Group items tagged

Do you ever want to know the way your cars works or how your driving habits affects your fuel economy? Then Dash is the app for you. However, it is only available for Android and in the US for now. For the app to work, Dash connects with an on board diagnostic that plugs to a dedicated port in your car and uses bluetooth to send data to your phone. Every car made after 1996 can use this app. The app requires an account and a diagnostics dongle. Once Dash is all set up, it will gather data about your car and your driving habits. Every time you start the car, drive around and turn off the car, it counts as a trip. For each trip, you will get a score which measures how safe you drive, and habits such as sticking to the speed limit. When you finish a trip, you get a breakdown of your starting and ending points, the total distance you drove, how long it took you, the amount of fuel used in dollars, and your average fuel economy. Dash also helps with repairs, and has many social features as added extras. New features that are on their way include a way to alert emergency crews that an accident has happened when the airbags are triggered. In my opinion, this app is a must have for drivers especially those who are still learning. With this app, your driving habits can improve a lot with its cool features.

although many people weren't pleased with the new release from apple because it was only an upgrade to the previous iPhone 4, apple still managed to break records. An estimated one million pre-orders were made in the span of 24 hours. the iPhone 4S which is a major upgrade to the iPhone 4 has better processor improvements, a new 8 mega pixel camera, and new speech to text and text to speech.

what Apple concentrated on most was Siri, the iPhone's virtual assistant. Built on the foundation of artificial intelligence technology developed from the CALO project, Siri takes natural language and turns it into action. Siri will make you fall in love with the phone. The only problem is now people will forget how to spell words, but they might improve grammar.

The Wii is so five years ago. But, could this bring it back? There is a possibility, which is exactly what the people at Nintendo jumped on. The new and improved Gamecube-free Wii is coming to North America. Not only that, but it comes with a copy of New Super Mario Bros. Wii, the Super Mario Galaxy soundtrack (wow I've always wanted this) and is designed to lie on its side. The new Wii refresh has been advertised in Europe for around $150, so no big price drop. However, there is a twist to this story, folks. The old and Gamecube-compatible Wii will remain available, at the SAME  $150 price tag. So, really. What's the point? Making it the same price is only going to confuse people, and sales might not be as high as they want. 

Sweden's Jays have released the new t-JAYS. Ever listen to music and just hate the way your headphones look? With these new headphones, you can look cool while listening to music on your iPhones, iPods, and iPads. Sounds like a really bad infomercial, but these guys sell for $129 a pop, with 10mm drivers, a 360 MEMS microphone and a three button controller. If you've got the money, go for it, and improve your listening and music life.

Instrapaper lets you save online articles to your Instrapaper account and sync them to various devises, of which you can read them later. (mobile diigo?) Recently, the iPhone/iPad app got a 'humongaulous' update that touches and improves every way you interact with the app. "Navigation, reading experience, Search, Browsing-all tweaked for the more gooder."  At it's current priced however, i would not download this app.

The new and improved OS for Blackberry, and its name? Blackberry BBX. BBX will be installed in Blackberry phones and tablets, with the possibility of systems in cars, next year. Apparently, it couples both "the best of QNX," which was the OS they bought out last year, and the current OS. BBX will have the capability to support all WebWorks and HTML5 apps that are currently being designed, with software for the Blackberry Playbook. Hopefully, this OS will be better than the current one, and on a side note, we can all pray that a certain company won't crash again for three days *ahem RIM cough cough*.

Any Twitter users out there? Twitter is reportedly testing some new design changes, which features your main timeline becoming expandable, so you can see media and related information smack dab in the timeline, as opposed to beside the timeline or on another page. This can speed up and shorten the time you spend on Twitter, and improve users' feelings and experiences. Trying to get more people online, Twitter? If this tests well, we will see a new Twitter, and maybe a lot more people tweeting.

We should all probably know that when technology starts upgrading as time goes by, we always want to get the new products. Our generation is getting more and more into technology and in this article, it explains a study of how we are digitally getting distracted in our academics. This study shows that 47% of teachers should make courses and content in digital literacy into a school's curriculum. I agree with this because as our generation spends our days mainly on our phones or on computers, we wouldn't be distracted on the technology if we have our work finished with it. The only back draw to this is that many students would just go on Google or Wikipedia for their answers as the Internet has a huge amount of information displayed for us to use. This article relates to portable computing because it's starting to affect how we do in our education. In addition, it relates to eLifestyle because we're using this technology as a daily part of our lives and if we start to use it as a method of education, we can use it as a form of gaining new information.

The article, by Neha Prakash, is about a study on the effects of technology on the current generation of students. The study concluded with 87% of teachers saying students were easily distracted and had short attention spans. This is most likely due to the internet providing such quick and easy access within a keystroke in search engines such as Wikipedia and Google. Students are used to having things accomplished and out of the way so quickly that they no longer have the attention span to complete more complicated and time consuming tasks. Due to this, students lack time management and also do not check if their sources are reputable. A solution to this problem could be to incorporate digital literacy and technology into schools' curriculum. With this additional knowledge, methods of education can be improved in today's technological environment. This relates to elifestyle in that we use technology so much that we can take it for granted. Normally, we do not acknowledge the consequences of repetitive and prolonged use of social media, search engines, cell phones, and so on. As the class of ICS2O, we learn to use technology in a healthy balance in our lives. We are at the forefront of electronic education, using sites such as diigo, Google Drive, and Google Reader to complete assignments and engage in the events of the outside world. While there are negative impacts to the overuse of technology, like most other things, technology, used in balance with other aspects of life, can be beneficial.

This article states that a new study has shown that more and more kids/teenagers are distracted by technologies which affect their learning.  87% of the teachers in this study have said that "technology is creating an easily distracted generation with short attention spans."  Other teachers also claim that "technologies do more to distract students than to help them academically."  Teachers, though, remained somewhat optimistic about digital impact, with 77% saying Internet search tools have had a "mostly positive" impact on their students' work. I think that technologies help out a lot in kids learning however it could still distract them. A lot of kids use the internet with homework and study help which could in some cases is a very beneficial thing. They would learn and find out more about the subject they are studying. Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet Project, says that maybe it is not the problem with tech, but the lack of digital literacy training in students that creates the problem. I agree with this also. 

Tiny glowing probes packed with LEDs and sensors are scientists newest invention for measuring and manipulating the brain.

This article talks about new apps in apple called Magic Reader Flips. This app is used to turn pages without using your hands. By nodding your head, pages can be turned. You just turn your head left or right and MagicReader will move to the next or to previous page. Once it detects your face, you can move your face to change the pages. This app was was created for people who didn't want to flip pages with dirty hands. however it is only used on PDFs documents. This relates to our course because this app represents how much our technology has improved since the past and how much we are dependent on it because every app is becoming famous and is used to make our lives easier. This is kind of sad because we are too dependent on technology that we have hard time living without them and we use those technology to do such a simple tasks such as flipping pages. 

This article is about the Magic Reader, it is like an iPad but it responds to your head movement rather than the touch from your finger. The pro of this is that you wouldn't need to touch the screen and get it all dirty and greasy like what would happen on the iPad if you were reading on eReader. The Magic Reader takes one second to scan and recognize your face and every time you would nod the page will turn wherever you would nod your head towards. I think that it is convenient but after a while I think that I would get annoyed after constantly nodding your head instead of simply sliding your finger gently.

Shazam has come out with it's newest version, 5.0 for iPod and iPhone users. The changes to this new app is faster speed, better layout, and ability to connect to other social networks. Some people claim that it is THE fastest music app. Shazam claims that their app can identify a song in 1 second, and when tested it only took 3 seconds. This is a huge improvement to the older model which took 10 seconds. I remember having Shazam on my blackberry and having to sometimes wait for almost 30 seconds to get a song identified. This shows that Shazam has come a long way. People are also now allowed to comment on the music they found and share it with their friends on facebook and twitter. In addition, Shazam has added language support for over 30 different languages. making Shazam more universal. I'm sure that this new model will make Shazam a lot of money.

recently people have been trying to break the iPhone 5 trying too see if if it holds much better than Samsung Galaxy S III. the iPhone 5 was developed in california. though it has out sold the previous iPhone 4S it is also a disappointment for many apple fans. they were expecting a new and improved look and model of the iPhone 5, but instead the shape was kept the same and only the screen got larger. most of the software on the iPhone 5 is on the Samsung Galaxy S II, so in my opinion the iPhone 5 is not exactly that new people are just buying this product because it is mainstream. if stive jobs was not dead i'm pretty sure he would've been disappointed with this supposed new model for iPhone 5.

This article was about the leading android app on the Google store to be a scam. It was suppose to protect your phone from malware and spyware, it costed $3.99. Virus sheild just changed the logo from an "X" to a check mark with no effort needed. Many complaints have been sent it saying that this app did not work. Making the price high and having good image previews, and a good description will make people want to buy it because they trusted the rating's and reviews. The app ended up not working, and with other 10,000 downloads, the people that made this scam, made a large amount of money. Google took this app down, and has their eye closely on malicious apps, to prevent this type of scam from happening again.

its a wrist health tracker. its also a watch, that tells time and date. but what's special about this one is that when it measures your movement for the day, it will give you tips on improving your daily schedule so that you can have a healthier life style, this is $200 but it is also an accelerometer and a GPS. it can also measure sleep length and is small and light weight

Facebook is not the most secure site for your private information, and it's about to get a whole lot worse. At F8, the event in which Facebook makes announcements about upcoming improvements to the site, it was announced that the company wants to "extend the site". This means integrating this social network into just about everything you do online, which was once done by AOL, and we can see how popular that service is today.

Samsung has today announced an update to the smallest slate in its Galaxy range called the Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus. The new device will be available from October and boasts a number of major improvements over its predecessor, including a super speedy 1.2GHz dual-core processor, 1GB of RAM, and HSPA+ with download speeds of up to 21Mbps.

Mozilla upgraded Firefox 6 with Firefox 7, six weeks after it came out. It uses 50% less memory and it is much faster. Much more memory and speed improvements are expected to come in Firefox 8 and 9.

Google has created its own social networking site called Google+. Google+ is like a combination of facebook and Skype. It is like facebook because you can update your status and post pictures with your friends. It is like Skype because you can call people and video chat, however in Google+, you are able to video chat with up to 10 people on the same conference.