Ken Nelson

http://www.vlingo.com/apps/android

Short:  Pretty useful in quiet environments (out to eat, in office). Doesn’t handle background noise well when driving but can save pesky typing.

I recommend it.

Longer:

I use my Android phone to talk, text, e-mail, navigate, and search Google for information about something that has come up in a conversation.

Vlingo does a very good job replacing typing in Google searches.  It also handled navigation searches pretty well.

Vlingo does a fair job starting texts and getting the wording right. But not good enough that I would send a text it generates without checking it.

And I wouldn’t let Vlingo anywhere near my e-mail, which I need to be accurate, typo and wrong word free.

I like that it has a one button launch (on my phone the searched button pressed long will launch Vlingo).

Examples that worked for me in a nice quiet environment were:

Today’s weather

weather in new york city

text devin thursday 1pm

launch  angry birds

get directions to Rowdy’s Range

google images christina hendrickson

text paula "how is your trip to NYC going?”

My results varied in a car. In my truck it worked similarly. While riding in a smaller car, with more road noise, it would get it close, but usually miss a word.

All in all, I find it pretty useful and worth installing. I recommend it.

“Take this down, Siri, Remind me to buy Helena Flowers”.

So Alexis Madrigal talks to his iPhone 4S, the latest launched this weekend to a 4 million unit (in 2 days) success.

I hope it works that well.  The voice recognition on my Motorola Droid X certainly isn’t that smart. I try it, but it doesn’t recognize particularly well, and the interface to use it is awkward.

Siri came out of Nuance Communications which spun out of SRI back in the early 90’s.  I was in the speech recognition game back then and we all had high hopes that speech recognition would take off as something used by most people.  That hasn’t happened yet.

Perhaps Siri hearkens an age when it will. I’d love to just tell my phone to remember something – and have it work. 

BTW: Mashable likes it but says… “work in progress”.

90% of the U.S. population doesn’t know about Ctrl-F.

What is “ctrl-f” ?

Let’s say you are in a web browser, say Internet Explorer. If you push these two keys at the same time:

You will get a seach box that searchs in the document you are reading.  So, for instance, if you want to search a Google search results for the query “help desk” for a link from Wikipedia. You would do the search and then hit “ctrl-f wiki”  and you would find it!

Note… on the Mac it is the “Alt-f” key sequence. Unless, of course, you are running a Windows app in an emulator on your Mac. Then it’s “ctrl-f”.

Simple! 

Via Instapundit

Moore’s Law continues…

The industry has considered 3D transistors for quite some time because of the potential to reduce leakage current and produce more predictable transistor performance characteristics, but the benefits do not end there. Intel’s analysis also demonstrates the potential for faster transistor transitions and lower voltage levels, which all translates into higher-performance and lower power chips. As with traditional planar transistor, Intel has developed various transistor designs to be able to optimise the transistors for power or performance.

Short: It may run Android but the lame BN App Store means it is not worth much now.

Longer:

The new Nook Color with firmware 1.2.0 runs Android 2.2 (Froyo). The one I bought from B&N didn’t have that firmware installed but it took me just a couple minutes in my NYC hotel room to update it.

Overall the Nook Color is a very good Android tablet for the money.  I occasionally had trouble with the keyboard responsiveness, but nothing onerous.

The real limit is that the B&N App Store for the Android Nook Color has just 185 apps in it. There is no Gmail app. There is no Maps App. No Amazon app (oops!).   It sort of reminds me of a Nokia Linux phone I had a few years back. Slick technology but worthless with the small number of apps available.  I know B&N is drooling over App Store money, and there is a place for a reviewed/tested App space in the Android market. But they better pick up the pace…

And I couldn’t find a way to side load. I’ll experiment more with that.

Basically, what I have now is something that will be nifty, but when….?

Why you should use Chrome:

Meanwhile, IE8 was taken down by Stephen Fewer, who used three separate vulnerabilities to get out of Protected Mode and crack that browser’s best locks. Safari running on a MacBook Air got shamed again, cracked in just five seconds. Not exactly an improvement compared to how it fared in 2008.

Not sure how good Firefox is. Stick to Chrome.

It bricked. Not sure why. It was working. Now it isn’t.

Last night I “rooted” a Barnes & Noble Nook Color e-reader to run Android 2.2.

It was pretty easy, but not for “novices”.

The end result…. not what I expected, but pretty slick.

I had expected to get a device running just Android. Instead, it runs the Nook Color existing system AND Android, sort of interleaved.

The big stuff works… Gmail, YouTube, Android Market, and everything I’ve installed from  the market (Google Maps, Angry Birds, Amazon Kindle) works just fine.

In the end, I got a conductive touch Android tablet with a very nice 7” screen for $250.

The downside… some of the typical Android interactions aren’t there. For instance, double clicking the home button to get a list of processes. You can do this, but with an app called SoftKeys.

As a device the Nook is paperback sized, very light, seems to have a long battery life, and is very responsive.

I’ve seen some other XDA hacks to make the Nook entirely Android. But I’m going to hold off on those.  I’ll hold off until there is a stable Honeycomb (Android for Tablets) version.

I thought I had it figured out….  I’d do two native versions of our products, one for iOs and one for Android.  Then Nokia, the largest handset manufacturer partnered with Microsoft. Which is fine… but I’m confident that partnership can fail, just like most of what Microsoft has touched of late.

But then I saw this:

A iPad sized Windows netbook that folds to become a touch screen tablet.

That appeals… quite a bit. And it costs less than an iPad.

Wow.

Good job Dell.   Don’t be surprised if I own a couple of these in the near future to try out.

You know you want some…

Clever ad, Motorola,:

But at $800 bucks… why would I choose it?

You have two lines of attack Motorola…

  Price – fail.
  Open – nice not enough to justify the price

My advice… wait for the next one. Early adopting at $800 bucks + a data plan is stupid.

An 7 to 10 inch Android tablet with conductive touch screen should be $200 bucks mid year.

You in back… give me 30% of your money!

Apple informed publishers today that if they want to sell content that runs on the iPad, they will have to pay 30%, just like in the App Store.

This, of course, means that Kindle will not be viable on the iPad. Which THEN means my iPad will collect dust after it is replaced by an Android pad.

And, sure, the iPad is nice. But the Galaxy Tab is nice too, and so are the zillions of alternatives steaming west from factories all over Asia.

So.. good luck with that Apple.  Continue to be the hated “1984” character you actually made fun of in 1984.   I’d add that Microsoft, even at their worst, only hoped to reach Apple’s level of greed.

A guy complained about somebody stealing pictures on Flickr. They then, accidently, deleted his account instead of who he reported.

Mirco Wilhelm has the original files saved elsewhere, but the photos from his extensive Flickr collection had been linked to from all over the web, including the official Flickr blog. Those links will now point to deadspace. Additionally, the followers he had accumulated, tags, photo captions and copyright information have been wiped out and may not be restored.

I had this happen to myself when a server I depended on went down. I was able to get pictures back up, and I was able to do some fancy Apache redirect/rewrites to get the old links to work to new locations.   Flickr might want to spend some elbow grease and do that for links they see coming into his stuff.

Google Cache has what it used to look like.

This, btw, is why you should keep originals safe and not totally depend on cloud backup.

Not sure who made this, but  web site developers, Graphics Artists, Photographers, Virus Removing Gurus, and others with hard to acquire skills and equipment will understand why this chart is useful.  It answers the question “Should I do this work for free"?” Click the image to see it bigger.

I do free work all the time, mainly for neighbors, relatives and organizations I support. But… I also decline “opportunities” frequently as well.

BTW: F-bomb alert. I didn’t notice til I read all the nodes on the chart. Sorry.

Update: Source: http://jessicahische.com/  (good job!)