Researchers from North Carolina State University have determined that skinned versions of Android may expose private data to any app that makes a request — and all without asking for user permission. Read More…
Posted under Gadget Reviews
This post was written by Journalist on December 7, 2011
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Our favorite iPhone camera app just got a boatload of new features after its four-month exile from the App Store.
Previously pulled by Apple because it included an inoffensive hidden feature, Camera+ returned to the App Store on Tuesday night with new controls, more image-editing effects, improved performance and several other additions.
Most notably, there’s a new slider bar that allows you to adjust the intensity of each effect applied to a photo, giving you more control over the end result.
There are also some neat new filters like a Nostalgia filter for a more old-school look and a depth-of-field effect to give your photo an artsy touch. (See the photos above for examples.)
I’ve had some time to test the update, and the biggest improvement is speed. Camera+ now loads much faster than it used to, which is useful for capturing those serendipitous moments, and the time to process photos has decreased significantly.
The app’s maker Tap Tap Tap has a full post onall 53 new features.
It’s a free upgrade for those who already own the app. For new buyers, Camera+ is $1 in the App Store.
Download Link [iTunes]
Brian is a Wired.com technology reporter focusing on Apple and Microsoft. He’s also writing a book about the always-connected mobile future called Always On (publishing April 2011 by Da Capo).
Follow @bxchen and @gadgetlab on Twitter.
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Source:wired.com
Posted under Gadget Reviews
This post was written by Journalist on December 22, 2010
Word Lens for the iPhone is, quite honestly, one of the most amazing things I have ever seen. Take a look at this, but put down any hot liquids first.
It’s an augmented-reality, OCR-capable translation app, but that’s a poor description. A better one would be “magic.” World Lens looks at any printed text through the iPhone’s camera, reads it, translates between Spanish and English. That’s pretty impressive already – it does it in real time – but it also matches the color, font and perspective of the text, and remaps it onto the image. It’s as if the world itself has been translated.
Impressed? You’re not the only one. John Gruber of Daring Fireball puts it best: “[It's] as though near-future time travelers started sending us apps instead of Terminators.”
If it works as well as it does in the video, Word Lens really is a taste of science-fiction, something like a visual version of the universal translator or the Babelfish. Only instead of being a convenient device to avoid movie subtitles, it’s a real, functioning tool.
Word Lens is free, and will do some fancy word-rearranging to show you how it works. The Spanish-English and English-Spanish dictionaries are in-app purchases, for $5 each, and the app runs offline – perfect for when you’re traveling. You can pick your coffee back up, now.
Word Lens download [iTunes]
Word Lens product page [Quest Visual]
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Source:wired.com
Posted under Gadget Reviews
This post was written by Journalist on December 17, 2010
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A peek into Nokia’s research labs reveals some intriguing possibilities on how we will interact with our devices in the future.
Phones could be embedded with chips that can help them “smell,” electronically stretchable skins could change the shape of devices and make them fit like gloves on your hand, and gestures could mean the end of peck and hunt on mobile displays.
Some future touchscreen displays might even give you tactile feedback — via tiny electrical shocks.
So while Nokia may be a bit behind the curve in developing touchscreen interfaces, its R&D department is not standing still.
Check out the five big ideas that are currently under development at Nokia’s labs.
Photo: (Andrea Vascellari/Flickr)
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Source:wired.com
Posted under Gadget Reviews
This post was written by Journalist on October 22, 2010
If you think there’s something in the air, you could know for sure by just pointing your Android phone at it.
An Android app called Visibility, developed by researchers at University of Southern California, lets users take a photo of the sky and get data on the air quality.
The free app is currently available for phones running Android 2.1 version of the operating system.
“Airborne particulate matter is a serious threat to both our health and the environment,” say the researchers on their blog. “We are working towards an optical technique to measure air visibility, and hence an estimate of some kinds of air pollution, using cameras and other sensors available on smartphones.”
It’s a neat idea and it’s interesting to see how smartphones are giving rise to the trend of citizen science and crowdsourced data.
As smartphones become ubiquitous and increasingly powerful, researchers are increasingly using the devices to do complex computations and use it for crowdsourced data gathering. For instance, as part of a project called ‘Common Sense’ Intel’s research labs developed sensors that could be attached to GPS-enabled phones and measure air quality. The data gathered from these sensors would be brought back and processed to help researchers understand pollution levels.
The Visibility Android app hopes to offer something similar but make the process more user friendly.
With the Visibility app, each user photo of the sky is tagged with location, orientation and time. The data is transferred to a server where the calculations take place. The level of air quality is estimated by calibrating the images sent and comparing their intensity against an existing model of luminance in the sky, say the researchers.
The result is sent back to the user and the data is also used to create pollution maps for the region. An iPhone version of the app is in the works.
Photo: Mobile Sensing/USC Robotics
[via TreeHugger and Gizmag]
Source:wired.com
Posted under Gadget Reviews
This post was written by Journalist on September 24, 2010
For just $13, you can have your own Leica camera. Petapixel will sell you a pair of stickers for your iPhone 4 which will turn it, magically, into a rangefinder camera worth many thousands of dollars. Or at least, it wil make it look like one.
For trademark-infringement reasons, the sticker set has no Leica logos, but it’s pretty clear from the big red dot that the Leica Look-Alike Skin for the iPhone 4 is inspired by the legendary German camera. There’s even a sticker for the front of the iPhone, although that might be taking things a little to far. The peel-off vinyl panels will also protect the phone from scratches, and may even fool the less perceptive that you’re a lot richer than you are. Available now.
Leica Look-Alike Skin for the iPhone 4 [Petapixel]
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Source:wired.com
Posted under Gadget Reviews
This post was written by Journalist on September 17, 2010
In what’s a sure sign that the megapixel race in cameras is out of control, Canon has announced that it has developed a 120-megapixel image sensor.
That’s 13,280 x 9,184 pixels packed into an area that’s less than 29 millimeters or 1.4 inches. It’s the highest level of resolution in a sensor of its size, says Canon.
Most cameras today used either a CCD (charge-coupled device) sensor or a CMOS (complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor) sensor. Canon’s latest innovation is for a CMOS sensor.
The 120-megapixel sensor is about 7.5 times larger and offers a 2.4-fold improvement in resolution over Canon’s highest comparable commercial sensor. Canon’s highest-resolution commercial CMOS sensor is currently the EOS-1Ds Mark III and EOS 5D Mark II digital SLR cameras. That sensor incorporates approximately 21.1 million pixels.
Cramming more pixels into a sensor is not necessarily indicative of the quality of the photos. Many consumers think more megapixels in a camera means better photos. But sometimes packing more light-sensitive pixels on a tiny sensor can result in greater noise in the photos. Cameras also require strong processing capabilities to take all the data from the sensors and translate into a beautiful picture.
With most CMOS sensors, camera makers use parallel processing to read data at high pixel counts. But that has to be balanced against problems such as signal delays and deviations in timing, all of which can affect image quality.
Canon has modified the method to control the readout circuit timing to get about 9.5 frames per second. This can support continuous shooting of ultra-high-resolution images, says Canon.
The newly developed CMOS sensor also includes full HD video (1,920 x 1,080 pixels) output capability.
For now, the 120-megapixel sensor is a proof-of-concept. It’s an engineering flight of fancy but it shows camera makers are trying to find ways to pack in greater capability into increasingly smaller sensors.
Photo: CMOS sensor/Canon
Source:wired.com
Posted under Gadget Reviews
This post was written by Journalist on August 26, 2010
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A ride to the stratosphere and back has now become a rite of passage for smartphones.
Space enthusiasts are attaching devices such as the Motorola Droid, G1, HTC Evo, and Nexus One — not to mention an array of digital cameras — to weather balloons or rockets, then sending them high into the stratosphere and beyond.
With integrated GPS systems, cameras and fast processors, smartphones are computing devices available to all. Thats why space enthusiasts are turning to them to do things that would have otherwise required custom components or a number of specialized devices.
What you are seeing is a grassroots initiative to reach for the stars, says Bobby Russell, founder of Quest for Stars, a non-profit organization that works with high school students to promote science and technology.
Driving the interest of hobbyists are the latest crop of smartphones and even digital cameras because the devices are cheap and fairly rugged.
Now, its all there off-the-shelf for the taking, says Russell. So why reinvent the wheel?
Photo: A Google G1 phone gets ready to head into the atmosphere, surrounded by members of the Noisebridge hacker space. Photo courtesy: Mikolaj Horbyn, Andrew Gerrand, Christie Dudley.
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Have you tried to launch a gadget into space? Submit a link to a photo and website where we can learn more about it. If we get enough great submissions, we’ll publish a gallery of your submissions! Your photo needs to be on Flickr, Picasa or another website. Give us the URL of the image file (.jpg, .gif or .png), not the web page containing it.
While you can submit as many links as you want, you can only submit one every 30 minutes. No HTML allowed.
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Source:wired.com
Posted under Gadget Reviews
This post was written by Journalist on August 12, 2010
The iPad clearly needs a camera. Maybe not the fancy 5-megapixel, hi-def-shooting camera in the iPhone 4 – after all, who wants to hold a big slab up to snap photos? – but something for grabbing basic images would make Apple’s tablet way more useful.
Unless you want to wait for v2.0 next year, a case would be the only way to add a camera, and that’s just how Chet Rosales has managed it with his iPad Cam-Case. The concept case has an ugly fat strip up the side which has a camera at its top. This camera flips in its mount to fire forward or back, depending on whether you are videoconferencing or just snapping pictures.
Just think for a moment how useful this would be. Apart from Skype (sometime the only time I still wake my MacBook at weekends is to chat to my parents) and the usual quick snapshots, the big-screen iPad is perfect for augmented-reality applications, scanning and organizing business receipts (I still didn’t do my expenses from this year’s CES. Maybe with this I would have) and general photocopy duties: Being able to snap pictures of, say, your mom’s best brownie recipe and read it back full sized would be great (and fattening).
Chet’s cam-case is a concept, but we see no reason why such a thing couldn’t work: Apple lets add-on GPS units talk to apps as if they were built-in, so why not this? Clean up that design and I’d buy one right away.
iPad Cam-Case Product Design & 3-D Renders [Coroflot via Yanko and Laorosa]
Source:wired.com
Posted under Gadget Reviews
This post was written by Journalist on July 7, 2010
