A growing number of psychiatrists and doctors are worrying about the effects of constant texting on the youth, according to The New York Times:
[they] say it is leading to anxiety, distraction in school, falling grades, repetitive stress injury and sleep deprivation.
Dr. Martin Joffe, a pediatrician in Greenbrae, Calif., recently surveyed students at two local high schools and said he found that many were routinely sending hundreds of texts every day.
Personally, I disagree. Obviously, there are some bad cases like that of Reina Hardesty. The article featured her one-month of 14,523 texts, and related her academic problems caused by an actual increase in her SMS volume. But I think she’s an exception. Texting per se isn’t bad for anyone—including the young ‘uns.
All I’m saying that, if parents and other authority figures want children to cut down on their texting, they should set a good example. The end of the article hits it right on the button, featuring Reina complaining about her parents’ hypocritical control of her cell phone usage.
“She should understand a little better, because she’s always on her iPhone, ” Reina said. “But she’s all like, ‘Oh well, I don’t want you texting.’ ” (Her mother, Manako Ihaya, said she saw Reina’s point.) Professor Turkle can sympathize. “Teens feel they are being punished for behavior in which their parents indulge.” she said. And in what she calls a poignant twist, teenagers still need their parents’ undivided attention.
“Even though they text 3,500 messages a week, when they walk out of their ballet lesson, they’re upset to see their dad in the car on the BlackBerry,” she said. “The fantasy of every adolescent is that the parent is there, waiting, expectant, completely there for them.”
In summary, its creators bill Google Wave as what email would look like if it made its debut today. And through O’Reilly Radar do the makers publicize Wave and its upcoming launch. Instead of emails grouped into conversations, we now have Waves, individually described as a cloud-based conversation. Essentially, Wave is more about collaboration rather than communication.
It’s the initial description that pushes me to describe Wave as advanced IM, not email. The yet-to-be-released service seems to come across as an amorphous group chat, but with the ability to pin your replies or comments onto a specific portion of the Wave, just like pointing out a specific picture within an album and starting a discussion over it. Thus Wave communiques seem to take a more multi-point approach, again much like many people expressing themselves within a group chat, rather than the one-to-one or one-to-many reality of current email.
Thoughts? Question? Violent reactions? Leave a comment below. You can sign up your email for Google Wave’s launch notification on wave.google.com.
Heart rate monitoring is an important part of training for any athlete, and while there are plenty of compact devices for those who stay dry during a workout, the Aqua Pulse is the first heart rate monitor designed specifically for swimmers. Besides being waterproof, the Aqua Pulse also features an infrared sensor that clips to the earlobe and measures the light pulses from the capillary blood flow in the skin, which can then be used to calculate the heart’s beats per minute. But it’s also important for a swimmer to be aware of their heart rate while training, so that they can stay in their ideal heart-rate-zone. So the Aqua Pulse cleverly uses bone-conduction technology allowing the swimmer to ‘hear’ their hear rate even while they’re under water.
The Aqua Pulse will supposedly be available sometime in May of this year for 9.99 from the FINIS website.
The netbook is one of the most popular categories in the notebook market right now. According to recent numbers form DisplaySearch netbooks accounted for 20% of the total notebook market in Q1 2009 and sales keep growing.
Asus sired the netbook category with its Eee netbooks back in 2007 and some of those early machines have tiny SSDs for storage. Super Talent has announced a new line of upgrade SSDs for owners of the Eee 900, 901, 901A, 901 GO, and S101 netbooks.
The SSDs are offered in MLC and SLC flavors with the MLC variety coming in 16GB, 32GB, and 64GB capacities. Read speeds for the MLC drives are up to 150MB/s and write speeds are 100MB/s. The SLC drives offer better performance with read speeds of 170MB/s and write speeds of 130MB/s. The MLC 16GB drive sells for .99, the 32GB version is 5.99, and the 64GB version is 9.99.
The mobile phone market is down like most other electronics categories thanks to the global economic recession. However, the smartphone segment is still booming and thanks to the success of smartphones, more and more devices are being introduced.
Verizon Wireless is getting three new handsets from LG this summer including the LG Glance, LG enV Touch, and the LG enV 3. The handsets share some of the same features including support for text, picture, and voice messaging along with Bluetooth support. The handsets work with VZ Navigator, email, IM and chat as well.
Both enV handsets have full QWERTY keyboards and can surf the net with HTML browsers and support up to 16GB microSDHC cards. The enV Touch has a 3-inch external touch screen and a 3-inch internal touch screen along with a 3.2-megapixel camera. The enV 3 has a 2.6-inch internal screen and a 1.56-inch external screen along with a 3-megapixel camera. The Glance offers a 1.3-megapixel camera. The enV 3 will sell for 9.99 after rebate, the Touch will sell for 9.99 after rebate, and the Glance will sell for .99 after rebate.
Sharp has announced that they’ve developed a five-primary-color display that is capable of reproducing more than 99% of real surface colors that the human eye can discern. The new display features something the company calls “Multi-Primary-Color Technology” which is a combination of special image processing circuitry, as well as the addition of cyan and yellow to the standard red, green and blue pixel structure. Unfortunately there’s no photos of the new display just yet, but a prototype will be shown at the Society for Information Display (SID) symposium being held in San Antonio from May 31 to June 5, so hopefully a few shots will turn up.
Apparently, just the fact that a game called DJ Hero is on the way is not enough. Instead, Activision is also going to be releasing a limited edition version of the video game that includes Eminem and Jay-Z tracks.
The controller will also be more advanced. How, we have no idea, but that’s the word on the street today. Included in the limited edition release will be a metal case for the turntable and a DJ stand.
Music from all different genres will be included in the game, from hip-hop to pop/rock. We can expect DJ Hero to be released sometime this fall for all the popular gaming consoles including the Wii, Xbox 360, PS2 and PS3. We don’t know pricing yet, or what the pricing for this limited edition version will be, but we’ll be sure to let you know when we do.
There are a lot more media hub options on the market nowadays than there used to be, so what’s one more? The Venice-V38HD is the latest offering from AMEX Digital and provides a unique function that allows you to actually rip DVDs.
This media hub plays digital video in several formats including H.264, XviD, Matroska and more. But the truly unique feature is the built-in DVD drive that lets you rip content onto the hub for later playback. You can rip CDs as well.
The device is equipped with 2TB of space for storage and includes Ethernet, HDMI, S-Video, component, and RCA. We don’t know pricing information or a release date just yet, but we’ll be sure to let you know when we do.
ViewSonic is always releasing new digital photo frames and today they’ve revealed three more that might be of interest to you. They are a part of the TrueView line and range from 7-inches to 10.4-inches in size.
The specific models include the 7-inch VFD720, the 8-inch VFD820 and the 10.4-inch VFD1020. All three photo frames have a 4:3 aspect ratio, a USB port, memory card, 2GB of memory and a wireless remote included.
These frames only really differ when it comes to resolution. The 7-inch and 8-inch frames sport a 800 x 600 resolution and the 10.4-inch frame has a 1,024 x 768 resolution. You can use these TrueView frames to play slideshows, show static images or you can even display a clock and calendar, if you’d like. These ViewSonic TrueView frames will be available by the end of next month. Pricing ranges from about to 0.
On the eve of Computex 2009, some company’s just can’t keep their excitement to themselves. Foxconn have been spilling the details on their SZ901, and Sascha at netbooknews.de caught up with the 10.1-inch netbook at the Linpus headquarters. Under the hood there’s the usual Intel Atom N270 processor, 1GB of RAM, a 160GB hard-drive and, slightly more interesting, a UMTS 3G WWAN module, but it’s the OS which is actually catching our attention.
Video demo after the cut
The OS, in fact, runs Linpus Lite Moblin V2, a fork in the roadmap thanks to Linpus’ ongoing work with Intel’s open-source OS team. Full details of the platform won’t be revealed until Computex next week, but we’re hoping for some of the flexibility of Linpus and the UI ease-of-use of Moblin.
Otherwise this looks to be a pretty standard netbook, even 3G is becoming more common, and without a price tag it’s hard to figure exactly how it will fit into the established netbook market. Foxconn are presumably hoping that the distinctive OS will give the SZ901 an edge.
