by wildcherry on Wednesday, October 28th, 2009 | News, Tech/Gadget | No Comments

Google’s blog announces that Google Maps Navigation will be available in Android 2.0. The first mobile phone that comes with Android 2.0 is Motorola Droid. “This new feature comes with everything you’d expect to find in a GPS navigation system, like 3D views, turn-by-turn voice guidance and automatic rerouting. But unlike most navigation systems, Google Maps Navigation was built from the ground up to take advantage of your phone’s Internet connection.” And unlike other navigation systems, it’s free.

For now, Google Maps Navigation is only available for the US, but it will certainly be available in other countries when Google collects enough mapping data.

Here’s what you need to know about Google Navigation(from Gizmodo)

• What’s getting it: It’s Android OS 2.0 only for now. And will be available when devices like that ship. (Google demo’d the app to us on a Droid, FWIW.) Other platform support will be announced “by carriers and phone makers” when they’re ready, but Google implied they are working closely with Apple now on it.
• How you tell it where to go: Addresses are input by either text or voice (using the same tech as in the iPhone’s Google mobile app). But the app can take things like business names and restaurant types as well as soft queries like “that museum that has the King Tut exhibit” and return a list of suggested locations
• Traffic handling: The traffic data, as on Google Maps, is driven by multiple sources. Typically, this means data could be from local road authority services like the Bay Area’s Caltrans department’s highway cameras and services like Inrix, but also from cellphones using Google Maps.
• Price: It’s free, and there are no ads. There’s nothing like it in Apple’s App Store that’s less than $25 bucks a year.
• Turn-by-turn voice: There’s only one English-speaking voice at the moment, but it does to text-to-speech, reading street names out loud.
• Does it work offline? Sort of. Maps cache along your intended route, so even if your connection dies along the way the route will still show you what you need to see, and text-to-speech voice synthesis of street names still works, too.
• Maps that never age: Like most cloud map services, you’ll never need to update your map data, but you have to download route maps every time you head out (so you need cell service at the starting point).
• Unique views: It has satellite view, which is super cool for context on the street, but also, it has Street View. When you’re supposed to turn, Street View images come up, overlaid with arrows. Same thing happens at your final destination. Since Street View images have metadata on direction faced and position, Google Maps Navigation intelligently draws the arrows where you’re supposed to go. Sort of.
• Traffic UI: The traffic icon is simple—green, yellow and red according to flow of traffic, with your time of arrival next to the symbol. If you click on the traffic icon, the map zooms out to show congestion points along your route.
• Multi-destination routing? There’s no way to setup multiple stops to help you plan a day’s drive to many locations. But you can search for locations (gas, eateries) along your route, and those results will show up on the map as long as they’re within a radius that moves long your path. You can also pre-determine your stops, and quickly queue up the next when you reach each destination.
• Navigate to point on map: You can tell it to navigate to a location by spotting it on a map and holding your finger down on that point.
• OS integration: You can bookmark locations as icons on your Android phone’s home page.

Tags: Google Maps, google navigation, googlemapsnavigation, GPS, maps navigation, mobile, navteq, tele atlas

by wildcherry on Thursday, March 12th, 2009 | News, Tech/Gadget | No Comments

Google stepped up its attack on the telecommunications industry on Thursday with a free service called Google Voice that, if successful, could chip away at the revenue of companies big and small, like eBay, which owns Skype, telephone companies and a string of technology start-up firms.

Google Voice is the name of the updated version of GrandCentral that runs on Google’s infrastructure. At this time, the service is only available in the US to the existing GrandCentral users, but Google promises to extend its availability soon. The good news is that GrandCentral will continue to be free and you’ll only have to pay for international calls.

“Google Voice gives you one number for all your phones — a phone number that is tied to you, not to a device or a location. Use Google Voice to simplify the way you use phones, make using voicemail as easy as email, customize your callers’ experience, and more. Google Voice isn’t a phone service, but it lets you manage all of your phones. Google Voice works with mobile phones, desk phones, work phones, and VoIP lines. There’s nothing to download, upload, or install, and you don’t have to make or take calls using a computer,” explains the new help center.

Google Voice Blog mentions that the service added many new features: “voicemail transcription, SMS support, conference calling, GOOG-411 integration, low cost international calling”. Voicemails are now searchable, you can embed them in a web page and you can receive email notifications. Text messages sent to your Google number are automatically forwarded to your mobile phone and they are also available in the web account, where you can reply to the incoming messages.

Tags: google number, google voice, google voicemail, grand central, mobile

by lvs004 on Sunday, January 4th, 2009 | Life | 2 Comments

The mobile has changed the way we live and talk. Today every other person you meet on the street has a mobile phone in their hand and is invariably talking, SMSing or gaming on it.

A recent Nokia survey came up with some interesting facts. Just less than half the respondents (44%) use their mobile device as their primary camera, with India being home to the most prolific mobile photographers (68%). Globally, seventy two percent now don’t use a separate alarm clock and 73% use their mobile as their main watch or clock. Further, 67% of the respondents predict the mobile phone will replace their MP3 player. Already a large percentage are listening to their music on a mobile phone. Over a third (36%) of respondents are browsing on their mobile devices at least once a month. Inevitably, Japan leads the way in mobile internet usage with 37% admitting to going online on their mobile on a daily basis.

But a not so positive side effect of the mobile phone revolution is the distance it has brought between us. Distance! You might say, but the mobile phone has brought everyone closer. Now we can just pick up the phone and start chatting with our friends and family.

Well have you noticed how even ten years ago there was just one phone in the house. When it rang just anybody in the house could go and pick it up, in fact many times simultaneously two people would pick up the receiver from two ends. That way we knew who the friends of our spouses and kids were and our own circle was larger because of that. But today what happens? When was the last time you picked up your spouses phone when it was ringing. Do you know half the callers on your teenage kids phone? So while the phone has brought us closer to people living a few miles or even many miles away, it has actually taken us farther away from our loved ones living with us.

[this is a guest post by L. Venkata Subramaniam, do visit his regular blog where he writes on technologies affecting everyday life ]

Tags: family distance, mobile

by wildcherry on Saturday, December 27th, 2008 | News, Tech/Gadget | No Comments

Wirefly - After Christmas Blowout Sale! Coolest Phones + Hottest Accessories = Biggest FREE Deals of the Year + Free FedEx Shipping on all new accounts. Ends Dec. 31 at midnight!

Wirefly: Get the BlackBerry Storm from Verizon Wireless: Special Introductory Price!

Wal-Mart confirmed Friday what everyone who follows Apple already knew: that it will begin selling Apple’s iPhone 3G at nearly 2,500 Wal-Mart stores starting Sunday Dec. 28 — three days after Christmas.

Wal-Mart will sell the red-hot mobile device for $197 for the 8GB model and $297 for the 16GB model, or $2 off their current prices. There had been rumors that Wal-Mart would sell a $99 iPhone. (See Anatomy of a rumor: Wal-Mart’s $99 iPhone.)

Wal-Mart, however, appears to be giving individual store managers some wiggle room on prices. According to the press release, the company’s price match policy will allow stores to “match the price of any local competitor’s advertised store price on the same item within the same promotional period.” Best Buy is offering the iPhone for $190 for the 8GB and $290 for the 16GB models.

Getting the iPhone into Wal-Mart (WMT) is something of a coup for Apple (AAPL). Wal-Mart is the world’s largest retail chain — by far — with more than 7,000 mega-stores around the world and some 2.1 million employees. It finished its last fiscal year with nearly $380 billion in sales — earning it the No. 1 slot in the Fortune 500.

The move represents the fourth major expansion of the iPhone’s retail presence outside Apple’s own 200-plus stores. The phone was sold first at AT&T’s (T) 2,000 retail outlets, then at nearly 1,000 Best Buy (BBY) outlets (see here), and then at the tens of thousands of points of sale (many of them no more than mom-and-pop kiosks) that carry iPhones for Apple’s overseas partners.

Source:CNN

Tags: 3g, cell phone, free cell phone, iphone, itouch, mobile, mobile phones, new, new iphone, phones, unlocked cell phone, walmart