The iPhone can be used in a lot of different ways, outside of the standard things that Apple let out of the labs. Applications give the device a breath of new life, and this new app, or system if Snapstick has their way, is meant to deliver the “full web” to your TV, thanks to your iPhone (and laptop). CRAVE got some time to play around with the iPhone application, and tested it out. So, how does flicking your shows from an iPhone to your TV work? Better than some may have thought.
The quick use of the application isn’t a full-blown review, or even an in-depth preview. The application itself, as Snapstick points out, isn’t a full, ready for primetime product quite yet. But, what does seem to be working so far works well enough. Not only can you “snap” content from your iPhone, which you can then control from the phone itself or your laptop, but other people with the application can then control the content on the TV from their respective iPhone, too.
Of course, you’ll need a device to snatch the content from the air after you throw it over. Snapstick isn’t sure if the current prototype, which is a set-top box, will stick around, or if they will incorporate the technology into a Blu-ray player, or maybe even a TV itself. As of right now, there’s no word on a release date or pricing, but with Snapstick obviously taking on Apple TV and Google TV, we can all just hope that a price is competitive.
While some may think that the design of the bottle could be look at again, the i-dration water bottle is certainly a good idea. Designed for those who need water on the go, such as athletes, this new design concept shows that you can not only connect anything to your smartphone in one way or another, but that doing so can help you overall health.
The i-dration water bottle connects to your smartphone via an application. When it does, it’s able to collect real-time data, regarding how much water you’ve consumed throughout the day so far, as well as the temperature outside. As it collects the data, it takes into account the personal health information you’ve input, as well as other vital stats, and then sends that information back to the i-dration water bottle. Once there, a blue light will turn on if you need to get some more water into your system.
While it’s just a concept that’s still in design right now, the i-dration water bottle will actually make an appearance on the showroom floor of CES 2011. So, stay tuned as more details about this interesting water bottle come to light early next year.
Remember The Fingerist, the guitar headstock-themed speaker and case for your iPhone or iPod touch? You know, the one with the shoulder strap for public (and private) performances with all of your favorite music making apps? Well, it seems that it’s finally available in the states. Indeed, there has been so little fanfare behind this announcement that the company responsible, Evenno, hasn’t even acknowledged it on its site. But don’t worry: we found this bad boy for $150 on Amazon. And if that’s not enough, iLounge has done a series of hands-on photos (see the More Coverage link, below). Or, if you’re like us, you can skip the thing altogether and groove to Rick Wakeman after the break. We do have one more thing to say about the Fingerist, however: at least it’s not endorsed by this guy.
If the name UberTwitter sounds familiar, that’ll be because it’s one of the more popular mobile Twitter clients, accounting for 10 million tweets each day from BlackBerry users around the globe. And now it’s also available on the iPhone. Citing the “growing dominance” of Apple’s one-device-to-rule-them-all mobile platform, the UberTwitter crew has decided to expand its offering with a new open beta, which is available to download now. The major distinguishing feature being touted is something called UberView, which allows access to links within tweets without exiting the app or opening up a new window within it. Looks a pretty slick idea, but there are still some early issues to be ironed out — as with all beta iterations — and a final v1.0 should be ready to do battle with Twitter’s official app by the middle of December.
Playing catchup, are we? Sony’s hot on the trail of Amazon and Barnes and Noble, who already have e-reading apps for the Android and iOS platforms, with its own freshly announced Reader offering set for release next month. The functionality in this upcoming slice of software will be familiar: you get to access books already purchased at the Reader Store or pony up cash for new ones, while making bookmarks, notes and highlights on your mobile device. Throw in adjustable fonts and you’ve got your boilerplate beginning to a decent mobile e-reader. Now you just need to pick your fave ebook purveyor.
Internet Explorer not stirring your cup of Windows Phone 7 tea correctly? Well, you now have an alternative in the form of a new browser that’s arrived in the Marketplace: Browser+. It does seem to have been built on IE code rather than its own framework, so don’t get your hopes up for Chrome to Phone on WP7 any time soon. Anyhow, the new app’s been given a test drive by a couple of sites, who note it integrates a view of your current tabs and a Google search box right into the general web view, providing a slightly more accessible interface than the default option, while also throwing in a private surfing mode for the paranoid among us. A few crashes and bugs have been spotted in Browser+ so far, but hey, it’s cheap and it at least gives us hope for a less monotheistic browsing experience. See it in video action after the break.
Quite the dollar amount. This is the new LSI SLP-300 acceleration card, intended for a different set of purchasers that me and… well probably you too. It’s a low-profile solid state storage card aimed directly at big companies hoping to keep performance but reduce clutter. This bad boy delivers data efficiency to the tune of hundreds of hard drives while consuming less than 25W of power, claims LSI. That sounds quite amazing, says we. Sounds quite amazing indeed.
By the numbers, you’d need 400+ mechanical hard drives and 36U of rack space, PLUS more than 300 times the power you’d usually use to achieve the same result. If you happen to get your hands on one of these, you can bet you’ll get up to 240,000 sustained IOPS and 300GB of SLC solid state storage capacity, all of this in a teeny tiny card (the one you see above.) You can plug it directly into your standard 8 lane PCI-Express Generation 2 server slot. Once plugged in, it can take up to 1,400MB/s of throughput with access latency of under 50 microseconds. That rocks. That rocks so very much. Read the entire press release below:
LSI Bolsters Channel Portfolio with PCI Express Solid-State Storage Card for Application Acceleration
New LSI™ WarpDrive™ plug-and-play I/O acceleration card dramatically improves application performance while reducing rack space, power and cooling costs
MILPITAS, Calif., November 16, 2010 – LSI Corporation (NYSE: LSI) today introduced in the channel the LSI WarpDrive™ SLP-300 acceleration card, a PCI Express (PCIe®) card offering performance up to 240,000 sustained IOPS and 300GB of SLC solid-state storage capacity within a low profile form factor. The WarpDrive card can help customers accelerate application performance, reduce energy costs and eliminate racks of storage by delivering the I/O performance of hundreds of hard disk drives while consuming less than 25 watts of power.
”The LSI WarpDrive card sets a new standard for data center efficiency by providing IT administrators with previously unattainable levels of performance while helping to reduce operational and capital expenditures,” said Brent Blanchard, director of worldwide channel sales and marketing, LSI. “The WarpDrive card complements the LSI CacheCade™ and FastPath™ solid-state storage acceleration solutions, providing our channel partners with a one-stop shop to address the performance, deployment and integration requirements that high-performance applications and dense computing demand.”
The low-profile, half-length WarpDrive card plugs into a standard 8 lane PCIe Gen 2.0 server slot and is designed to deliver high performance with low latency and a low CPU burden independent of main memory size. It offers system builders, system integrators and their end customers a cost-effective, plug-and-play solution for maximizing the transactional I/O performance of applications such as Web serving, data warehousing, data mining, professional video and high-performance computing.
A WarpDrive card can sustain up to 1,400MB/s of throughput, with reliable and consistent performance across both sequential and random reads and writes. It delivers up to 240,000 4K read IOPS and up to 200,000 4K write IOPS, with access latency of less than 50 microseconds. To achieve equal performance on a write IOPS basis utilizing hard disk drives would require over 400 drives, 36U of rack space and consume more than 300 times the power.
“The LSI PCIe-based WarpDrive card offers simple, effective, and affordable application acceleration for enterprise servers,” said Bob Farkaly, director of marketing, Storage System products for Exar. “Utilizing two WarpDrive cards combined with Exar’s BitWackr ™solution, we measured an aggregate performance of 1,028 MB/second, which is almost twice the speed we were able to achieve with other PCIe-based flash products.”
“Schooner’s MySQL and NoSQL solutions combined with the LSI WarpDrive card provide industry-leading performance for database and key-value stores, delivering over 9x performance throughput increase relative to hard drive configurations and over 3x performance throughput increase relative to alternative PCIe flash-based solutions,” said Dr. John Busch, founder and CTO, Schooner Information Technologies. “Beyond raw IOPS and latency performance, we are very impressed with the LSI WarpDrive card’s performance stability, observing negligible performance variance over time. Also, the LSI WarpDrive card’s very low overhead consumption of server processor and DRAM memory resources enables even higher performance by leaving these resources available for useful application processing and data caching.”
The WarpDrive card utilizes industry-standard and widely deployed LSI SAS software drivers to provide channel partners with simple integration and management using existing SAS infrastructure. It features the LSISAS2008 6Gb/s SAS I/O controller and is based on the enterprise-proven LSI Fusion-MPT™ architecture. The WarpDrive card is bootable, has no external power requirement and installs as a single drive with no user configuration required. The WarpDrive card helps to ensure high reliability with a management infrastructure offering extensive monitoring, including health, error rate and drive failure.
The WarpDrive card builds upon LSI enterprise-level experience in the design, manufacture and support of advanced server and storage solutions. The WarpDrive card is designed to provide system integrators and system builders with a robust and stable solution with assured interoperability and a low-risk path to market. The WarpDrive card also helps to minimize hardware requirements, reducing initial investment costs and eliminating points of failure for greater overall system reliability.
Thanks to Google, we now have an official Google Voice application available in Apple’s App Store. The day that many thought would never come, finally has, and so we needed to find out if the wait was really worth it. After all, with something that has been longed for this long, it’s only right that we dig into it right off the bat, and find out if the official version was something we’ve really been wanting all along. So, does Google Voice for iPhone really stack up? Find out after the cut.
It didn’t take us long to find, download, and install the official Google Voice for iPhone application. We were happy to find out that the application runs natively on the iPhone, which is a big plus in our book. As you can imagine, there’s a few intricacies to the software that you’re either going to love, or hate. For example, like a few different iOS-based applications feature now, you’re able to just drag down the list of messages in your Inbox, and the application will immediately refresh, bringing any new messages you have waiting for you front and center.
The messages between you and your contacts are threaded, just like they are in the full Web-based version of Google Voice. Threaded messaging makes it a lot simpler to keep up with the conversation, just as we’ve seen in plenty of other messaging formats over the years, so it’s good to see that the official application has this feature, too. If you want to get in touch with someone other than text message, clicking on your contact’s name will bring up a full list of other options, like calling them, or even removing them from your Quick Dial list, if that’s something you’d like to do.
You have access to your main screen, which will show you a quick run down of new things happening, such as your Inbox and voicemails. You can also access starred messages, which are just messages that you’ve starred, so you can save for later. You can also read your history, so you can look back at what someone has said, or what you’ve said to someone else, as well as call information. Accessing your voicemail lets you read the transcription (if Google was able to make one), or listen to it, right form the iPhone.
As for the dialer, it’s obviously present. You can make calls from the iPhone, using your Google Voice number (which will show up on the person your calling’s Caller ID as your Google Voice number, remember), as well as receive calls. You have a Settings menu as well, which will let you change some settings right there on the device, for the iPhone you’re using Google Voice on.
Adding someone to your Quick Dial list is simple, just as everyone would imagine it would be. Just head into your contact list, find the contact you want to add, click on their name, and then select the right option after you select the phone number you want to add. As soon as they are added, they will appear in your Quick Dial list. Deleting someone from the list is just as easy, as you can simply hit Edit at the top-left, and the red delete marks will appear next to the contact’s name. Hit that, followed by Delete, and you’re good to go.
The fact that the official application for Google Voice works so well, and natively, with the iPhone is a big plus. Things like making calls, or getting background notifications for incoming alerts, all work so well, that it’s a wonder why it has taken this long for the application to show up in the App Store (or not). However, we did find a bit of redundancy, in that the background notifications will show you the same notifications that you’ll get from a text at the same time. If you have it set up so you get text notifications, which many Google Voice users do, then the background notifications from Google Voice aren’t needed. Depending on how you want it set up, based on your personal preferences, you can either choose to skip text notifications, or as we did, turn off the background notifications. Especially considering you can still reply to Google Voice text messages right from within the native messaging application, we just didn’t find a need for it.
In the end, the set up process is way too simple. If you’ve been using Google Voice already, then getting the official application set up on your device is as easy as any other phone. Just set up your phone number, which should be your iPhone’s number, and you’ll be good to go. Of course, you will need that Google Voice account, or you won’t be able to use the service at all. Google has come out with the official application, and yes, it was worth the wait. If you’ve been waiting for a free, official application, then here’s your chance to jump on it.
Check out the full video below, to see the application in action. As well as the gallery, with plenty of pictures.
Given that the first truly respectable Android tablet just came out, the Wall Street Journal is timing its Tablet Edition app release pretty much perfectly. It aims to offer a faithful reproduction of the printed version of the paper while augmenting it with full-screen video, market data, customization options, and the ability to save articles for offline reading. $3.99 will net you a week’s worth of access on both Android and iPad Tablet Editions along with subscriber privileges on WSJ.com. The app itself is free, so if you have a Galaxy Tab just hanging around (it doesn’t work on phones, we’ve already tried on a Desire Z) you can give it a test-drive — it’s certainly what we intend to do, check back later for our impressions!
Got yourself a big new Windows Phone 7 device and need something to fill its screen with? Sling Media has your back with its SlingPlayer Mobile app, which has hit the Marketplace just in time to earn its Launch App Partner achievement. Pricing for the software is set at $30 in the US, C$32 in Canada, £23 in the UK, and €21.10 in Europe plus local tax, though you’ll obviously need to have a Slingbox to communicate with as well. It ain’t cheap, but good things rarely are.
Update: We’ve also just come across a signup page for news updates on an iPad version of SlingPlayer Mobile. It’ll be priced identically to the company’s smartphone offerings, at $30, and looks to be coming soon. Thanks, Blake!
