Cc:Betty, a free service that helps organize group email threads, has rolled out an iPhone app to help declutter your email on your mobile device. Cc:Betty’s app is a group based email application that breaks email conversations into collated, threaded discussions.
An account can be created right from the app, and new group discussions can be created, using the iPhone address book to access your contacts. Photos can be easily attached as well and new contacts can be added to discussions via your address book. Any discussions, or other content such as attachments a person has in their Cc:Betty.com account are automatically synced to their iPhone. When one of your discussions is updated, you’ll get a push-notification to your iPhone so you can access important information on the go.
Here’s the premise: you take a good old fashioned augmented reality setup, the likes of which we’ve seen all over the land, and attach a three-dimensional, rotatable iPhone to it. Not impressed yet, are you? Neither were we, but there’s some secret sauce to this one: you can actually launch apps on the simulated iPhone. That extra layer of interactivity makes the video after the break a lot more fascinating than it has any right to be, though it’s worth pointing out that we don’t think the apps are actually usable — they just give the illusion of launching. Anyhow, don’t wait around while all the cool kids are watching it, go have a gander yourself.
Continue reading iPhone in iPhone app is useless, but mesmerizing
Still have a bit of faith left for the OLPC project? Good, you’re gonna need it: designer Yves Behar has unveiled his latest concept design for the now-aiming-for-$75 vision, and it’s all screen. Keeping with the newfound trend toward tablets, the XO-3 is an 8.5 x 11 touchscreen, coupled with a little folding ring in the corner for grip and a camera in the back. To keep things minimal the plan is to use Palm Pre-style induction charging, and less than a watt of power to keep an “8 gigaherz [sic]” (800MHz?) processor and a Pixel Qi screen powered. At half the thickness of an iPhone, this vision is obviously banking heavily on presumed technology advances by 2012 (the projected release date), but it’s not too hard to see somebody making this form factor happen by then-ish. Nick Neg isn’t all hubris, however: “Sure, if I were a commercial entity coming to you for investment, and I’d made the projections I had in the past, you wouldn’t invest again, but we’re not a commercial operation. If we only achieve half of what we’re setting out to do, it could have very big consequences.”
Update: According to our man Nicholas Negroponte, who took time out of his busy schedule to email us with the info, there are two other variations of the XO headed our way before we see the XO-3. Nick says we’ll see an XO-1.5 appear in January for around $200 — an update to the current version. The 1.5 iteration will swap a VIA CPU for the current AMD one, and will double the speed as well as quadruple both the DRAM and Flash memory of the current version. Furthermore, he says that in early 2011 the XO-1.75 will make an appearance, and will sport rubber bumpers on the outer casing, an 8.9-inch touchscreen display inside, and will run atop a Marvell ARM processor which will enable two times the speed at a quarter of the power usage. That version will sell for somewhere in the $175 range. Then, no 2.0… straight on to the XO-3.0!
Much of the web is based around clickstreams. The latest version of Whrrl, a location-based application by Pelago, wants to take that concept into the real world, with “footstreams.”
Up until this point, since the launch of version 2 of its iPhone app earlier this year, Whrrl’s focus has been on storytelling. That is, allowing users to tag places they’re at with stories and pictures. But the latest version shifts the focus towards creating a digital record of all the places you go in the real world, Pelago CEO Jeff Holden tells us. “It’s about places, not location,” he says.
Back in September, we wrote about a new iPhone app that would allow you to run a background check on a new lover. It’s mildly creepy, but also kind of interesting. Unfortunately, that app, DateCheck, also charged an arm and a leg to run the checks. A new one gives you some background checking ability for free.
The aptly named Background Check App does exactly what it says: Using data from the site BeenVerified, it allows you to do background checks on people via name queries or their email addresses. And it even allows you to check your contacts on your iPhone with just one click. Just imagine the fun that will bring.
Fact: most phones last. Thing is, for us (and likely many of you), they last far longer than our clinically-diagnosed Gadget Attention Deficit Disorder would ever tolerate — but for your dad, your sister, your college buddy with the hand-me-down ZEOS Pantera running Windows 95, or anyone weary of re-upping a two-year commitment, a handset can easily become a serious long-term investment. That helps explain why Motorola’s venerable RAZR series remains staggeringly high on Nielsen’s latest US phone usage report — third place, to be exact, at 2.3 percent of all subscribers behind the iPhone 3G at 4 percent and RIM’s BlackBerry Curve line at 3.7 percent. Needless to say, that doesn’t mean the ancient V3 line is still in third place for sales — it’s more a testament to the staggeringly huge RAZR user base Moto managed to develop over the years, many of whom scored their phones at sub-$100 price points as an attractive, midrange value in the phone’s twilight and have no intention of upgrading any time soon if they don’t have to. Maybe the most interesting part of this is that two V3 variants are also topping 2009’s most-recycled list, so they’re definitely getting taken out of circulation — it just might take a few years yet before you don’t know anyone that uses one, that’s all.
Empire is a venerable British movie magazine that has amassed quite a library of film reviews since it was first published more than 20 years ago. Their reviews tend to be aimed at the enthusiastic film buff, rather than academics. I have always found the reviews entertaining and a worthwhile read.
Now, the entire Empire archive has come to the iPhone and iPod touch with the Empire Movie Guide [iTunes link]. The US$4.99, 8.9 MB app puts all of the reviews on your phone without need for a data connection. As a nice bonus, Empire grabs the most recently published reviews over the air when you are connected and launch the app.
The Google Nexus One trickle continues. Today’s two menu items include a 5-minute demonstration of the Android 2.1 interface — shaky, sure, but it’s a pretty thorough rundown of all the menus. We’re also serving up some low-resolution picture comparisons of the Nexus One laying side-by-side with the iPhone and HTC Hero. It
still eludes us how all these leaking parties don’t seem to have in their possession a decent DSLR or camcorder (feel free to give us a buzz, we’ll gladly help out). Video after the break.
Tasmanian cops are using some pretty sophisticated technology to catch criminals down there — they have hardware in their cars now that will not only catch pictures of criminals, but upload them to a database, track down any outstanding warrants or other red flags, and update GPS information and location data of where the checks are made. Oh, and there’s apparently an app for that. When the cops realized that they could do all of those same functions with department-issued iPhones, they built an app that replicates the functionality seen in the cop cars. So even while the police are walking a beat, they can pull out an iPhone and check up on any drivers they happen to see.
Very interesting. Unfortunately, there’s not much information available about how long it took them to build the app, or just who put it all together — the article from Australia’s The Mercury seems mostly intended as a warning to criminals everywhere that even though a cop may not recognize you, an iPhone will. But this is just another reminder that we’re all walking around with a little handheld device that has the ability to replace most of the technology we were using just a few years ago. When we hear about a cop making an arrest while on a phone call, we’ll let you know.
Over the past couple of years, I’ve had the pleasure to write about iPhone / iPod touch apps from Tapbots. First there was Weightbot, a beautifully designed app for tracking your weight. Next came Convertbot, a unit converter calculator that featured an innovative and extremely useful interface. Now Tapbots has introduced a third app to their stable of products; Pastebot [US$1.99, iTunes Link], which is a combination of clipboard storage and (with a companion Mac app called Pastebot Sync) inter-platform cut and paste.
Launching the app brings you directly into the Clipboard. As with all of the Tapbots apps, the user interface is not only functional, but a treat to the eyes. To add items to the clipboard, you simply use the iPhone’s copy and paste function to copy something. It can be text or a graphic, a URL or a photo. When you copy the item, then launch Pastebot, the item is automatically added to the Clipboard. The Clipboard items have a frame around them with a small circle up in the top right corner. When that circle turns blue (it looks like a blue LED), the clipboard item is selected and ready to perform some action on. Tapping again slides a small toolbar out of the bottom of the frame.