Hasta La Gadget!

This vintage Japanese Space Age radio, for all its clean lines and stylish details, might seem limited today. The thing is, it only gets AM stations. But you could say it just has firm roots in its late-1950s origins—FM, you know, didn’t take off until the 1960s. More »

For those of you working with NFC-laden smartphones with nothing to do with them other than turning your wi-fi on or off, it’s time to get happy: the mobile payment system known as Isis has all but confirmed that they’ll be up and running on October 22nd. This system has been spoken about for many moons, coming across many months ago with a “debut” at SXSW and a mention of Austin and Salt Lake City as launch locations. Now according to an email sent to the press, the marketing lead for the company has confirmed that they’ll be good to go by the 22nd of October.

With a mobile payment system you’ve got one whole heck of a lot of bugs to worry about – it’s no small matter making a whole payment system a reality. What we’ve got here is a set of phones already on the market with NFC sensors ready to go, their only need being an app to make them all worthwhile. With Isis’ concept of a fully functional multi-business plan for wireless payments with just a tap, we could very quickly see a mass of phones become a whole lot more useful – and wallets tossed.

“Isis will be launching in Austin and Salt Lake City on Oct. 22. By year end, as many as 20 Isis Ready handsets are expected to be in market. We look forward to sharing more details on Oct. 22.” – Isis marketing lead Jaymee Johnson

Of course that’s just wishful thinking, the final evolution to a one-device system being many years off, if a possibility at all. Apple has a system for cards that work like coupons from your smartphone, and Google already has Google Wallet working with NFC as well – but no system has taken hold at a level that’s game-changing right this minute. Isis plans to be that system.

The Isis group’s marketing lead Jaymee Johnson has let it be known that business should be starting in Salt Lake City and Austin with “as many as” 20 smartphones compatible by the end of the year. With NFC on the rise and more smartphones with the technology being released by the week, Isis is set for a rather large success story if all goes as planned. The final combination that an Isis-capable phone will need is the finalized Isis app, a SIM card compatible with the system, and a store that’ll allow Isis payments. We shall see soon enough!

Isis NFC payment system claims October 22nd launch date is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

It’s not that smartphones smell bad by any means (although they are covered in trillions of germs), but it doesn’t hurt to make the area around you smell good. A Japanese perfume company called Chaku Perfume has made a small iPhone accessory that allows you to remotely trigger a puff of fragrance or other smell to someone else’s iPhone.

Using the accompanying app, you can send a fragrance blast to a friend who also has the accessory and app. And of course, you can trigger smells on your own device as well if you’re in the mood for a good scent. We can’t deny that this would make a great gag gift, and the reactions of the ladies in the video below will probably be the best thing you watch all day.

The accessory plugs into your iPhone’s 30-pin port (sorry iPhone 5 users), and contains an atomizer and a small tank of the perfume of your choice. Once the device is plugged in and you have the app ready to go, it’s all a matter of tapping a button to release a small scent of perfume for your nose to enjoy.

The Chat Perf costs $63, which is a little pricy for a device like this. As mentioned, it would certainly make a great gag gift, but $63 is a bit much for such a product. We’re also not sure how refills work or how much they cost, but hopefully it’s nothing like printer ink, where you pay $20 for a refill for what seems like every two weeks.

[via CNET]

Chat Perf accessory makes your iPhone smell good is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Sony vowed a long (long, long) overdue PlayStation Store remake starting this week, and it delivered just that today with launches in Europe as well as Australia and New Zealand. As promised, the PS3 shop’s cleaner design scales more elegantly from standard to high definition, brings more intelligent searching and makes it easier to find everything related to a given game. We still wouldn’t be too eager to dive in just yet, as there’s been hiccups early on — the sheer amount of traffic has reportedly brought the new store to a crawl, on top of teething issues with adding funds and recognizing PlayStation Plus memberships. Sony has promised fixes, but we’re suddenly not feeling so bad about having to wait for that October 23rd North American launch.

Filed under: Gaming, Sony

PlayStation Store redesign goes live in Australia, Europe and New Zealand with a rocky start originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 17 Oct 2012 13:13:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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A new set of two API releases for developers will soon have 3rd party apps working with Google Maps features that will allow them to be location aware – with location information not just relegated to GPS. The first of two releases is the Google Maps Tracks API, this allowing developers to integrate the display and analyzation of GPS data on a map, with this API being built on top of Google’s own cloud infrastructure for reliability that’s unmatched. The second of two releases today works with Google Maps Geolocation API, this enabling developers the ability to integrate location data found by looking up said information on nearby wifi access points and cell towers.

With these two new API releases, 3rd party app developers will be able to take the massive beast of a dataset that Google has in their Google Maps archive and integrate it into their own apps at a whole new level. With this information, apps of all kinds will be able to map their own location – that being the device they’re being run on, of course – and help people find the locations they’re aiming at. Should a bakery have an app, for example, Google Maps integration would be able to lead the user of said app to the physical location of the bakery, even if they don’t have GPS switched on.

If you run a business – or work for a business as a developer – you can also pay for support from Google to make this system work for you. You’ll be able to work with Google’s own set of advanced features such as geo-fencing. With geo-fencing, a company can create a virtual space on a map that’ll be able to send notifications if a device enters or exist its bounds. This system could certainly be automated and do away with a central dispatcher – if that’s your kind of business, of course.

Have a peek at a timeline of recent Google Maps related stories and see how the system has been evolving of late. It’s Google that’s still in the limelight here in the GPS maps universe as the rest of the brands fight for glory against such a titan as the big G. Stay tuned for more on the iPhone Google Maps story specifically, where a re-release of Google Maps app data in app form constitutes a giant news release.

[via Google]