Hasta La Gadget!

I told myself I wasn’t going to get hooked, but it all happened so fast. I downloaded the Angry Birds Demo to my Droid, and ten minutes later, I couldn’t put the thing down, sitting on the subway, ignoring my fellow passengers, while slingshotting birds into the rickety structures.

Honestly, my only saving grace was the fact that the demo (Angry Birds Lite) is only 15 levels–all of which I quickly beat.

I’ve been simultaneously anticipating and dreading this day–the full version of Angry Birds is available for Google’s Android operating system. Right. Now.

Interestingly, while the demo version of the app was made available through Google’s Android Market, the game’s manufacturer, Rovio, has opted to sell this version through the third-party app store GetJar. The good news, however, is that unlike its iPhone counterpart, the full Android version is totally free,

It’s ad-supported, actually. And there will be some in-game purchase available as well. The extremely frustrated will be able to buy the Mighty Eagle, for example.

There goes my free time.

As the saying goes, no good deed goes unpunished. There’s a sliding scale of punishment, of course. Kerfye Pierre’s was well into the five digits. While volunteering in an earthquake ravaged Haiti, Pierre managed to rack up a $35,000 T-Mobile texting bill.

After the quake, T-Mobile agreed to waive the cost of voice plans for all Americans volunteering in the country. Unbeknownst to Pierre, however, that the fee waiving didn’t include text messages.

“I would be OK to pay for it if everything was disclosed, and I knew upfront that, if I used this part of the service [data and texts], I would be charged,” she said in an interview. “But I did not know.”

After being contacted by Pierre, T-Mobile has agreed to knock her fee down to $5,000, but Pierre says that she still isn’t able to pay.

Now’s a pretty good time to be a lawyer representing a major smartphone manufacturer. The patent applications and lawsuits are flying fast and furiously between companies, and it certainly doesn’t seem as though it’s going to stop any time soon.

Check out the latest patent awarded to Apple. Here’s one that certainly has the potential to stir things up in the industry. In 2006, the company filed for a patent on pinch-to-zoom for multi-touch screens–a nearly ubiquitous feature in today’s touchscreen smartphones.

So, what does the awarding of patent #7,812,826 mean for, say Android or Palm? Well, it’s not great, of course, but it’s not as concrete as Apple owning pinch-to-zoom outright. Engadget’s Nilay Patel, as usual, has a pretty good breakdown of the what this whole thing means,

Apple doesn’t have a patent on “pinch-to-zoom” generally, but rather pinching to zoom, and then pinching to zoom again within some fixed period of time. How long that period lasts is totally up in the air, but it has to be defined somewhere — this patent doesn’t really apply unless there’s a clock running and a second gesture takes place.

That said, this could be a sign of bigger patents to come.

Have you ever wondered if the naked stranger on Chatroulette had too much cholesterol in their diet? Well, soon that worry will be a thing of the past thanks to one MIT Grad student. Ming-Zher Poh has devised a way to automatically (and accurately) read basic vital signs using technology as simple as a built-in laptop webcam.

The tech works by measuring and analyzing slight variations in brightness produced by the flow of blood through blood vessels in the face. When compared to a commercially-available, FDA-approved blood-volume pulse sensor, the system produced pulse rates that agreed  within three beats-per-minute.

Which is not bad for a dinky webcam. Conceivably, this technology could be developed into an app utilized by any smart phone with a camera.

In other real-world applications, Doctors could help diagnose patients around the globe via the internet.Vitals could be remotely detected in patients where the very process of taking readings might
be uncomfortable such as with burn victims or newborn babies. Poh has even put forward that this tech might one day be used in a bathroom mirror that could tell the mirror-gazer various vital signs including heart rate, blood pressure, and blood-oxygen levels. 

Poor, poor Mark Zuckerberg can’t catch a break. First Aaron Sorkin and David Fincher team up to make a movie that portrays him as kind of a, well, let’s just use the word “punk”–that’s what the bus stop posters say, so we’ll just go with that.

Now the paparazzi is running around, snapping shots of him, while he’s just minding his own business, texting while walking down a “busy street.” Okay, sure, it’s not the safest thing in the world, but let’s face it, most of us do it at some point, right?

The Daily Mail has a bunch of shots of Zuckerberg walking down the street near his home in Northern California, frantically texting his little billionaire heart out, if that’s the sort of thing you’re into.

They suggest that Zuckerberg is such a workaholic that he just can’t put the phone down. Now we’re just going to suggest that he’s actually do something else, like playing Farmville or update his MySpace profile, but I think it’s best not to rule that out entirely.