Archive for the ‘smartphone’ Category

Future smartphones may read our minds

Thursday, September 16th, 2010

Sydney Morning Herald reports today that developing technology for smartphones are working on ‘psychic’ smartphones.  Intel researchers are working on a prototype application with Fodor’s Travel, which learns your favourite foods, where you like to visit and other such information using your GPS searches, and then makes recommendations when you visit new cities.

The techies have to train computers to look at ‘hard sensors’ data (location, voice patterns, temperature etc) and combine them with soft sensors such as calendar appointments.  Obviously, privacy issues will arise which will also need to be dealt with as the software is developed further.

Almost scarily, Intel reports that is looking even further, a computer that can read your thoughts!

Masterchef serves up iPhone treats

Thursday, July 29th, 2010

The Masterchef finalists are going all out to help Telstra attract iPhone buyers, in preparation for the iPhone’s official sale date on Friday, by cooking up Apple-inspired treats to attract the Apple fans.

To help customers from having to line up in the strangely cold weather in Sydney overnight, Vodafone and 3 will allow people to register their iPhone 4 purchase at the George Street Vodafone store from 10pm today.  Customers have also begun queueing at the Optus store on George St.

Click here to access the best iPhone plans.

Apple iPhone 4 fuels recall speculation

Thursday, July 15th, 2010

Continuing faulty antenna issues with the iPhone 4 may lead to a product recall, an embarrassing event for Apple, which may have costs of up to $1.5 billion USD.  It is harder to put a price on the cost to Apple’s reputation.

Consumer Reports stated that it could not recommend the iPhone, due to the antenna, which, if the device is held a particular way, substantially cuts the phone’s reception resulting in “signal loss issues”.

This result was upheld by Engadgets, who in their own testing, found that the iPhone 4′s dropped calls and experienced low data rates at a much higher frequency than other phones.  Engadget‘s full review of the iPhone 4 is here.

Consumer Reports blog contains further detail as to why the iPhone 3 is preferable to the latest model.

Mobile shopping – get set to splurge

Tuesday, June 22nd, 2010

Paypal, the lucrative branch of Ebay which allows individuals and businesses to pay online using different methods of payment, is looking to the Asia-Pacific region to grow e-commerce.

The latest figures from Informa Research show that in this region, buying products online with a handheld device is to go up to $139,000 billion USD in 2012, with the key markets being Japan and Korea. The rapidly expanding use of smartphones is credited for this growth in use.

To cope with the higher workload, Paypal has plans to double employees in the offices of Australia, China, Hong Kong, India, Japan, Taiwan and Singapore by the end of the year.

To read the full article, click here.