Cydle media player coming to America

Cydle is launching their new in-car multimedia system at CES this January. Previously only available in South Korea, the Cydle P29 is a portable multimedia player with HD radio and subscription-free Mobile DTV.
Cydle is known for their media devices in South Korea, but are relatively unknown here in the U.S. The P29 will sport a 2.9-inch touchscreen interface, and runs on an ARM9 CPU. Reportedly available in 4GB or 8GB, expect to start seeing them this coming spring with an MSRP of $199.

Make Free Phone Calls with Google Phone Android

You can do free voice-over-internet phone calling through your cellphone. On an Android phone.

you can use the Gizmo5 service, Google Voice, and a free application to call anyone for free.

A free, open-source, and unofficial Android app, Guava, gives any Android phone the ability to make and take calls over Gizmo5's VoIP service, connected through a Google Voice phone number. It works over Wi-Fi, 3G, or, for the daring, Already HTC Hero, Dream are running on Android seems you can use this service in your existing Android enabled HTC phones.


What all you need to do this

Android-powered phone: P HTC Dream (T-Mobile G1), Magic (T-Mobile myTouch 3G), or Hero should work.
Google Voice and Gizmo5 accounts : You'll have to hope for an invite if you haven't gotten your Google Voice account yet, while Gizmo is much easier to obtain. click the stand-alone Guava link to download the .apk installer.
Wi-Fi or 3G service: At least to test out Guava and make your first test call. You can set Guava to call over EDGE connections, and even specify how many reception bars are required to try a call, but it's likely not worth the hassle.

Pranav Mistry: The thrilling potential of 'SixthSense' technology

Pranav Mistry: The thrilling potential of 'SixthSense' technology At TEDIndia, Pranav Mistry demos several tools that help the physical world interact with the world of data -- including a deep look at his SixthSense device and a new, paradigm-shifting paper "laptop".  In an onstage Q&A, Mistry says he'll open-source the software behind SixthSense, to open its possibilities to all.

Twitter 360 – Augmented Reality App

The newly released Twitter 360 app is sure to make a big splash. The app allows you to see your friends tweets and also track them through your camera view or map view.

As far as I know, this is the first iPhone app to utilize the geotagging feature of Twitter.

Would be nice to see this integrated into a Twitter client, but I imagine that won’t be far behind.

Digital Life vs Life Digital: Our Inevitable Digital Future

source :http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/digital_life_vs_life_digital.php

Written by Alex Iskold: Life is becoming more digital and the digital is becoming more alive. On one hand we have the rapid rise of Second Life and other virtual worlds. On the other we are beginning to annotate our planet with digital information, via technologies like Google Earth.

I was reading a feature about Second Life on the plane and next to me was a man in his late fifties, named John. As it turns out, like me John was a graduate of Lehigh University. He was class of 1967, while I was 1994. He'd never heard about Second Life, but when I explained to him the concept he had a good laugh and then asked: "So is this for those who did not quite make it in the First Life?" No, I replied, this is quite different - it's a whole new world. What happened next was probably even more surprising than the fact that we went to the same school. John said to me:

"You know it would be really cool if the airlines conducted computerized tours of the places that we are flying over. It could be powered by GPS and we could see a mix of maps and videos about all these places."

I thought that was a neat idea. But what struck me even more is the fact that it came from (nearly) 60 year old civil engineer. At that moment I no longer had doubts - our future is digital. Digital Life and Life Digital are going to be two parallel paths that we will take over the next decade. Both of them will mix Life and Digital to challenge and change the way we think about ourselves and our world.

What is Digital Life?

For the purpose of this post, we define Digital Life as a collective of the virtual world technologies that are bringing life to the digital realm. All of them create environments where participants live in a digital form. These worlds mix the real and imaginary, they both follow and break the laws of physics. They have concepts of markets and money. They have cities and islands. Most importantly, they are unique venues for innovation and self-expression.

Second Life - Your Best Digital Life Now

Linden Labs' creation Second Life is currently the leader in the Digital Life space. With close to 8 million inhabitants, Second Life has received much media attention in the blogosphere and mainstream press. It is appealing because of its rich design, which elegantly blends real world-like features with fantasy and game elements. But Second Life is very different from virtual world video games - because it is not a quest. You are not chasing anything and nothing is chasing you. The core of Second Life is social.

As in real life, you can walk around and talk to people. You can drive cars, climb stairs and even purchase things - most importantly, you can buy land. Commerce is one of the secret sauces in Second Life, since (as the song goes) money makes the world go around. The official currency of Second Life is Linden dollars, which is convertible to and from the dollar - so any user can participate. Together these social and commercial aspects of Second Life make the world realistic and engaging.

But the characters in Second Life are unmistakably digital. Since you can fly with a touch of a button, geographical boundaries are inconsequential. You have a complete map of the world; people have tooltips with names above their heads; pointers, posters and advertisements are all based on rich media. There is really nothing like this in our physical world. This collective digital experience is unusual and exciting, stimulating and thought-provoking.

There is little doubt that worlds like Second Life are going to be increasingly more engrossing. At the end of the spectrum of possibilities, we can imagine wearable technologies that enable total submersion into a virtual world. This is not happening anytime soon, because of the complexity involved in mimicking human sensory experience. In the mean time, virtual worlds will take smaller steps - like adding voice communication and trying to scale to the increasing demand.

What is Life Digital?

The second focus of this post is what I will call Life Digital - a set of technologies that aims to put a digital mesh on top of our reality. Futuristically speaking, we are talking about magic glasses that overlay digital information on top of real-world scenes as you walk around. The closest modern version of this technology is Google Earth - a detailed 3D visualization of the Earth.

Even though Google Earth is a simulation, one of its main functions is to augment geographical information with digital information. In a way, you can think of the program as tagging each place on Earth with all sorts of relevant information.

The precursor of this technology was destination software, like Vindigo, which brought restaurant reviews, movie guides and destination reviews first to PDA's and later to cell phones. Using this technology, you could punch in an address and a kind of cuisine - and get a list of restaurants in response. The difference now is that information is tied to exact physical coordinates and there is much more of it - the world wide web!

But where these technologies become really interesting is when you combine them with cameras inside cell phones. Imagine going out to your back yard, pointing to a tree and asking: What kind of tree is this? or imagine walking around in a new city, pointing to a building and getting its complete history.

Tagging and annotating our physical world with digital tags and other kind of digital information will make our world much richer. Perhaps the device that is capable of creating this experience today is the much hyped iPhone. It certainly has all the ingredients to make it happen - it is the matter of connecting the dots.

Conclusion

Life is becoming more digital and digital is becoming more alive. On one hand we have the rapid rise of Second Life and other virtual worlds. On the other we are beginning to annotate our planet with digital information, via technologies like Google Earth. In both cases digital information is breaking geographical boundaries and overcoming the limitations imposed by our physical world. Flying in second life has the same affect as linking a Wikipedia entry to the Grand Canyon as rendered in Google Earth.

Information is being unleashed and re-shuffled. We are beginning to look at information from literally a 1000 foot view. And everything is becoming increasingly more connected. This is both very exciting and a bit unnerving. We are accelerating into our digital future from all directions - pushing digital towards life and pushing life towards digital.

Do you agree that this is happening? Please share your experiences with virtual worlds and annotated reality.

Coming Soon: Low Cost iPhone 3G for India sans Wi-Fi

Unlike North America, iPhone in India has been a total failure because of the high price.

Now an analyst report has suggested that Apple could release a new low cost iPhone 3G model in countries like India and China that will run on the 3G network but won’t have support for Wi-Fi.

That could reduce the entry cost for buying an iPhone here but 3G networks aren’t available everywhere in India yet so one may still have to rely on the expensive data plans of Airtel or Vodafone for Internet connectivity so, if you are a heavy web user, it won’t really make a huge difference in the long run.

The same analyst has also predicted that Apple will release a new version of iPhone 3G with 32 GB storage capacity but only for the markets of North America and Europe.

In any case, if you are planning to buy an iPhone somewhere in the near future, it may be a good idea to wait until June because that’s the time when Apple generally announces new models.

Airtel Brings a Google Android Powered Mobile Phone to India

Airtel Brings a Google Android Powered Mobile Phone to India

HTC Magic, a touchscreen mobile phone that runs on Google Android OS, is now available in India through Airtel. And it’s an unlocked phone so you can use the device on other GSM networks in India as well.

Google Android vs Google Phone

If you have never heard of Android before, it’s an Operating System for mobile phones that is developed by Google.

Unlike RIM (BlackBerry), Apple (iPhone), Nokia (Symbian) and other mobile phone companies that develop the mobile OS and the hardware, Google is only developing the OS part while the hardware of mobile device is manufactured by other companies like HTC, Lenovo and Samsung.

So when someone says "Google Phone", it essentially means the that phone runs on the Google Operating system which is known as Android. And since Android internally runs on Linux, some users have even managed to install the Google Android OS on their Nokia phones and Asus notebooks.

Video Tour of Google Android – HTC Touch

Google Phone in India

The HTC Magic is the first Google Android phone that will become available in India through Airtel at around 30k INR. It’s the same phone that’s marketed as Android G2 or myTouch 3G by T-Mobile in America and a unlocked version of this phone was given to all attendees of the Google I/O conference.

The HTC Magic is Wi-Fi enabled and features a 3.2 Megapixel camera (that can record still photos as well as video) but unlike the Nokia N97, it has no physical keyboard. Other models like the HTC Touch and HTC Dream (or G1) feature a keyboard but none of them are in India yet at least through official channels.

The phone features a unique bar coding application so if you are shopping somewhere, you can quickly scan the barcode of any product in the shelf to get more information about that product using your Google phone.

While Airtel is the exclusively selling HTC Magic Android phones in India, the good news is that these are unlocked phones so you can buy a phone from Airtel and use the SIM of other cellular networks like Vodafone, BSNL, Reliance, etc.

Picture Gallery – HTC Touch

Should you buy the HTC Touch

HTC is about to launch a new smartphone called the HTC Hero that is just as big as the HTC Magic but features a 5 megapixel camera and best of all, it will be the first Android smartphone to include a native Flash player. The HTC Magic can only play MP4 (MPEG-4) video format while the Hero has support for Windows Media files as well. I will probably wait.

Video Tour of Google Android – HTC Hero

References:

• HTC Magic – Official Web

Coming Soon: Low Cost iPhone 3G for India sans Wi-Fi

Coming Soon: Low Cost iPhone 3G for India sans Wi-Fi

Unlike North America, iPhone in India has been a total failure because of the high price.

Now an analyst report has suggested that Apple could release a new low cost iPhone 3G model in countries like India and China that will run on the 3G network but won’t have support for Wi-Fi.

That could reduce the entry cost for buying an iPhone here but 3G networks aren’t available everywhere in India yet so one may still have to rely on the expensive data plans of Airtel or Vodafone for Internet connectivity so, if you are a heavy web user, it won’t really make a huge difference in the long run.

The same analyst has also predicted that Apple will release a new version of iPhone 3G with 32 GB storage capacity but only for the markets of North America and Europe.

In any case, if you are planning to buy an iPhone somewhere in the near future, it may be a good idea to wait until June because that’s the time when Apple generally announces new models.