Today is my birthday and the online community has really made my day for me. Hundreds of Facebook friends have sent wonderful birthday wishes. Many of them were very personalized. Local and online merchants who I have shared my birth date with have sent special coupons and free stuff. What a great feeling.
This is one of the reasons why social media and the Internet is so popular. It can make you feel like you are surrounded by people who care about you.
I am really lucky today to also be physically surrounded by people who care. My son and his family sent a beautiful bouquet of flowers.
Birthday flowers 2012
And my husband created a papaya stuffed with pistachio ice cream (two of my favorites) for me for breakfast in bed. His present didn’t disappoint either — A beautiful broach from the Jackie Kennedy reproduction line. The original was created by Coco Chanel, one of my favorite designers.
Coco Chanel Brooch
If you don’t know anything about Coco Chanel, check out her life in Wikipedia. She led quite a risque life, but was a great designer!
Today’s cell phones with cameras are making digital cameras obsolete. The pictures are getting better and better.
Thanks to Ant Pruitt, a fellow writer at A New Domain, I’ve discovered a wonderful new app that lets you take spectacular photos with a cell phone. The App is called “HDR Camera” and it is available at the Google Play Store for free. There is also a paid version, but the results with the free version are so spectacular that you may not even need to upgrade.
If you are unfamiliar with HDR (High Dynamic Range) photography, it is simply images that are created by taking multiple pictures of the same subject. They are exposed for the highlights, mid-tones and shadows separately and then merged into a single image. The images that are created by this method are extremely vivid and lifelike.
The HDR camera App takes three images for you and merges them magically right in your cell phone to product outstanding results. Here is a picture of my back yard in North Carolina taken with my Droid X cell phone with the HDR camera app.
For more photos taken with cell phones and ideas on similar Apps for the iPhone, check out the A New Domain Cell Phone Shootout.
Remember Geordi La Forge, the blind Star Trek engineer who wore a kind of weird prosthetic glasses that enabled him to see? Well, we may not yet have come that far, but, if Google has their way, someday we will be able to wear glasses that augment our reality.
Google’s ProjectGlass let users “see” many of the thing shown on a smart phone without the phone. With these glasses you can see icons alerts, and other visual information on the top portion of your vision. This YouTube movie explains it all.
If you want to see what the future may hold, you will want to check this out!
Happy Valentine’s Day to all! Be sure to check out the Google Doodle today. It’s a lovely animation of Hank Williams’ Cold, Cold Heart. Check it out at Google.com.
Although it is good, in my opinion, it still can’t beat the Valentine Google Doodle in 2008 (shown below) which depicted two older people in love.
You can see all the Valentine’s Day Google Doodles from 2000 to 2012 at Mashable.com.
Just received my Kindle Fire and three things are readily apparent. First, it is as simple as an iPad. Second, it is not as fully capable as an iPad. Third, filling it with content with content and using it will be great fun.
At $199 the Kindle Fire is less than half the price of the cheapest iPad. Yet it can perform about 80% of the tasks that an iPad can perform. You must have a wireless router or be in an area that gets a good Wi-Fi connection. That’s all you need. You can be up and running in less than five minutes with no computer needed for the setup.
The Fire is an Android tablet, but you would never know it when using it. Amazon has given the Fire a very specialized interface. This interface doesn’t give you as many options for customization as the pure Android interface, but I have found it very easy to use and very effective. Like the iPad, it is has a color touch screen, but the screen is only 7″ so the whole device is much smaller than the iPad with its 10″ screen. Actually if you think of it being a size midway between an iPad and a smart phone, you would be pretty accurate in sizing it up.
The size has its pluses and minuses. Carrying it around with you is sure to be easier than lugging a larger tablet, but movies won’t be as large. Like the Apple devices with the Apple iTunes store, Amazon has an entire ecosystem for the Fire to use. You can very easily use Amazon’s resources to buy books, movies, and music. You can also use Amazon’s Cloud Drive to get your own books, movies and music onto the device, as long as they are not copy-protected. If you are already using Amazon Prime for Instant Movies or Amazon Kindle books or the Amazon Cloud for music, pictures, or documents, accessing your content on the Fire is a no-brainer — easier than using iTunes.
The Fire has only a little more than 6 GB of usable storage space. While this is a little skimpy, the Fire does have a very easy way for you to access the data that you have stored in the Amazon cloud, so you don’t have to use up your storage space for books, music, or other data.
I’ll be posting a full review when I’ve had more time to use the Fire, but I can already say that you get a lot for the price.
I loved my original Motorola Razr phone. In fact, I liked it so much that I went through three batteries before I finally let it go for a new model. So when Verizon announced the new Motorola Droid Razr, I was anxious to take a look. The original Razr was unique because it was a thin flip phone with an easy-to-use numeric pad. The new Razr is a flat candy-bar type of smart phone. So I wondered what Motorola could do to make it different.
When I saw the new Razr last week, I got my answer. The new Razr is really thin. When I put it next to an iPhone, the iPhone looked twice as thick making the iPhone look surprisingly chunky and the Razr look extremely sleek. As I grabbed the new Razr, I wondered if that thinness would equate to flimsiness. All my concerns were immediately put to rest. The phone feels very solid in your hand. It has Gorilla Glass on the front and is reinforced with KEVLAR on the back. The 4.3″ Super AMOLED Advanced Display was also pretty impressive. Side-by-side, it actually looked more detailed and vivid than the Retina Display of the iPhone.
The Razr has plenty of extra accessories and features. The most impressive may be “Smart Actions” which let you program the phone to perform a certain task based on a certain time, location or both. Want to have your phone turn off automatically when you get to Sunday services? The Razr will do that and more. It is a 4G phone on Verizon’s LTE network which has just been ranked No. 1 in PC World’s 100 Best Products of 2011.
At $299 plus a two-year contract, the new Razr is not cheap, but it is impressive.
Okay, I’m sticking my neck out early this year. My pick for this years hot holiday gadget is a device with a hot name — the Amazon Fire.
If you haven’t yet heard of the Fire, it is a tablet PC with a touchscreen that Amazon will be selling for $199. The Fire is not an iPad killer, instead it is the tablet for those who want to get into the tablet market without spending $500 or $600 dollars. The Fire is smaller than the iPad (7″ screen vs. 9.7″.) It has no camera or microphone, and can only connect through Wi-Fi (no cellular connection.)Yet it will allow you to surf the web, send and receive email, listen to music, read books, watch movies and TV shows, view magazines in color, and even read documents like Word documents
and PDFs. Oh, and I almost forgot….it will also let you play games. Amazon has created its own App store where you can download games and other apps just as you can from the Apple iTunes store.
The Fire uses the Android operating system, but has a special interface that was created by Amazon. It also has a special Web browser, called Silk, that is said to be very fast. The Fire will start shipping on November 15th. Amazon did a great job of creating the Kindle e-book readers so I am convinced that the Fire will also be a great product. I already put in my order. We won’t know until November 16th just how good the Fire is or how hot the flame will be, but if it meets expectations, I predict that it will be the hottest holiday gadget this year.
For $199 you can get a portable device that will do about 80% of what you do on a computer. And there is no monthly service charge.
If you have an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch that you would like to upgrade to IOS 5, you can do it now. Apple made the upgrade available about 1 pm (eastern) today.
Upgrading is easy. You can make it even easier by doing two preliminary preparations:
1. Download iTunes 10.5. This version just became available last night, so you probably don’t have it yet. To get it, start iTunes, click on the About menu option, and click on Check for Updates. Then follow the on-screen directions to complete the update.
2. Update all of your applications.
Once that is done, you can proceed to the iOS 5 update:
1. Plug your iPhone (3GS or 4), iPad (original or iPad 2), or iPod touch (3rd or 4th generation) into your computer with the USB cord.
2. If iTunes doesn’t open automatically, launch it by clicking on the iTunes icon.
3. On the left side of the iTunes windows, find your device, for example, “Sandy’s iPad,” and click it.
4. Click on the button that says “Update.” Then follow the on-screen directions.
Last week Amazon announced several new versions of the Kindle, their popular eBook reader. Not only will the new Kindles be inexpensive, but Amazon is lowering the price of the current Kindle.
The Kindle that Amazon has been selling for $114, and the one that I own, will now be $99. That Kindle has a gray scale screen and a built-in keyboard. It also has Amazon’s Special Offers, which are ads that appear in certain areas, but do not interfere with the text when you are reading.
Amazon will now also have a $79 Kindle which is basically the same, but without the keyboard. The screen size and quality will the same, but the unit itself will be smaller because they were able to completely cut out the keyboard. Unless you take a lot of notes, the physical keyboard is kind of superfluous anyway. The four-way controller will still be available for moving around the screen and an on-screen keyboard will appear if you need to type something.
A new Kindle Touch with a touchscreen and Wi-Fi will sell for $99 with Special Offers. 3G versions of the Kindle Touch and Kindle with Keyboard will also be available for an additional cost of $40 or $50, depending on the model. All of these have black and white screens, which I find excellent for “easy-on-your-eyes” reading.
When I reviewed Amazon’s first Kindle in June of 2008, it was selling for $349. The new Kindles are better and obviously much cheaper. These new Kindle’s will make great holiday gifts at affordable prices.
Along with Apple’s announcement of the iPhone 4S, came another very important announcement — iOS 5. This is Apple’s newest operating system. Although it will come preinstalled on the new iPhones when they are released on Oct. 14th, it will be available for other Apple devices tomorrow.
If you have an iPhone, iPad, our iPod touch, you won’t want to miss out on this. It promises to be a fantastic upgrade. And it is FREE!
iOS 5 will work on the iPhone 3GS and the iPhone 4. It will also work with 3rd and 4th generation iPod touches and both versions of the iPad.
Install it by hooking up your device to iTunes and checking for an update. Once installed you should see a new Notification area, Twitter integration, a new Reminder feature, and improvements to navigation, surfing, messaging, and picture taking.
Apple didn’t say exactly what time the update will be available, but I am going to try to be the first in line!
If you don’t want to be first in line, I understand. Check back here in a day or two for my take on how hard or easy the download was and how worthwhile iOS 5 really is before you download it.
