latechna » Mobile

Opera Mini iPhone/iPod Touch

logtech — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 03:49:26 +0000

Opera Mini has finally been released on the Apple iPhone and iPod touch. From the current test it is 10 times better than Safari. The first thing you will notice is speed. Pages load much faster than Safari (lifehacker chart). The speed of a loading website makes a considerable different especially when on Edge or 3G. The tab browsing on Opera is nice, it is out-of-the-way and easy to use. Page zooms are quick, however we found sometimes they were to quick. We also found there is only one zoom level, however, Opera will re size everything so you don’t have to worry about that too much. One feature which we found useful was search in the website which Safari lacks. With some test we found that Opera had some trouble with formatting pages, cutting off text, and making headers too big. However, this does not take away from the over all experience. Over all it is a speedy browser that has some issues like startup time and zoom, but is probably one of the best mobile web view experiences yet.

Update: Skyfire another mobile web browser may come out on the iPhone and iPod Touch soon; it might have flash.

Whats next for the tablet

logtech — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 05:05:43 +0000

The iPad official launch was Saturday and it went well. With the over hyped media saying that this will revolutionize the industry, what are other companies doing to keep up. There are the rumors that the Microsoft Courier will hit the market soon with its double-sided note taking capabilities, however so far it seems to be only that. More resent the HP “Slate” is said to be a pretty powerful competitor to the iPad with several advances over the iPad. According to Engagdet who said they got their hands “on what looks like an internal HP Slate presentation”, breaks down some pretty cool statics. The HP Slate is said to be around the same price as the iPad but have a more powerful possessor. It was also said to have a card reader, USB port, and a HDMI port. The report also said that it would contain two camera one of them a VGA camera, which unfortunately the iPad lacks any camera. And finally it said that the HP Slate would run Window 7 which means Flash and full web capabilities. Over all the HP Slate appears to be a very nice competitor to the iPad and in my opinion over shoots the iPad by far. However, this is all speculation and who knows when and if this device ever comes out. Right now the iPad is solo in this new market and it could be for some time until we see some good competition

Windows Phone 7

logtech — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 21:59:42 +0000

The new Windows Phone 7 is miles ahead of his predecessor Windows Mobile. If you are familiar with the Zune interface you will be at home with Windows Phone 7. The interface is clean and appears pretty easy to use. Windows Phone 7 is very integrated with social and web services such as Facebook, Bing search, Bing Maps, and photo cloud services. All of the in phone and in the cloud services are tightly integrated with one another. The music and video apps are just like they are on the Zune player. You will also be able to download content from the Zune store over Wi-Fi or 3G. There will be an app hub coming soon which will have applications like games. In the near future they will also be releasing Windows Office Hub, which will be programs like Word, and OneNote but made for the phone. This future will probably integrate closely with Windows Office 2010 on your computer which has show off some share options itself. Of course there will be the typical apps like e-mail, calendar and Bing Maps. Internet Explore on the phone is much cleaner and user-friendly than any of their earlier versions. Microsoft said there will be many more futures that they did not show at the Mobile World Congress 2010, which hopeful will make this phone ever more user-friendly and easy to use. Despite quite a few bugs in the prototypes that they show off at the show, the phone as a very big potential to do well in the phone market coming later this year.

Apple's iPad

logtech — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 02:27:37 +0000

Despite the name, Apple’s new iPad is an attractive device. In essence the tablet is a 9.7 inch iPod touch with the ability of 3G. It runs on a new version of the iPhone software and has a fairly high quality screen. It has a very nice browsing experience (except no Flash yet) and a good mail client. Viewing pictures is a clean and easy process however there is not build in camera which is a disappointment. Video including Youtube, will play in HD . The AppStore and iTunes are the same except for the addition of iBooks. iBooks is like iTiunes for books, and that’s about it. iBooks is defiantly not a new idea but will help a industry. And of course there is a maps app and a calendar app. Most apps in the store will work on the device. The most important part of this however is the price. The starting price is at $499.99. This was a lot lower than expected, however it is not surprising because if they priced it at 999 for example, it should be more like a computer which it is not (Price list below). The 3G is a lot cheaper than you get with a computer at $ 30.00 for unlimited data. The iPad is said to last 10 hours and a month on standby. Over all this is a sleek device that will create a new category that we will see change the way we do computing. However, this is probably not the device to define this new tablet category. (The iPad wifi is available in 60 days and the 3G in 90 days).

	16 GB	32 GB	64 GB
Wi-Fi	$499	$599	$699
Wi-Fi + 3G	$629	$729	$829

Download video and audio from video sharing sites

logtech — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 22:39:16 +0000

Now that video sharing sites like Youtube.com are very popular it is no wonder why people want do download from these sites. Here is a list and instructions on how download videos and audio from these sites.

One of the easiest sites is keepvid.com. All you have to do is paste the URL of the video (make sure it is the direct URL) into the box and click download. It will download the video as an .FLV, which can be a down side if that’s not the format you want.

A second website will download and convert the video this site is called, vixy.net. This is one of our favorite because you paste the video URL into the box, select which type of format you want (MOV, AVI, MP4 (iPod) 3GP (cell phones) or just the audio MP3), and click start. It will convert the video and then give you a download link. When picking a video conversion type you may want to consider MOV and AVI are higher quality and could be used for DVDs, while MP4 and 3GP are lower quality.

The only problem with sites like these is they don’t always download the video the first time so you may want to try a few times or try a different site. We are going to put a list of other downloader sits below if the above don’t work, comment if you have a question.

savevid.com
If using Firefox you can use this plug-in: addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3006
gazzump.com

Hulu Mobile

logtech — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 00:22:59 +0000

Hulu.com, the popular video on demand website, has sealed its self off from being accessed on Skyfire 1.0. Skyfire is a relatively new application for cell phones which allows people to access content most cell phone browsers don’t support like Flash. This was very disappointing, but it seems they are doing this for a reason. If you look back a few months ago hulu did a similar thing with boxee. They blocked there content from boxee and just about a month later came out with their own desktop application. So it seems obvious what they are planning, come out with their own mobile application. If they do come out with their own mobile application how are they going to do it? There are several ways a site like hulu could go about this. They could create their own mobile applications for devices like the iPhone, Blackberry, Pal Pre, ext. However, if they do go this path their content will not be available on all devices and they will have to create applications for each device. On the other hand they could create a mobile website which could be reached by most mobile browsers; this would have a wider distribution but limit capability and quality. They could reach people either way but it would be much easier if the world could come together and create a stranded for web videos on the computer and on mobile devices.

CrunchBase Information

hulu

Information provided by CrunchBase

LG VU Review

logtech — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 06:18:56 +0000

Today I received the LG Vu and spent some time with it. Over all it seems like a great phone, maybe not a iphone killer but it still gets the job done. At first the touch screen did not seem to responsive but I got use to it and it worked pretty well. The menu system is easy to use; not to much of a learning curve involved. The web browser is a full html web browser and can play Youtube videos but not hulu.com videos, yet. I was able to install some application like gmail application, google maps, and Opera mini. These programs however do have some glitches on the phone. Over I really like the phone and it grows on me more and more.

Aurora Concept Video

logtech — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 06:27:27 +0000

Aurora (Part 1) from Adaptive Path on Vimeo.

Backblaze

logtech — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 04:18:02 +0000

Iphone, Iphone, Iphone….

logtech — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 22:09:04 +0000

Well you may be sick of hearing about the iPhone like me, or you may not. As you may or may not know the new iPhone 3G came out Friday, and the reviews are falling off the tree hitting every blog on the way down. Personally I do not see why there needs to be so much coverage, but then again almost every Apple product is like this, the hype and all. I do not dislike all Apple products, but the talk about one product before and after it comes out is overload.

I have not got the chances to test the new 3G iPhone, however I saw a test for the speed of the 3G (below) on Cnet. It was a little over 20 second different in the test of loading a website. 20 Seconds is nice however, the other features that are missing from the 3G like a camera that can record video, landscape keyboard, and changeable batteries make the iPhone a no buy for me, yet.

Please leave a comment on what you thought I said, maybe you could change my mind.