Let's Talk Tech
The smartwatch market is still wide open, with a spectrum of options for what you can wear. While some watches focus on strapping a phone to your arm, Martian’s approach is far more conservative. Let’s see how it holds up in a growing wearable market.
Shop the Martian Notifier on Amazon.
More info on Martian Products.
comScore released their quarterly smartphone rankings for the period ending in September.
Android showed a modest increase to 52.1% of the overall market. Apple lost ground, and now represents 41.7% of the pie. Microsoft gained another .2%, and now sits at 3.6%, while Blackberry shrank a little more to hit 2.3%.
While Apple might have lost market share, overall the smartphone market is a growing market, and looking at individual manufacturers, Cupertino still reigns. Remember the iPhone owns 41.7% of the market, with the next closest competitor being Samsung who also saw growth to 29%. LG continued their growth trend hitting 6.9% of the market while Motorola was down to 5.4% and HTC dropped to 4.4%.
comScore also examined what apps were most popular, and while Google dominated the list, Facebook ran away with the top spot as the most used app on any phone. You can check out the full app list below.
Hyperlapse is becoming something of a buzz word. It’s essentially a time lapse video, but with more (and smoother) movement. Microsoft recently showed off an incredibly complex and beautiful method to achieve fluid time lapse video. Now Instagram is taking the wraps off of their solution.
It’s novel in its simplicity. Many phones incorporate some form of electronic image stabilization. Instagram’s Hyperlapse app will use the sensors in your phone to detect movement, and then it’ll filter that movement out to give you a smoother tracking shot. As it detects movement in real time while recording, it’s unknown if the app will be able to import and smooth out previously shot video.
The UI is incredibly simple. Push big red button to capture video. Once Finished capturing, there’s a slider to change playback speed from 1X to 12X, and then you have the option to share that video with Instagram or Facebook.
As this is Instagram, it’s iPhone only for now, as they’re sorting out Android API’s, and it’s doubtful we’ll see this on Windows Phone (and those incredible Nokia cameras) any time soon. It is live now for you iOS folks though on the App Store.
See another sample from Hyperlapse below!
Continue reading “Instagram Shows Off Hyperlapse App to Smooth Out Video and Time Lapse”
This has always been one of my biggest complaints about turn by turn apps in general, and Google Maps specifically. Unless a turn is intermediately following another direction, Maps will only give you one instruction at a time, with little guidance as to which lane you’ll need to be in.
To address that issue, Google is now building Lane Guidance into their turn by turn directions. When you approach a turn or intersection with multiple lanes, the app will try to highlight which lane you should be in, and what direction each lane will travel. A terrifically welcome update to Google’s mapping app.
Google is also improving the offline caching for maps. Going on vacation? You can search a locale, save it offline, and name it for quick reference.
Also added to the navigation options, Google has included support for Uber. After searching for directions, you’ll now have the option to tailor results to Uber, and selecting that will automatically open the Uber app on your phone.
It’s a pretty substantial update for one of the best mobile mapping experiences available, and should be rolling out to all phones over the next couple days.
It’s funny how tech moves in cycles.
When data networks were slow, and our mobile smartphones were far less powerful, we usually could count on unlimited data here in the States, even through the 3G revolution. Companies like Opera would release 3rd party browsers to help reduce data use and to speed up web browsing. Especially during the Windows Mobile days, this was tremendously helpful as web browsing could be somewhat painful on smaller screens and under-powered hardware.
Now we have devices which do a remarkable job of replicating the desktop web browsing experience, on screaming fast hardware, with broadband bandwidth over the air. Unfortunately, all of these improvements came with caps and throttling for most consumers. We don’t necessarily need the speed benefits of compression anymore, but saving a few MB’s while browsing would certainly come in handy.
Rolling out today, Chrome will now offer up data compression for Android and iOS. Once you’ve received the update, go into settings, hit Bandwidth Management, and enable “Reduce Data Usage”. Easy peasy. This wont help reduce data on any of your other apps or services, but if you use the browser, it will be able to reduce your data footprint by up to 50%, while improving your “Safe Browsing” security.
Android users will also receive an update to add website shortcuts to their homescreen directly from the browser menu. Not too shabby.
Check the Google Chrome Blog for the full scoop.
Are you a poker fan and just can’t get enough of the game? You should check out Poker King developed by Geax Game Inc. Poker King is one of the top rated poker games for Windows 8 phones, Android and iOS.
This app was very well designed and very easy to use. The graphics are very easy on the eyes and well polished. Playing Poker King is very smooth and you can choose to play in Sit-N-Go, Tournament,  or browse tables to play at.
One of the nice features while searching for a table to play at is the option to choose the fast option. If you regularly play poker on your phone then you know how frustrating it can be when another player is taking his sweet time trying to figure out their next move. When you choose a table with the fast speed, you will have a shorter time to make your move thus making the game a lot faster and enabling you to play more games in a shorter period of time.
Poker King’s game features: Continue reading “App Review: Poker King Texas Hold ‘Em”
Today’s review is on the UTrailme app developed by Dream Team Mobile, which is a live streaming app for both Windows and IOS phones. Instagram, Facebook, Twitter all allow you to share pictures at that moment. Vine let’s you record short video to share. What if you could share a live stream with all of your friends in real time? Utrailme is here to provide you with an app for live streaming of concerts, sporting events or you see something interesting happening that you want to share with your friends.
UTrailme has a pretty slick UI which is very easy to navigate. Setting up this app is quite easy so you can share your live streams directly and automatically post on Facebook, Twitter and VK. You can select your video quality from the setting menu to stream your event in low, medium, high or auto-detect.  There are no light or dark themes, and you will not see any pop up ads. Let’s not forget the best part about this app is that it is free! Continue reading “App Review: UTrailme – Live Video Streaming”
It’s that time!
Wrapping up the year, we’re going to take a look back at the year in smartphones. Unlike our Tablet Buying Guide, there are many aspects to shopping a phone. Instead of declaring a one-size-fits-all winner, we’re going to run down a list of individual features. We’ll hand out awards to the best of the best in categories like Camera, Speakers, and Battery Life.
If you’re shopping a phone this Holiday Season, we hope this will help you make a buying decision on those features which are most important to you!
Let’s get to it!
Continue reading “SomeGadgetGuy’s 2013 Smartphone Awards! The Best of the Best!”