Hasta La Gadget!

Garmin built its empire on dedicated GPS devices, but those are obviously facing extinction in the face of smartphones that can replicate their function without requiring an expensive secondary hardware purchase. Today, Garmin announced a device that could help it capitalize on its changing role in the navigation ecosystem, while still allowing it to sell hardware to consumers.

The Garmin HUD is just that, a heads-up-display that sits on your dash and projects a simple set of basic navigation data onto a transparent film affixed to your windshield. This replicates some features found in very expensive and well-appointed luxury cars, and it’s relatively inexpensive at $129.99.

Information displayed on the readout includes current speed, speed limit, an indicator to show when you turn next and the distance to said turn, as well as estimated arrival time. There’s no detailed map or points of interest, which is actually very good in that it will help keep drivers more focused on the road. It also shows yo upcoming traffic delays and traffic camera locations, and auto-adjusts for night and day. The smartphone HUD will work with any Bluetooth-capable smartphone running Android, iOS or Windows Phone 8 that can run Garmin’s StreetPilot and Navigon applications, and will arrive this summer for $129.99.

Garmin and others who make third-party smartphone apps that offer navigation services face an increasingly challenging market: Apple and Google both offer free software that does turn-by-turn navigation on mobile devices, either built-in or free, and offerings like Waze (which Google just acquired) really does a fantastic job of giving you all the bells and whistles for free, with a system that’s intelligent and adapts to changing traffic and road conditions in real time.

How do you differentiate as a dedicated navigation company? Offering your own accessory hardware is one very good way. The HUD from Garmin provides a real, tangible advantage to using Garmin’s paid apps over the free and easy competition. Until HUD projection becomes a built-in feature of every smartphone or in-car infotainment system, at least.

Depending on your point of view, today’s either the 66th anniversary of an Air Force experiment gone awry or an alien landing. With tongue firmly in its cheek, Google is celebrating the Roswell incident, the most (in)famous of alien encounters with one of its interactive doodles, in which you help an extra terrestrial rebuild his spaceship after it breaks apart in New Mexico. Once you’ve done that, you can then kick back with an X-Files box set or two — assuming you’re not into the adventures of doe-eyed alien teenage romance.

Filed under: Internet, Google

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Via: The Guardian

Source: Google

Facebook Graph Search will begin rolling out to US users from today, offering complex filtering and search features that will allow users to hunt through their friends based on combinations of location, interests, Likes, and more. Announced back in January, Graph Search attempts to let Facebook users pare through their friends lists using complex queries, such as “people who like football and live in Miami”, with results coming up based on where users have checked into, what they’ve liked, where they are, and more.

Initial reactions to the Graph Search system were mixed. On the one hand, there’s an obvious technological and social advantage to being able to use more complex, natural-language queries to hunt through the ever-increasing amount of information Facebook users are sharing. The social site argued that it would help users make more meaningful connections by highlighting overlapping interests that might not have been normally recognized, for instance.

However, privacy advocates proved unsurprisingly wary of the amount of information – and the ease of its discovery – that Graph Search would unearth. Facebook responded by arguing that the same privacy tools and settings that had always been in place would continue to protect private data from Graph Search, however.

Facebook Graph Search privacy:

For Facebook, the goal is to better shape advertising so that users are more likely to click, as well as drive adoption of its various features with members hopefully wanting to increase the amount of information about themselves available so that they show up more accurately in search results. Initially, Graph Search only works on the desktop, rather than mobile, but Facebook tells the NYTimes that it intends to address that this year.

Also on track to be added is better data mining of status updates, picking out keywords rather than relying on explicit Likes and other indicators of interests. Facebook will also use third-party app data – not currently integrated in Graph Search – and is working on predictions.

That could end up promoting movies, books, places to eat, and other suggestions based on similar interests from other friends, something Facebook believes will increase the success rate since users are more likely to trust the data.

There’s more on Facebook Graph Search in our SlashGear 101.

Facebook Graph Search brings deep search to US today is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
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Here’s a little treat on a Monday morning. A number of premium iOS apps and games have been discounted to nothing over at the App Store, including the charming and mildly addictive Tiny Wings (and Tiny Wings HD for iPad), Traktor DJ (normally $20), Superbrothers: Sword and Sorcery EP, as well as Infinity Blade II (usually $7). There’s no official promotion to explain or list all the discounts, so we’re left to guess that this could be a prelude to July 10th, when Apple will mark the fifth anniversary of the App Store. Cupertino has already started sending out promotional material to mark the occasion, listing the usual big statistics to show how far the App Store has come since 2008, so these freebies could well be a part of that. We’ve linked up a few of them after the break, but the list isn’t exhaustive so please add more in the Comments section if you spot any others that merit the storage space. Happy hunting!

Filed under: Cellphones, Gaming, Tablets, Mobile

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Via: The Verge, TouchArcade

We did talk about the Nokia Amber update at the end of last week, where it was spotted to run on the higher end Lumia 920, but it seems that the Amber update has more surprises up its sleeve compared […]

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