GADGET REVIEWS Just another GADGET NEWS

You know the drill: You’re on vacation, wandering a strange but beautiful city, and you need to take a look at the map. You pull it out, signifying your tourist status with the huge paper flag, while at the same time you struggle to find your spot as the wind snaps an edge from your hands. Finally you orient yourself and, as you try to fold up the map, it tears, ripping in two. You start looking for a store that sells Scotch tape.

This ugly scene could have been avoided if only you had bought the Crumpled City, a map that is meant to be screwed up in a ball like paper from the typewriter of a frustrated writer in old movie montage sequences. It is fashioned from a tough, waterproof material that won’t rip or tear, and can be scrunched and unscrunched to show the correct spot as you move around the city.

Designed by Emanuele Pizzolorusso from Milan, the maps are available for London, Paris, Berlin, Rome and New York. Fully flattened, they measure 87×58cm, or 34 x 23-inches, and should you not want to follow the designer’s advice to “just screw it up, stuff it back into your pocket, and carry on.” you can also wad it back into its accompanying bag.

For bonus stealthy-tourist points, you should smear it with a little ketchup and keep it in a fast-food takeaway bag. 12, or $16.

Crumpled City product page [Palomarweb. Thanks, Emanuele!]

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Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

Interactive Map of Afghanistan for iPad. Image By/Used Courtesy Of Development Seed

GPS maps for smartphones generally require a fairly high-speed wireless internet connection, consume significant processor resources, and are optimized for driving. But what if your 3G connection is unreliable or unavailable, and you still need to get from point A to point B — perhaps on foot?

Last week, I spoke with Eric Gunderson and Ian Cairns at Development Seed, one of the companies developing tools to create custom maps that work in a wider variety of situations, like this one. It’s not that farfetched: In a natural disaster and in the developing world, mobile phones may be useful navigational aids, but only if they can work without a reliable data connection and are optimized for different kinds of transportation than just zooming down the highway to the nearest Starbucks.

Development Seed caught our attention with a post that Cairns wrote for PBS’s MediaShift Idea Lab on custom maps for cyclists and drunken, late-night pedestrians. For StumbleSafely, DC Bikes, and DC Nightvision, a typical street map was overlaid with crime data, bike lanes, bar and bike shop locations, and municipal infrastructure: “Not just buildings and roads, but even crosswalks, medians, and topography lines.” In short, all of the data that actually helps you get where you’re going when you’re not in a car.

These maps were built with TileMill, an open-source program the company created to help governments, NGOs, news organizations, and others easily create custom maps. The idea is to make map image tiles and Geographic Information System (GIS) data as easy to work with as RSS feeds or CSV databases are today.

“We want to put these tools in the hands of the subject-matter experts and see what they can do,” Gunderson told Wired.com. Development Seed won a Knight News Challenge award for the project.

Knight News Challenge: Tilemapping from Knight Foundation on Vimeo.

One of the most-needed and currently most-poorly-served markets for mapping and data visualization support is in international development. As Gadget Lab reported this week, mobile devices are thriving in Afghanistan and elsewhere in the developing world, but data bandwidth and easy-to-find electricity aren’t.

“You can’t get an application like Google Earth working in Afghanistan,” Gunderson said. Maps On A Stick offers full-fledged, data-and-image-rich maps on a USB drive for no-bandwidth or poor-bandwidth use. The company and clients have plenty of experience with those scenarios, mapping uncharted road data in Africa, or helping relief workers provide housing assistance after Hurricane Katrina.

I think about those disaster scenarios often, just as I think about the people I love walking home alone in the city late at night.

When Apple launched the iPhone, it made a big deal about how its software team had written its own Maps client, using Google’s data only for the backend. It had to work for the touch interface, but it also had to make sense for how people would be likely to use Maps on a mobile device.

Now that easy mobile maps have become a natural part of our smartphone-carrying, 3G-surfing lives, it may be time for us to broaden our assumptions about the kinds of maps we’ll need and the conditions we’ll have when we need them.

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

Don’t type when you can talk, says Google. The search giant has strengthened its existing voice command feature on Android and introduced a new application called Chrome-to-Phone, for syncing with Chrome browsers.

Voice Search, despite its name, now lets you do more than just search: It will let users send texts, compose e-mails, call businesses, navigate, jot notes, and set the alarm on their phone by just speaking into the device.

The voice commands, called “voice actions,” are part of Google’s effort to improve the user interface on Android and let consumers go beyond the traditional keyboard and touchscreen interface on their phones.

The Voice Search application is currently available only for phones running version 2.2 of the Android OS — which means HTC Evo, Droid X and Droid 2 users can get it on their phones immediately.

Google also launched a mobile sync app to link its Chrome browser to Android 2.2 devices. The tool, called Chrome-to-Phone, lets users on Google’s Chrome browser click an icon to send a web page or a map to their phone. The page or map is then almost immediately available on the phone.

“This is a low-latency, super-fast app for pushing data to the phone,” says Dave Burke, engineering manager for Google.

Google debuted its voice search application in the U.S. about two years ago when it introduced Android. Now one out of every four queries, or 25 percent of queries, on devices running Android 2.0 OS and higher comes through the voice interface, says Google.

The earlier version of the voice command allowed users to do just three things: web search, call a specific contact and navigate to an address.

The new voice search app goes beyond that. For instance, you can speak the name of a song or a band into the phone and the app will go online, find the music and show a list of apps such as Pandora and last.fm that can play the music you want.

For more details, check out Google’s list of voice commands available through the app.

But when it comes to the Chrome-to-Phone app, the service is more limited. It is currently available to only Chrome users, though some Firefox users are also using it. The sync feature is also only available for Android devices, though Google says it will work to bring the feature to iPhone users as an app.

Image: Screenshots of Voice Search courtesy Google.

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews