV website to announce their content and application partners, and Logitech debuted its Google TV set-top box, the Revue.

Sony’s contribution to Google TV, however, has probably attracted the most speculation. An ABC News story on Sony’s Internet TVs showed an oversized remote control that disappointed many (including a few of us here at Wired). Last week Sony Insider received leak about the product line (which we wrote about here at Gadget Lab) that nailed the screen size of all of the HDTVs but happily overshot the prices by as much as $500. I had an inkling, though, that those prices might be high when Sony held a contest to give away a new 40-inch Internet TV and pegged the approximate retail value of the prize at just $1,000.

Sony is certainly pricing Internet TV much more aggressively than most observers expected. In fact, the new Internet TVs will actually be selling for about $100 less than already-discounted current Bravia models with similar specifications. For example, the 46-inch Bravia NX-800, which also has an LED backlight and built-in Wi-Fi, currently retails for $1,500 at SonyStyle.com (marked down from $2000); the comparable NSX-46GT1 with Google TV will start at $1,400. The Blu-ray player does cost more than comparable non-Google TV Sony Blu-ray players with Wi-Fi, which run between $200 and $300. But for only $100 more than the $300 Logitech Revue, the additional Blu-ray playing capability may make $400 seem like a very fair price too.

A handful of Google TV apps will come pre-installed on Sony devices, including Pandora, YouTube, Napster, Twitter, television content from CNBC and the NBA, and Sonys own Qriocity on-demand video service.

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As we’ve seen with the success of iOS and Android (and the disappointments of Palm’s WebOS), applications are essential to the success of smartphone platforms. Customers and developers both want to know what the new Windows Phone 7 will bring to the table.

At the WP7 announcement, Microsoft’s spokespeople were coy about the total number of third-party applications that would be available for the new OS at launch. Instead they touted their own admittedly-impressive integrated applications, including MS Office, Zune for media management, XBox Live for gaming and Bing for search and maps.

Microsoft also spotlighted a few key partners, including AT&T’s U-Verse TV & Video, and cloud service applications from eBay, iMDB, Fandango and Slacker Radio. Major social networking services like Facebook and Twitter, too, are well-integrated into the OS and its applications. It also announced that Electronic Arts would bring The Sims 3 and other games to WP7. Other applications including Netflix and Flixster have already been presented in demos.

When asked directly about the number of apps on the store at launch, an unnamed Microsoft spokesman told Gizmodo, “It’ll be more than iPad at launch. More than the iPhone. “What matters isn’t how many apps we have, it’s that you can find the apps you need.” Of course, the iPhone had zero third-party apps at launch; the iPad about 350. Most rumors have put the total number of apps somewhere in the thousands.

The marketplace for third-party applications is already in place on the new phones. Our Charlie Sorrel reported last week that life-altering music streaming service Spotify will be in the marketplace, at least in parts of Europe where the service is legally available. TeleRead’s Paul Biba reports that e-reading app Wattpad will be ready to go at launch too.

Still, whatever the number, it won’t approach Apple’s 250,000 applications for iOS or Google’s 90,000 for Android. Nor will they have close to as many handsets (or tablets) in the market. Just how quickly can Microsoft rally third-party developers to catch up with Apple or Google?

While Microsoft can’t offer the same number of users right away, developing for WP7 could offer some advantages. Unlike Android, the hardware specs for WP7 phones are more-or-less standard. And while Apple has been criticized for their opaque approval process, Microsoft has promised explicit standards, quick processing and specific feedback to developers whose apps are rejected.

The development tools for WP7 are also well-established. The primary environment for apps will be Silverlight. In March, Windows offered a package of development tools for WP7, including an add-in and express version of Microsoft Visual Studio 2010, XNA Game Studio 4.0, Expression Blend (a tool for user interface development in Silverlight) and a phone emulator for application testing.

It’s not only new developers and those coming from other mobile platforms who will be picking these up. Part of the struggle current Windows Mobile 6 and 6.5 developers will face is that they will have to port or rewrite their existing applications to work on the new OS. Even though developers may grumble, and it may take longer for their apps to be ready, it’s still a substantial base to draw upon.

There’s an opportunity, too, for developers (particularly for media and gaming applications) to gain access not just to Windows Phone 7 users, but to XBox Live and other platforms in the Microsoft ecosystem. With Windows Phone, Microsoft is aiming for integration of its product line; if it’s successful, integrated cross-platform applications will be an essential part of that.

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Amazon seems ready to get into the app store business with plans to launch a new Android app store.

The company has reportedly sent welcome kits to some developers to entice them to start signing on to the store, according to report in The Wall Street Journal and Engadget.

With its plans to offer an Android app store, Amazon may be hoping to take on the Google Market, currently the app store of choice on most Android devices. Exploding sales of Android smartphones and the introduction of new Android-based tablets hungry for apps may have caught Amazon’s attention and had it clamoring for a piece of the action.

Amazon has not yet responded to a request for comment.

Smartphones running Android OS were more popular than iPhones among new buyers in the U.S. during August, according to a report from The Nielsen Company.

Currently, Google’s Android market has about 90,000 apps, compared to Apple’s App Store has 250,000 apps.

Already upstart, independent challengers such as AndSpot and SlideMe are trying to create their own Android app stores. It’s all kosher because, unlike Apple, Google allows for multiple app stores to exist on the Android operating system. These independent app stores hope to lure users with the the promise of better search and user interface, greater availability internationally and increased revenue.

Amazon may be betting on something similar and it certainly has the clout and the brand to be more popular than these upstarts. But winning over developers may not be easy.

“From the developer perspective, its trial and error to see how effective they really are. A lot of these app stores, whether from Verizon now or Amazon in the future–are yet to prove themselves,” says Paul Chen, director of business development at Papaya Mobile, an Android games developer.

Still Chen says his company is open and willing to embrace any distribution channel that could increase the visibility of its apps.

Though Amazon has been extremely tight-lipped, based on the leaks, here’s everything we know so far about Amazon’s plans:

What will the app store be like?

Amazon’s app store is likely to be a lot like Apple’s–carefully curated and targeted at consumers who are tired of the chaos in the Google Android Market. Spam, poor quality of apps and the inability to easily find apps are major problems in the Android Market. But what Amazon’s app store will be called, look like or the kind of features it will have is still under wraps.

For consumers, it will be exciting if Amazon can bring features such as recommendations, wish lists and deals to its app store.

Cost, control and availability

Developers will reportedly have to pay $100 to sign up–just as they do with the Apple app store.

Unlike the current Google Android Market where any developers can publish apps as long as it follows the company’s guidelines, Amazon will decide what will get into its store, according to a report in TechCrunch.

Apps can either be free or paid. Paid apps will have to be competitively priced–that means developers can’t charge more for the same app on the Amazon app store compared to other markets.

Amazon’s app store will likely be available only in the U.S. though it won’t be long before Amazon extends it to other countries. After all, Amazon has all the necessary payment systems in place to make this happen, even as Google Checkout remains limited.

Support and distribution

This is where things get confusing. It is not clear which Android devices Amazon’s app store will support or how it will be distributed. Google’s Android Market comes pre-loaded on all Android smartphones. But Amazon will have to ink deals with device makers to get its app store in there. We will also have to see if Amazon’s Android app store and Google Market will co-exist on a device. If they do so, it could cause consumer confusion and give rise to app store fragmentation.

Also, with the availability of tablets and hardware boxes running Google TV, which is based on the Android platform, it will be interesting to watch if Amazon limits its app store to just smartphones or if it is willing to go where Google fears to tread.

Photo: (astanush/Flickr)

Source:wired.com

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We hate our remotes. Every electronic media device comes with its own remote. We lose them and can’t control our stuff without them. They break. We confuse them with each other. It’s too hard to do simple things. It’s way too hard to do hard things. We ask too much of them. The batteries die, and they all take different batteries. They’re uncomfortable. They’re unresponsive. What we do with our hands don’t match what’s happening on the screen. And the software on the devices themselves that’s controlled by the remote is frequently terrible.

And occasionally, as with Sony’s controller for its upcoming Google TV, the remotes just boggle the mind with their ugliness and complexity.

We’re not alone in disliking remotes. The above litany of problems comes from what readers told Consumer Reports in an article titled simply “Readers Dislike TV Remotes.”

Now we have an emerging class of internet-connected media devices with powerful software designed to make navigating TVs and movies easier. Google TV, Apple TV, TiVo and Roku join game consoles like Sony’s Playstation 3, XBox 360 and Nintendo’s Wii in providing multimedia content on the biggest screens in our house.

But however sophisticated the software, all of these devices still need a hardware device for us to control them. It’s quite likely that some of these devices won’t be dedicated remotes at all, but phones, tablets or other handheld media devices running apps. We might use these apps to control not just our TVs, but our entire house.

That’s one vision of the future of remote control.

Here, we want to examine the other side of the equation: dedicated hardware controllers. From traditional remotes to mini-keyboards, video controllers and devices that combine all three, here are fifteen devices that offer you a glimpse of everything that’s good and bad about the current generation of remote controls.

Above: Sony’s Google TV Controller

Wired: Sony’s controller offers all of the control you could want. Full QWERTY keyboard for text entry, which is essential for search — sure to be a key part of the Google experience. Raised buttons with different feel make it easier to use in the dark. It’s even got tab, control, number, and function keys — not dependent on software to get it done.

Tired: The sheer size of the thing will be a deal-breaker for some. In different shades of gray, it doesn’t look like a device from 2010. Too many buttons could be confusing or intimidating to non-expert users.

Image by ABC News

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Source:wired.com

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Apple TV may not have native apps yet, but AirPlay provides a workaround to run apps on your TV — so long as those apps involve streaming video or audio.

Ars Technica’s Jacqui Cheng wasn’t able to try out AirPlay video streaming to the Apple TV in full — that won’t be possible until iOS 4.2 ships in November — but she did unearth two important bits:

• With iOS 4.1, you can already easily stream audio to the Apple TV, including audio from movie files;
• Every iOS app using Apple’s standard audio and video profiles can stream to Apple TV. Not just your iTunes library.

Some of these applications are no-brainers, like Netflix and YouTube. Since both apps run natively on Apple TV anyways, this might appear redundant; still, it’s nice to be able to seamlessly throw video from your phone to your TV in the middle of watching something, without having to start over and search for the same video again.

Other iOS apps add content that Apple TV doesn’t have. Ars Technica mentions sports applications like MLB at-bat and internet radio. You might be able to preview a movie you’re editing in the iPad’s iMovie mobile app on the big screen without plugging in.

Of course, applications that either don’t want their content streamed to Apple TV or don’t want to put in the work to reformat their video into H.264 will be left out — just keep your video and audio in a format that can’t be streamed. For others, there’s nothing else they have to do on the software or hardware side to make their applications AirPlay compatible.

That prospect could be exciting for both developers and users — at least until full-fledged iOS apps for Apple TV come along. Or Google TV’s apps sweep through and steal the whole show.

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Google unveiled a new website preview of its Google TV service and announced content partnerships with HBO, CNBC, Turner Broadcasting, and the NBA. Each of these network partners will build custom applications with premium content optimized for Google TV.

Most of these TV applications are either news-oriented or offer specialized interfaces for content. NBA Game Time follows basketball news and highlights; HBO Go will be a special on-demand portal for HBO subscribers that appears to be separate from whatever on-demand offerings are available through one’s cable provider; CNBC Real-Time augments the news channel with personalized stock tracking and news; and Turner will provide a big-screen, new-interface version of its website content from TBS, TNT, CNN, Cartoon Network and Adult Swim.

Other announced Google TV applications include Netflix, Amazon Video On Demand, The New York Times (which appears to be mostly video- rather than news-driven), VEVO’s music video service, Pandora, Twitter, and of course, Google’s Chrome web browser (w/Flash 10.1 support) and an HDTV-optimized version of YouTube called Leanback. Additional and forthcoming applications will be available through Google’s Android Market beginning early next year.

Google TV’s overhauled website offers a tour and feature list, including TV search, use of an Android smartphone or iPhone as a remote control, and the ability to “Fling” websites, video and audio from your handset to the television. It also spotlights its hardware partners, Sony’s Internet TV and the Logitech Revue set-top box, with an option for notification when more products become available.

Here Comes Google TV [The Official Google Blog]

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Something as simple as changing your Android phone’s wallpaper or downloading a ringtone could transmit personal data about you, including your location, without your knowledge.

Sound farfetched? It’s not: About 15 of 30 randomly selected, popular, free Android apps sent sent users private information to remote advertising servers and two-thirds of the apps handled data in ambiguous ways, say researchers.

The researchers at Duke, Intel Labs and Penn State University, created a tool called TaintDroid that identifies apps transmitting private data to distant locations. TaintDroid monitors how applications access and use your location, microphone, camera, phone numbers in your contact list. The tool also provides feedback once an app is newly installed, letting you know if the app is transmitting data.

“This automatic feedback gives users greater insight into what their mobile applications are doing and could help users decide whether they should consider uninstalling an app,” says Peter Gilbert, a graduate student in computer science at Duke University who’s working on the project. The TaintDroid program isn’t publicly available yet.

The latest data supports a study published in June by mobile security company SMobile Systems that found 20 percent of the then-available 48,000 third-party applications for the Android operating system provided sensitive or private information to outside sources.

Data collection practices in apps are increasingly becoming a major privacy issue for consumers. In July, a mobile security firm called Lookout identified a free wallpaper Android app, Jackeey, that allegedly gathered data about its users, including their phone numbers, carrier subscriber identifiers and phone number of their voicemail accounts. The app then sent the information to a website based in China. The Jackeey app is estimated to have anywhere from 1 to 4 million downloads.

Read more…

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The new Apple TV could be Steve Jobs’ best sleight-of-hand trick yet.

During his modest introduction of the device, Jobs called the Apple TV “one more hobby.” But a closer look at the code and the hardware powering the Apple TV reveals that there’s a lot more going on under the hood than the CEO shared.

Interestingly, Jobs didn’t mention that Apple TV runs iOS, the same operating system running on its flagship product, the iPhone, and some other big hits the iPod Touch and iPad. And there’s more, too: The Apple TV’s software might already be jailbroken, and some hidden software should eventually allow you to share the Apple TV’s media with other iOS devices.

These secret ingredients could be the recipe Apple needs to shake up the television industry. For years, Apple executives have labeled the set-top box a “hobby” product because of its mild success compared to blockbuster sellers like the iPhone and iPod. Now that Apple TV has been revamped into a streaming rental service with an arsenal of stealth features, maybe Apple has a chance to change the TV business if not today, perhaps later.

“The most importanthint ofApple’s real ambitions in the living room come fromAirPlay, whichputs iPhones and iPads in the driver’s seat and makes theTVjust an outputdevice for theAppleecosystem,” said James McQuivey, a Forrester analyst, in a recent e-mail statement. “ExpectAppleto gradually push more and morein that direction, but as of this moment in 2010,Applehas not yet made asignificant play for control of theTV.”

Here, we round up the juicy tidbits we’ve heard about Apple’s mysterious new set-top box.

iOS and third-party app support

There’s more than enough evidence proving that the Apple TV runs iOS. Dispelling any doubts, Apple recently posted a build of iOS 4.1 specifically for the Apple TV.

This piece of information about iOS is important because of a new feature called AirPlay, which streams media from your iPad, iPhone or iPod Touch to the Apple TV. When Jobs demonstrated AirPlay, he only showed the feature working with an iPad’s built-in video player, photos app and music library. Now that we know Apple TV runs iOS, it’s likely that third-party apps such as MLB at Bat or ABC Player will be able stream media to the set-top box, too.

DaringFireball blogger John Gruber confirmed that an AirPlay button is showing up in the MLB at Bat app, and he adds that apps using the built-in media controller will be able to integrate AirPlay.

Long story short, you’ll be able to wirelessly stream media from some third-party apps straight to your Apple TV with an AirPlay button. AirPlay is shaping up to be Apple’s secret weapon to reshape home entertainment.

In addition to AirPlay, the fact that Apple TV is running iOS means that — in principle, at least — it may someday be able to run applications from the iTunes App Store. For now, that capability is not included in Apple TV, but the underlying operating system certainly supports it, so Apple might open a TV App Store in a future software update.

Jailbreaking hacks

Third-party app support will probably be limited for the Apple TV, but that’s where the jailbreakers come in. In the same way that we’re able to override restrictions on the iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch with a jailbreak, we should be able to run unauthorized apps on the Apple TV — something Jobs would never advertise, of course.

In fact, hackers already have a head start, because a tool called Shatter, which was used to jailbreak the newest iPod Touch, already works with the Apple TV, according to the iPhone Dev Team. That means we should be expecting hackers to code some unauthorized apps soon to unlock additional capabilities such as video-conferencing via your Apple TV.

On top of that, existing hacks for the old Apple TV should work, too.Dev Team memberWill Strafach explained thatthe new AppleTV OS seems to be a mashup of the old AppleTV OS and iOS, meaning “frappliances,” plug-ins that add functionality to the old Apple TV, should work as well.

‘Lowtide’ app

The Unofficial Apple Weblog’s Erica Sadun, a popular iOS programmer, took a close look at the Apple TV’s software and discovered that it runs an application called “Lowtide” the software containing the set-top box’s media interface.

Sadun dug deeper and found lines of code that suggest that Lowtide might eventually be extended to other iOS devices. In other words, you should be able to share media from the Apple TV to your iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad, whereas originally we thought we’d only be able to do the converse with AirPlay. This functionality would be comparable to a Slingbox or an EyeTV.

Lowtide isn’t readily available for Apple’s iOS mobile devices yet, but iOS developerDustin Howett has already managed to load Lowtide on an iPod touch running iOS 4.1, demonstrated in the video above. He recommended against doing it yourself, though, unless you plan on reformatting your iPhone on a regular basis just to turn it back into a phone.

Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com

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Image by Charlie Sorrel and Tim Carmody

There’s a lot of gadget news about Amazon today, so we’re going to take these items one at a time, in increasing order of uncertainty:

1. Amazon launches Beta version of Kindle for the Web. Think YouTube for books. You can preview short selections of books in your browser, embed them on web sites with a little bit of JavaScript, and customize the size (it won’t automatically keep the aspect ratio) or even add your Amazon Associate tag to the embed. Click through and it takes you to the book’s entry on the Amazon Kindle store. Level of certainty: This you can actually use right now.

   KindleReader.LoadSample({containerID: ‘kindleReaderDiv’, asin: ‘B003X28734′, width: ’640′, height: ’346′});

2. Amazon announces Kindle app for forthcoming RIM Playbook tablet. Makes perfect sense given yesterday’s Playbook announcement, natural extension of the Kindle app for Blackberry, iPad, and other platforms. Level of certainty: Actual press release from Amazon after high-profile announcement from RIM. I suppose a bolt of lightning could strike one or both companies tomorrow. But you can’t see it today.
3. Amazon to Launch Android App Store, which my pal Charlie Sorrel already let you know about. Level of certainty: Well-reported rumor. But it makes sense — Amazon sells a lot of stuff, and there are a lot of Android app stores — and it’s confirmed by multiple developer sources. Don’t be surprised if you hear details soon.
4. Amazon to Build Own Branded Android Tablet. Okay, so, a source comes to you with what seem like two wild, fan-fiction stories about Amazon and Android. You ask around, and one of them — an Amazon App Store — turns out to probably be in the works. Is the other story true?
   
   On the one hand, again — Amazon sells a lot of digital products online, not just e-books: movies, games, music. And it’s not hard to make an Android tablet. In fact, at this point, Amazon has more hardware-production experience with the Kindle than some of the companies that are coming forward with pretty solid products. Add an App Store and it starts to look pretty appealing.

   On the other hand, Amazon’s built up good brand identification with the Kindle, e-books, and E Ink. Will they turn around and say, “oh yeah, multimedia tablets are really awesome, but not, um, more awesome than a Kindle, I mean, um, why not buy both?” Just seems a little surprising. Level of certainty: Pretty cloudy. The source was right about an app store, but as they say, a stopped clock can be right twice a day. If Amazon releases some kind of other media hardware, whether using Android or anything else, it’s equally likely to be a TV box or a smartphone or something else that equally plays to their strength while being a little more differentiated from a dedicated reading machine than a tablet.

Source:wired.com

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Hog Bay Software, maker of the cult-favorite distraction-free text-editor Writeroom, has released its long-awaited iPad app, PlainText. When it was first announced, I was very excited to see a Dropbox-syncing, Textexpander-expanding writing app for the iPad. Now, though, it launches into a crowded field.

PlainText has two tricks. It has folders, which apps like Elements don’t support, and it looks gorgeous. The developer, Jesse Grosjean, has clearly spent a lot of time polishing the UI. From the wide margins to the minimalist black-on-gray interface, it looks classy, and makes you want to write. Navigating is easy once you have learned a few tricks: you rename a document by opening it and editing the name in the title bar, for example, and swipe-to-delete files and folders as you’d expect.

After that, though, PlainText falls behind. A recent update to Elements has added a feature that searches within your files, and it already has a word-count and the excellent scratchpad we love here at Gadget Lab. And the newly released iA Writer, profiled last week by our own Tim, wins for its extra row of writing-specific keys and its easy-to-edit typeface.

Plaintext scores big points by being free, and it also lets you specify which folder in your Dropbox it will sync to (choose this before logging into Dropbox from the app), so you can share documents with other iPad apps. It’s certainly worth a look, and we’ll be keeping an eye on updates, but for now, most iPad writing needs are covered elsewhere.

PlainText [Hog Bay / iTunes]

Follow us for real-time tech news: Charlie Sorrel and Gadget Lab on Twitter.

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Amazon is set to open the doors on an Android App Store, adding to the list of places where you may or may not be able to buy software for your device. According to Tech Crunch’s excellent MG Siegler, the store’s structure will be very similar to that of Apple’s App Store.

Developers will have to pay $99 to sign up, just like with Apple, and will get the same 70:30 revenue split. Amazon will decide what gets into the store, pull any apps it doesn’t like, and wrap everything up in its DRM. Further, you can’t sell your apps cheaper elsewhere. If it costs a dollar in the Android Market, it has to cost a dollar over at Amazon.

And it will be dollars. The Amazon app store will be U.S-only at launch, although as Daring Fireball’s John Gruber points out, “Amazon takes payments in more countries than Google Checkout does.” Apps can also be free.

One problem that won’t be solved is customer confusion. Unless Amazon makes its own tablet which has exclusive use of the store, then it will have to pick a range of Android devices to support. Unlike its music store, whose goods (MP3 files) can be played anywhere, an app store could only support a subset of devices.

Amazon will join Verizon and Google as outlets for Android apps, adding to the confusion. Remember the arguments about Android being “open” and iOS being “closed”? They’re starting to look a little silly now.

Yep, Amazon Launching Their Own App Store For Android Too [MG Siegler via ]

Illustration: Charlie Sorrel

Follow us for real-time tech news: Charlie Sorrel and Gadget Lab on Twitter.

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Image via BarnesAndNoble.com

Oh, you thought we were just all up in Amazon’s Kindle on the tweed beat here at Gadget Lab? NOT TRUE. The newest iteration of Barnes & Noble’s Nook offered Wi-Fi only before Kindle, dropped its prices before Kindle — and yes, it was jailbroken and rooted a long time ago.

Major advantage to rooting a Nook over jailbreaking a Kindle: because the Nook runs Android, you can use it to run Android apps. Popular Science’s gadget blog isn’t the first to describe how it’s done, but this guide is one of the most readable I’ve seen — just five steps.

It’s all software-based, requiring you to first connect your Nook to your computer via USB, downgrade your firmware to version 1.0, and then install the hacked/rooted version of 1.4, which includes an Android app installer. However, as Nook-rooting experts NookDevs.com note, “Barnes and Noble has likely introduced a new hardware revision which bricks your unit if you install their official 1.0.0 Firmware (A step needed to root). As of right now, Nooks with serial #s starting with 1003 (running firmware 1.4.1) cannot be rooted, and should NOT be attempted.” This warning is on top of the usual watch-yourself-you-might-break-something caution whenever you mess around with your devices. Be careful out there.

How to Add Applications to Your Nook [Apartment Therapy Unpluggd]

Source:wired.com

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With their infinitely configurable touch-screens, iDevices make pretty much perfect universal remotes. The iPhone and iPad can already be used to remote-control a DSLR, your iTunes-equipped PC or even your Sonos multi-room sound-system. Soon, you’ll be able to add Elinchrom’s RX flash lights to that list.

Elinchrom make those big, powerful flashes that you see in photographers’ studios, the ones that pull their juice from the mains or large external batteries and put out enough light to beat the Sun into submission. The company has just announced, through a coy, teasing blog post, that it is working on an iApp to let you control the power levels of your various flash-heads, pilot-lights and “many other features of the Elinchrom RX flash units”.

The actual workings of the apps are still top-secret:

We like to give our respected competition the chance to find out themselves. The EL-Skyport system idea lasted at least approximately 4 years, before other companies picked up this great idea.

We can make a guess, though. Elinchrom’s existing solution is a transmitter on the camera, and also a USB-dongle for control from a Mac or a PC. The picture above doesn’t show any extra hardware plugged into the iPhone or iPad, so I assume that the internal Wi-Fi radio of the iDevice is somehow being used. Either that or there is a dongle and it just isn’t in the picture.

We’ll find out soon enough, though, as Elinchrom will be showing off a demo at the Photokina show beginning next Thursday. The app will be available to buy for the “most modest price” in the early part of next year.

Remote Quadra RX with iPhone, iPad [Elinchrom]

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

We know that the iPad is (mostly) great for video playback, as long as you can be bothered to convert it to the right format or buy your movies and TV shows from Apple. But what if there were a way to play not just H.264 MP4 files with AAC audio (yes, the Apple spec is pretty specific), but to play any file? Thanks to VLC for the iPad, there is.

VLC is a port of the popular and excellent desktop application. The open-source project is famous for playing video files that will kill lesser applications, and it is set to make its iPad debut early next week. Romain Goyet, the CTO of developer behind the app – Applidium was kind enough to send the final version to me for testing.

The first iPad version of VLC is simpler than the desktop version, and quite a lot prettier. To get movies into the playlist, you drag them into iTunes, just like adding files to any other app. You can’t add folders, but you can drag in pretty much any kind of file. Some files may cause the app to crash on launch, and the only way to find out is to remove them one at a time.

Fire it up and you get the above view. The app can take a few moments to generate thumbnails of your clips, and it presents them in a nice-looking grid, which you can scroll. In addition to the thumbnails, you get the file-name, the length of the movie and its on-screen size. HD movies get badged as such, and if you have watched a clip part-way through, a little pie-shaped progress-indicator is overlaid onto the icon.

To play a movie, just touch it. If VLC thinks your iPad might not be up to the task, it will ask you if you want to try anyway. I did with one short 1280 x 720 clip, and all I got was sound.

Not all file-formats are supported: the AVCHD files from my Panasonic GF1, for example, can be added via iTunes but don’t appear in the app. Subtitles, though, do work. Just make sure the SRT file has the same name as the movie file and drop it into iTunes alongside the movie. It works great (Although you can’t turn them off from within the app).

Sometimes the video starts to break-up, and sometimes the sound gets out of sync. The former usually fixes itself and the latter can be cured by quitting and relaunching VLC. This is no hardship as the app remembers where you left off.

There are a few other iPad apps that will play AVI and DIVX files, among other formats, but VLC plays files that the others wouldn’t even open. And so far it appears not to drain the battery significantly more than the iPad’s hardware-assisted video-player (VLC uses software decoders for much of its work). I’m 15 minutes into Truffaut’s 400 Blows and the battery is still at 100%.

The one big thing I miss is the volume boost of desktop VLC. ITunes on both the Mac and the iPad have whisperingly low maximum volume settings, whereas sound in VLC comes loud and clear. That said, this is v1.0 and is way more polished than any other video app I have yet seen on the tablet.

The best part of all this is that VLC for iPad will be free when (and if) it makes it through the review process and into the store.

VLC for iPad [Applidium. Thanks, Romain!]

Follow us for real-time tech news: Charlie Sorrel and Gadget Lab on Twitter.

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

Apple has opened up the App Store review process, dropping its harsh restrictions on the tools developers are allowed to use and at the same time actually publishing the App Store Review Guidelines, a previously secret set of rules that governed whether or not your app would be approved.

Those guidelines will go a long way to making iOS a better place for developers. Previously, you wouldn’t know if you had broken a rule until your app was rejected. And if your app had taken months and months and tens of thousands of dollars to develop then you were pretty much screwed.

This uncertainly has doubtless kept a lot of professional and talented developers out of the store and caused the rise of quick-to-write fart applications. In fact, the point I have heard spoken over and over is that the developers don’t mind what the rules are, as long as they know about them.

The second part of Apple’s relaxation of restrictions is even less expected. Here’s the relevant point from the press release:

We are relaxing all restrictions on the development tools used to create iOS apps, as long as the resulting apps do not download any code. This should give developers the flexibility they want, while preserving the security we need.

Yup, that means you can use Flash to develop your apps, and then compile them to work on the iPhone and iPad. This also means that all those crappy Flash games on the web can now be quickly ported to the iOS. This is a direct reversal of Apple’s previous ban on third-party development-tools. Why? Games. Many games use non-Apple, non-iOS code to make them work: the Unreal Engine behind the stunning Epic Citadel shown off at last weeks’ Apple event, for example, would fall foul of Apple’s previous rules. The “do not download any code” part of this is important. Apple will let you use non-iOS runtimes within your apps as long as it can inspect them first. Anything downloaded after installation which bring out the ban-hammer.

It’s a completely unexpected reversal, and one which will eventually lead to much more complex and refined apps in the iTunes Store. And everyone should be pleased about that.

Statement by Apple on App Store Review Guidelines [Apple]

Follow us for real-time tech news: Charlie Sorrel and Gadget Lab on Twitter.

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

Abvio’s trio of motion-tracking iPhone fitness apps have been updated with a major new feature: they know when you stop.

This information isn’t used to detect the lazier amongst us, but to give more accurate readings of your times and average speed. The three apps, Cyclemeter, Runmeter and Walkmeter, now use GPS signals to detect when you stop moving. They then “roll back your elapsed time to when the stop started,” adding this chunk of time to a new “stopped time” counter. This means that when you next get stuck at the traffic lights (or stop for a beer), you won’t see your average speed

It’s a useful feature, and one that is curiously lacking on almost all other apps in the store. It joins some other neat options, too. First is the new calendar-sharing function, which automatically adds your workouts to your calendar, from whence they can sync across the cloud. Better is the integration of the iPhone’s inline remote, which can be used to stop and start the timer with the phone still in your pocket.

But perhaps best of all is the apps’ ghost-mode, which will project your previously recorded runs onto the map so you can compete against yourself. This, I don’t have to say, is lifted straight from Super Mario Kart and is quite awesome.

The apps cost $5, but it appears that you can just buy one and use it for cycling, running or walking (aka running slowly). Available now.

Abvio product page [Abvio. Thanks, Lori!]

Follow us for real-time tech news: Charlie Sorrel and Gadget Lab on Twitter.

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

Greyscale screenshot of A Bard’s Tale

Amazon’s Kindle reader isn’t going to get amenities like color, video capability, a camera, or an accelerometer in the foreseeable future. But that doesn’t mean we won’t see a rich variety of specialized applications for it. A recent high-profile hire at Amazon offers one possibility for the future of Kindle apps, while two Kindle-watchers have offered different forecasts.

Amazon recently hired away Andre Vrignaud, Microsoft’s Director of Game Platform Strategy. Now, Vrignaud worked on many different platforms at Microsoft, from XBox and XBox Live to PCs and mobile phones; presumably, he’ll do the same for Amazon, especially since Amazon already offers casual game downloads for Windows PCs. A revitalized, multiplatform game streaming or download service for Amazon is intriguing, but let’s set it aside for now to focus on gaming for Kindle.

Here, Vrignaud and Amazon face a challenge, as they have to chart a game platform strategy that works within the Kindle’s limitations. These aren’t just technical, but are circumscribed by the Kindle’s user base, few of whom are likely to use the Kindle for heavy gaming even if they’re interested in it.

The sweet spot seems to be black-and-white word games, like you might find in a book or newspaper. The Kindle already has two word-puzzle games available, Every Word and Shuffled Row. It’s easy to imagine crosswords, Sudoku, Scrabble, and the like for Kindle — it’s almost unfair to call this casual gaming, since its fans are so passionate. And I’d wager there might even be a market for vintage text-based computer games, many of which are terrific to play for a few minutes at a clip. Any five-hour airport delay would be a lot more interesting if I could bang out Zork or A Bard’s Tale or entertain my son with Oregon Trail on that terrific Kindle battery while I was waiting. (Note: I’m deliberately the pit of hell that is casual gaming for Facebook, but clearly those companies could clean up here too.)

But games are just the beginning of an ecosystem of Kindle apps. We’ve already looked at a few ways you can make Kindle 3’s much-improved browser work like a champ for news reading, but just like with smartphones, a dedicated RSS application could potentially suit some users even better.

At iReader Review, RSS readers are listed along with email clients, weather apps, finance apps, and chat as functions currently performed using the browser that would make natural apps for Kindle. The author makes a strong case for these apps as indicative of the kinds of apps that will do well on the Kindle — providing focused information in a client specifically tailored to the Kindle device and Kindle user.

Livescribe’s app store provides a potential model for the Kindle; an array of pencil-and-paper games, translation services, and reference applications, all perfectly suited for a simple text interface and black-and-white display.

Finally, there’s the one-in-a-million possibility. One of the biggest knocks on Amazon had been that its Kindle supports its own unique formats but not ePub, an e-book standard many other companies have rallied around. There’s no way Amazon would ever allow an application that duplicates its e-reader function, allowing you to read DRMed or cracked Amazon e-books. Amazon even has a clause in its terms of service forbidding generic readers.

Popular Sun-Times tech columnist Andy Ihnatko, though, recently claimed in a podcast that several app makers were working on building an ePub client for Kindle — and that Amazon had given them the go-ahead.

Now, some people think Ihnatko was confused or misinformed, and it’s quite possible that Amazon could allow a reader for open, non-DRMed ePub files while still barring all the books you bought from Barnes & Noble.

Still, it’s an intriguing possibility — and Amazon could certainly use an App marketplace to open the Kindle to becoming a general document viewer (and casual writer) of a wide range of files without writing a line of code themselves.

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

The official Twitter app for iPad is finally here, and star developer Loren Brichter has polished yet another gem. Twitter for iPad sports a really elegant interface that’s significantly faster and more intuitive than competing Twitter clients we’ve tested (such as Twitterific and Tweetdeck).

Formerly called Tweetie, Brichter’s popular iPhone app impressed the big wigs at Twitter headquarters who ultimately hired the talented coder to produce native Twitter software in house. Twitter for iPad is his first brand new creation since the acquisition, and from the looks of this app, it was clearly a wise investment.

Loading and sending tweets feels almost instant, and the overall design is very pleasant. When you’re creating a new tweet, for example, the app brings up a notepad-style compose window, which is plain cute.

It also introduces some functionality we haven’t seen before: tap on a tweet with a link, and the content loads in a browser pane (pictured above); pinch a person’s tweet to get more details on the author, and swipe down with two fingers to view the threaded conversation. The paned view of content was very cool and surprisingly fast with loading photos and web pages. However, the pinch and two-finger swipe functions are awfully gimmicky: simply tapping on a person’s tweet with a single finger shows profile details and threaded conversations as well, rendering the pinch and double-swipe redundant (screenshot below).

When composing a new tweet, there’s a location-pin button to share where you’re tweeting from, as well as a paperclip icon to attach a photo. The photo-sharing feature worked in a snap, but after multiple attempts I couldn’t seem to get the location feature to work properly. I’ve put in a query to Brichter about this issue, and I’ll post an update when I receive a response.

All in all, it’s a sweet update, and it’s free. Download the Twitter app in the iPad’s App Store.

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

Who doesn’t love them some simulated pinball action? Me, that’s who, but I still like this tiny little box that turns your iPhone into a miniature pinball table: It’s so cute.

The dock can be bought at BestBuy for $40, and works with a free pinball game available in the App Store. The box hooks into the 30-pin connector and provides buttons for the flippers, a proper, spring-loaded ball-plunger and even another screen at the back to show your scores. There’s also a tilt-function in there should you get too feisty with the game.

Sadly the table only works with the provided pinball game and no others, making the fun somewhat limited, especially for $40. The app’s page on the iTunes Store currently looks a little odd, too: The single screenshot on display shows the three wheels from a one-armed-bandit, presumably from the developer’s other hardware/software game combo, Jackpot Slots. Now, make me one of these for the iPad and even I might be tempted to play.

Pinball Magic Game [iTunes]

Pinball Magic dock [BestBuy via Touch Arcade]

Follow us for real-time tech news: Charlie Sorrel and Gadget Lab on Twitter.

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

The iPad is an almost perfect travel computer. It’s easy to carry, works as a guide, a map, a book and it’s crazy-long battery life will let you sit back and watch another movie while your laptop-toting companions search for a power outlet. But as convenient as it is, a little preparation will make things even smoother. Here are some things you should do before you leave the house.

Go Offline

A 3G iPad is a wonderfully useful machine, but outside of your home country, unless you’re willing to pay extra for roaming or a new, local micro-SIM, you’ll be back on Wi-Fi. Get ready for this by preparing a few apps.

OffMaps

OffMaps is an iPad (and iPhone) app which lets you download city maps for offline use. This lets you use the GPS (or Wi-Fi triangulation) on your iPad without an internet connection. City-specific versions of OffMaps are free, but a master version costs just $2 and lets you grab any map, for free, from within the app.

Maps are organized by country and then city, and are sourced from OpenStreetMaps, the crowd-sourced map project. There are also city guides which can be downloaded, and these not only give tourist hints and tips, but add a user-built database of restaurant, hotels, tourist-spots and so on. This makes searching the map double-useful. The guides cost around 30-cents each, and are paid for by buying tokens from within the app. Three free guides are included with the purchase.

A Wi-Fi Hotspot Directory

One way to get online in a foreign city is to find some free Wi-Fi. But if you don’t have an internet connection, you can’t download a hotspot database. Do this before you leave. There are several free and paid apps in the store, although I couldn’t find anything good for the iPad, so I just picked the free Wi-Fi Finder for iPhone and use it pixel-doubled.

Weather

If you’re spending your days outside, a weather app is pretty essential. You’ll need a connection to use it, but a once-a-day update should be enough. I use Weather Pro for iPad, which costs $5. It’s uncannily accurate and easy to read, and yet offers an embarrassment of detail, from animated weather-radar charts to an hour-by-hour breakdown of rainfall predictions. It also works worldwide, unlike some rather short-sighted U.S-only apps.

Language Guides

Which one you choose depends on where you are going, and quality is astonishingly variable. For vacations, though, you should opt for a travel-guide app rather than a full-on dictionary, as these will have useful phrases grouped together. Try learning the numbers one to ten by looking them up individually in a dictionary instead of together on a page and you’ll see why.

Why bother? Because if you are like most native English-speakers, you are an arrogant traveler, and you assume that you can just start talking English at somebody and they’ll understand. They probably will, as these foreigners are smart enough to learn another language, but they’ll hate you. You’d be amazed how far the local words for “hello”, “please”, “thank you”, and “do you speak English?” will get you. I tried it in jaw-crunching Polish this past weekend and the helpful, warm smiles I got betrayed just how few people bother. This happened despite my truly dreadful pronunciation.

PDFs

Wherever you store them, you should put your useful travel information in PDF-format for your travels. Well known guides are available as apps for some cities, but some of you may have illegitimate copies of the paper versions, or even saved Wikipedia articles. Convert to PDF and store on the iPad for fast, offline retrieval.

Technical Tips

Stealth and Cases

You don’t want to stand out as a tourist, and in some areas you won’t even want to pull out your iPad. To help, you’ll need a case. It should be quick-access, as you’ll likely be consulting the various guides and maps pretty often. The best kind is probably the flip-open type which makes your iPad look like a book. Failing this, a slim slip-cover will work, although you’ll have to hold it as you read. Avoid anything big or bulky, and above all don’t use something that looks like a computer bag.

If you’re really not comfortable pulling out your iPad, or you just must consult the paper guide-book, cover that book in something. Do not wander the streets with a Lonely Planet book in hand. It screams “mug me” and makes you look like a dork. Best of all, try the little Moleskine City Guides, the most covert maps you can buy.

Power

As you won’t be using 3G, you should switch it off. The same goes for Wi-Fi, most of the time. The iPad has a great battery life, but you can extend it further by switching off unnecessary radios, especially if you are in an area with no 3G coverage (the constant search for a network will drain juice double-quick).

Don’t do it right away, though: The GPS will grab its initial location much faster if it can use local cell-towers and Wi-Fi signals to give it a rough idea first. After initial acquisition, you can turn them off. Don’t use airplane mode, though, as this also kills the GPS.

Plan to Share

You can load the iPad up with the Lord of the Rings trilogy (books and movies) and the latest RPGs from Square, but won’t you please think about the children? Or at least consider your non-nerd fellow travelers. Before you leave, download some multi-player and family-friendly games (Labyrinth 2 HD is a great choice, and has a free lite version). Also, consider short, throwaway TV-shows that everyone will like, and that can be watched in half-hour chunks. Think less “The Wire” and more “30 Rock”. And don;t forget a cheap, two-way headphone splitter for shared movie-watching.

And if you’re sharing, there will come a point when you’re left staring out the train window, bored to death. This is where you pull out your secret weapon: Your iPhone or iPod Touch, loaded up with all the same goodies. And one more thing: Put all the above apps on your first home screen. You’ll thank me for it.

There must be plenty more great ways you can use your iPad when traveling, especially the online services I haven’t covered here. Got any apps, accessories or general tips? Leave them, as ever, in the comments.

Follow us for real-time tech news: Charlie Sorrel and Gadget Lab on Twitter.

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

Elements is a new iPad text editing app that syncs with your Dropbox. Another one? Yes, but this one is at once simple, functional and a lot of fun to use. It is also a universal app, so you can buy it once and use it across all your iOS devices. The core of Elements is a super-simple plain text editor which saves and reads files directly to and from Dropbox, a (free) online sync and storage service. This means that any new documents, and any changes you might make, are immediately available on any other device connected to the Dropbox account, or on the web. Elements saves changes every 30-seconds and, if you’re offline, will sync next time you connect. If you drop a TXT file into the Elements folder of your Dropbox, it will show up in the iPad app.

You can choose a color scheme, change fonts and sizing, but it’s the details that really make this stand out as a great portable writers’ tool. First, it supports Textexpander, an app which expands typed snippets into longer texts. For example, if I type “gl” it immediately changes to “Gadget Lab”, according to my settings. It is essential for writers. Elements also shows you word, character and line counts in a popover, and will email your TXT files as attachments.

The other standout feature is the scratchpad, a popover panel which lets you type a quick note or paste a paragraph to use later. It should be standard in any app, mobile or desktop, which uses text.

What it doesn’t do is let you do fancy formatting, or search within your files. It won’t even let you search those files by title. But that’s not early the point. Elements is, as it’s name may suggest, a bare-bones text-editing machine.

One hidden feature is file versioning, which comes courtesy of the Dropbox storage. Here’s an example. Say you are writing a review of a new iPad app, and you are writing it in that same app. Say that the Internet connections are flaky and somehow you lose all your work but the first two lines. Then say you panic a little (you may have already guessed that this is a true story that happened a few minutes ago). Stay calm, wait for the Dropbox website to load up and go chase down the version with the most text in it. Make sure Elements isn’t in use, click restore and you’re back where you were. Thank God.

I like Elements a lot so far. It lacks the tabbed document view of Simplenote on the iPad, which makes popping between documents to copy and paste a breeze. The word-count features, versioning and scratchpad, though, make it useful in other ways. $5.

Elements [iTunes]

Elements [Second Gear]

Follow us for real-time tech news: Charlie Sorrel and Gadget Lab on Twitter.

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

Flickpad is a Flickr (and Facebook) client for the iPad. There are seemingly endless Flickr clients for the iPad, but this is the one I use most. Why? Because it is the first one that actually makes it feel like you are browsing real printed photographs.

The app, which comes in paid and lite versions, uses a wooden table as a presentation metaphor, and pulls photos in from your Flickr and Facebook contacts. These photos are scattered over the table, overlapping just as if you had emptied a shoe-box of pictures. Flickpad isn’t designed to be a full-on Flickr browser. It does one thing: let you keep up with your friends’ photos.

The interface makes heavy use of touch, to the extent that when you have to actually tap a button, it is jarring (but necessary, like editing settings, for example). Instructions can be called up in a popover at any time, but the basic controls consist of tapping and swiping to move the stacks around: Rearrange photos by dragging with one finger. A two-finger drag magically pulls together all the photos in a set into on pile. Pinching or double-tapping lets you zoom fullscreen, and long and triple-taps offer extra functions.

If you flick a picture off to the side it scoots off the table and is marked seen. You can also view all photos from a friend, add to favorites and even take a look at the “Interesting” photos from Flickr.

The deeper controls take some getting used to, but the fingers-on manipulation is so perfect for the content that it is worth a little effort.

Currently, no photos are cached, so you’ll need to reload everything on launch. Some of the settings are a little tricky to find, too, so deep are they hidden, but one you know about them it seems obvious.

For instance, hit the little settings cog and you can drill down to choose which friends’ photos you want to pull down. This last is essential if you use the app to show your mother your baby-photos, but also have contacts who share more erotic images. You can switch them off easily.

The addition of an offline mode would make this app truly killer. As it is, you’ll find big chunks of the day disappearing as you flick through Flickpad. Remember when you’d be looking in the closet for something and you’d come across a shoe-box of old photos and lose the rest of the afternoon going through them? Flickpad is just like that.

Flickpad is free (with limitations) or $7 (adds multiple user accounts and more). And yes, I know the video at the top of the post comes off like a commercial, but it’s a great way to see the features in action.

Flickpad [iTunes]

Follow us for real-time tech news: Charlie Sorrel and Gadget Lab on Twitter.

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

Photoshop and the iPad, a pairing as natural as Bert sharing a bed with Ernie. As of today, you can use Adobe’s legendary image-editing app on your tablet. Or maybe not.

Photoshop Express is a reworking of the rather more awkwardly-named Photoshop.com Mobile for the iPhone. It is now a universal app, running on both devices, but there are some iPad-specific features. But before we get to those, we’ll note one giant problem. For many users, Photoshop just won’t launch.

Tap the icon and you get a splash screen, and then you see a dialog box swirl across the iPad’s display. Then the app closes and, somewhat confusingly, launches another picture-editing app. In my case, this is Photogene. This appears to be a common problem, and some people say a reboot will fix it, although that didn’t work for me. And that dialog box? I grabbed a screenshot: It’s a request to send anonymous usage data back to the mother-ship, titled “Help Us Improve”. Oh Adobe. The fix, now posted on the iTunes store page, is to start up the app in portrait orientation.

If you can fire it up, you can now work in both landscape and portrait modes, work on a sequence of photos at the same time and carry out basic editing. Cropping, rotating, flipping and adjustment of exposure, color and contrast are all easily done. From there, you can upload to photoshop.com and Facebook, or just save the files locally.

It’s nowhere near as powerful as the desktop version or even (somewhat ironically) as full-featured as iPad apps like Photogene. It is free, however. It’s also pretty cool to be able to tell your friends that you have Photoshop on your iPad. Available now.

Photoshop Express [iTunes]
Photoshop Express [Adobe]

Follow us for real-time tech news: Charlie Sorrel and Gadget Lab on Twitter.

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

Discovering new apps in the Android market, which now has over 100,000 titles, has become increasingly difficult. So an independent app store is using social networking to help you find what you really want.

AndSpot has introduced social networking features such as activity feed, profiles and recommendations so its customers can find new apps based on what their friends like, instead of trying to find apps by category.

The site is now in private beta and will be launching publicly next month.

“The current paradigm of how marketplaces work isn’t in the favor of users or developers,” says Ash Kheradmand, one of the co-founders of AndSpot. “It works in the favor of apps like Facebook, Twitter and Pandora but not anyone else.”

An average user sees less than 99 percent of the apps in the Google Market, says AndSpot. And when users do find apps, they have little beyond basic comments and average ratings to go by.

Users are tired of scrolling through lists of apps to get ones that may be useful to them, says Kheradmand. Bringing social networking to an app store could help solve some of those problems, he says.

Unlike Apple, which has a tightly controlled official distribution for iPhone apps, multiple app stores can exist on the Android phone alongside the official Android app store, which is called Android Market.

For now, Android Market is pre-loaded on all Android phones. Independent app stores such as AndSpot can be downloaded from the Android Market or a browser. These independent app stores could in theory ink distribution deals with handset makers to get on devices, although they have yet to do so. Meanwhile, the number of apps in the Android market continues to grow making it difficult for users to find apps and for developers to market their programs.

That’s where AndSpot comes in, says Kheradmand, who has applied for a patent on the idea. On AndSpot, users first create a profile with an avatar and add friends. As with Facebook, there is an activity feed that highlights what the apps your friends are downloading. The activity feed also integrates with a recommendation engine, which AndSpot says suggests apps based on what you and your friends are using.

AndSpot also has a discussion board so its users can discuss apps. It will also have privacy settings so that users can choose to share apps, or not share them, depending on which category they’re in.

“You can set it so that you show games apps but not productivity apps,” says Faisal Abid, chief technology officer for AndSpot.

AndSpot says it will let developers keep 80 percent of the revenue from their apps sold through its app store and developers don’t have to do anything additional to publish their apps on AndSpot.

It’s an interesting idea and one where I can see social networking helping the process of discovery of apps. The key to its success as with any social networking site is scale. Unless you can get friends in there, you won’t have enough activity in your feeds to make it worth visiting.

Check out screenshots from the new AndSpot market below.

The discuss feature on AndSpot lets users talk about apps.

A friend's profile on the AndSpot Market

Here's how the app will be displayed in the AndSpot market.

Screenshots: Andspot

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews