Phone options for the blind previously been pricey hardware based solutions — or feature-light (physically-heavy) handsets. While the functional abilities of smartphones have expanded out wildly from the mobile devices we used to use, accessibility options have remained firmly in the past. Enter Georgie, an Android app that offers up a blind-friendly interface to open up the likes of maps, Twitter and email. It also includes an OCR function that can both re-display text in larger fonts and offer an audio version for listening. You can even store these photos for listening to later. Navigation through the app is steered by holding your finger to the screen, hearing the menu described and giving haptic feedback to confirm your choice. Keep reading to see how the app developed and our impressions on how it all works. You can also check out our hands-on video, which includes a glimpse at the app’s OCR read-out feature and a quick demonstration from its co-creator Roger.
Zoom is known for making audio recorders, but its latest product, the Q2HD, brings video to the recording party — HD video, no less. Sure, there are many ways to shoot and share our lives these days, and it’s a wonder that services like Ustream aren’t just full of videos of people unboxing cameras, checking in and uploading pictures to Pinterest (while also watching Ustream). Zoom, however, evidently believes that though the method might evolve, the medium largely remains the same — voice and video. As such, the Q2HD Handy Video Recorder (to give it its full name) promises to play, capture and stream, all in “HD audio and video.” Paraphrasing of the box aside, we got our hands on one and took it for a spin. Want to know how it fared? Let’s reset the levels, then head past the break for the mixdown.
Action cameras. We love ’em. Much like buying new sports gear, owning one makes you feel one step closer to the adventurer you know your true self to be. While we’re familiar with more than one contender for the “gnarly throne“, who said there wasn’t room in the rankings for one more? Veho‘s been making pocket-friendly cameras for some time, even of the action variety, but this latest edition — in conjunction with No Proof No Glory (an extreme sports video hub) — sees it making the clearest move yet towards carving its own slice of the high-octane pie.
The latest member of the Muvi HD family will do you full HD at 30fps, along with 720p (at both 30 and 60 fps) plus the usual other resolutions — 960p, WVGA, etc. Of course, it’ll also do stills (if you don’t mind them all being wide-angle) and it’ll even just record audio if you like. So far, so good. What really got us interested, though, was that Veho has squashed two of our most common bug-bears with action cameras by including a viewfinder / screen and a remote control as standard. So, with hope in our hearts and glory to prove, we strapped one on and took it for a ride. Scoot past the break for the impressions.
After a brief respite to recover from last week’s hot dog and homemade ice cream comas, our tablet mag is back in action. Getting our e-publication affairs back in order, Brian Heater sits down with Levar Burton to chat about Reading Rainbow, a new iPad app and Star Trek gadgetry. Hitting on another bit of childhood nostalgia for many of us at Engadget HQ, Alexis Santos drops by NASA’s Launch Control Center (LCC) for a tour after more than three decades of operation. On the review front, we roll up our sleeves and put both the Nexus Q and the Samsung Series 9 through the wringer while offering some in-depth impressions. “Eyes-On” takes a peek at the Google booty offered to I/O attendees, “Hands-On” our latest gadget outings and Gaikai’s founder admits his reliance on the PowerPoint gods in the Q&A. Don’t take our word for it. Snag your copy of the e-magazine with a few clicks on the download links that follow.
A bug has popped up in early review units for the Verizon Samsung Galaxy S III in its Wi-fi notifications system specifically in the tenacity behind its reminders for the user to work with wireless web when a network is near. Verizon’s version of the Samsung Galaxy S III has a feature that gives you the option to be notified if there’s a nearby Wi-fi network – simple enough, right? Though the other versions of the Galaxy S III have similar options, Verizon’s is the only with the feature that has no option to turn off – this resulting in no less than a pop up window that appears multiple times a day or more.
What you see below is the option inside the Verizon Galaxy S III’s Wi-fi settings which allows you to turn on the “Notify me” feature we’ve been speaking about above. Though it would seem simple enough, Verizon has implemented it in a way that does keeps it on even when it appears to be shut off. Whenever the device detects a Wi-fi network anywhere, at any time, it sends up an alert that requires you to select an option.
This set of options only allows you to attempt to connect, to select “always” connect, or to say no, but to remind you later. There is no “never” option, and again, this pop-up occurs quite frequently. In addition, when you do have “always auto connect” selected, the device certainly does connect – but if it does not know the password to any wi-fi networks around you, your phone will be stuck with no data at all – this feature shuts your mobile data off and continues to search for Wi-fi in vain.
We’ve reached out to Samsung on the matter and have also spoken to Verizon, who are investigating the matter now. Meanwhile have a peek at the rest of our hands-on experiences with the Samsung Galaxy S III in all of its iterations!
Also note: AT&T’s version has a notification, but it sits in the notifications pull-down menu instead of popping up, and never disconnects you from your mobile data unless you’ve got a solid connection to Wi-fi and do not need a password to do so. The HTC DROID Incredible 4G LTE has also been reported as having this bug live in effect.
Android eyes? That’s the promise from UK company Screenreader, who have created what’s said to be the world’s first smartphone app designed for, and by, blind and partially-sighted people. Georgie runs on most regular Android phones, but heavily redresses the interface into a combination of chunky icons, consistent navigation and clever haptics to suit the needs of those who have been all but left behind by the rise of touchscreen smartphones.
Whereas many Android skins are a riot of buttons, scrollbars and carousels, Georgie is the polar opposite. At most there are eight buttons on-screen at any one time, with clear iconography and text – you can change the color scheme depending on what hues you might have trouble with – and each uses a system of tap-and-hold: tap, and the button’s feature is read out; hold, and after a second’s pause there’s a beep and the function is selected.
Multiple page menus – the homescreen, for instance, has three panes – are navigated through using the volume keys, and the Android home button itself is remapped to take you back to the Georgie homescreen. The menu button doesn’t do anything, while the back key steps back through menus as you’d expect; we only saw one crash taking us back to the true Android homescreen in our playtime with various devices.
Meanwhile, there are some useful haptics to help guide you through the UI. The phone buzzes periodically anyway, to let you know that the screen is on, and each tap and press is accompanied by a companion vibration. Sweep your finger across the icons and there’s a buzz when you move from button to button. It doesn’t sound like much, but close your eyes (if you’re not blind or partially-sighted already) and it does make figuring out the limits of the interface more straightforward.
Standard functionality replicates the basic phone functions. There’s a dialer, though entering a number is a laborious (if accurate) affair of pressing, holding, waiting, and then moving on to the next digit; when you tap the entered number, it calls it out and then dials it. The SMS app can handle voice dictation – using Android’s standard voice recognition system, which means you’ll need a data connection for the processing to take place – or allows you to select from a number of preset messages.
There’s also a Places app, which tells you which direction you’re facing in and allows users to store a record of hazards such as low-hanging branches or potholes – things that a guide-dog might not recognize as a problem. All of the menu options read out their function as you tap them, so that you know what the phone is doing at all times.
However, three add-on packs introduce extra features, depending on how much you want to use your smartphone as, well, a smart device. Travel builds on the Places app, with a “Near Me” feature that flags up nearby points of interest such as bus stops, shops and places to eat, along with weather alerts for your destination, and a particularly useful bus tracker that tells you not only when the next bus is due, but reminds you when to get off.
Lifestyle, the second add-on pack, brings with it an audio app for audiobooks, talking newspapers and podcasts, complete with chunk controls and the option to speed up or slowdown playback. It has a “Voice Assistant”, similar to Siri, which allows spoken question-and-answer style queries be made, and “Colour”, which uses the phone’s camera to identify the color of an object or item of clothing.
Finally, Communicate adds a Twitter app for posting and “reading” tweets, as well as an audio-blog feature and audio tagging, allowing you to attach a snippet of audio to images for easier discovery later. It also builds on the camera functionality, using OCR to convert photographed text into speech; again, you’ll need a data connection in order for that to work, however, and we struggled to get it to function properly in our brief testing. A similar system uses the camera to identify objects such as tins of food, and if you have NFC tags you can label items and have them identified when you hold the phone nearby.
Georgie hands-on:
That’s a lot of functionality, but the strictly consistent interface makes taking advantage of it more straightforward. There’s a learning curve to face, but once you get to grips with the tap-and-hold system you build up a decent pace through the menus. Screenreader is run by a husband and wife team who are blind themselves, and so all the testing has been done in-house over the course of 18 months development.
Neat tidbits can be found throughout. Take a photo – there’s a 3-2-1 countdown, spoken of course, when you hit the shutter release button – and after it’s taken you’re prompted to give it a filename in your own voice. Configuration – such as entering names and numbers into the address book – can be done either on the phone itself or through a web-based interface, automatically synchronizing in seconds.
It’s that sort of remote support which will be integral for Georgie users. Although the app will be released through the Android Play Market, it will need to be provisioned by UK support partner Sight and Sound Technology; they’ll sell both the app alone and a range of smartphones (priced from £150 SIM-free and unlocked) preloaded with it, as well as handle setup configuration and ongoing customer-service, accessed through a shortcut in Georgie itself.
As for price, Georgie is both expensive and a steal. The core app is £149 ($230), while each add-on feature pack is £24.99 ($39); that might sound a lot, but it’s worth noting that an existing screen-reader app on the market, which does nothing but take a photo of text and read it out, is currently priced at £499. In the world of niche software, with a target audience in many ways left behind by the mobile tech we’ve grown used to, that makes Georgie a bargain.
We first met Andrew Chang — one of the co-founders behind LUMOback — when he approached us at the end of our panel at SXSW and offered to show us his smart posture sensor. He was wearing it right then and demoed it for us on the spot. We were impressed enough to stay in touch. Fast forward four months and the device has launched on Kickstarter and already surpassed its $100,000 funding goal. We recently caught up with Andrew to learn a little more about the device’s evolution from mockup to pre-production and to get some hands-on time.
While we didn’t get the chance to wear the smart posture sensor ourselves, Andrew gave us a thorough rundown and brought along various iterations of the device which you’ll find in the photo gallery below. LUMOback is an 8.5mm thick appliance roughly the size of a credit card that’s worn like a belt and rests against your lower back. It’s packed with sensors, a vibration motor, an iOS-compatible Bluetooth 4.0 LE radio and a Li-Ion battery which provides about 4 days of operation on a charge. The only visible components are a single capacitive button, an LED and a micro-USB charging port. It’s splash resistant and features an adjustable elastic strap.
The hardware may be interesting, but it’s the software that really makes LUMOback useful. Paired with an iOS device over Bluetooth, the smart posture sensor monitors if you’re running, walking, standing, sitting or laying down. When you’re standing or sitting, it knows if you’re slouching and optionally alerts you by vibrating. It even measures how much you’re slouching and to which side, and knows if you’re laying on your stomach, back, left or right side. Best of all, the app logs your posture over time, gives you feedback, and lets you journal how you feel. There’s a social networking component as well, and you’re able to share some of that information with others.
Andrew and his team are still tweaking the hardware and the software (nothing we saw is finalized yet), but the LUMOback smart posture sensor should cost between $100 and $125 when it ships this fall. Hit the break for our hands on video, and be sure to check out the screenshots gallery below.
We spend hundreds of hours on board a variety of airplanes each year, most often en-route to a trade show or product launch event, but occasionally we have a rare opportunity to hop on board military aircraft, to test out unrelated products, or, even more unusually, to take a seat behind the yoke. Sadly that’s not what we’re doing today — well, not exactly. We are taking a closer look at the F-35 fighter jet at Lockheed Martin’s Fighter Demonstration Center just outside our nation’s capital, but, being in the middle of a corporate complex, there’s no actual Lightning II on hand. We were able to take a simulated ride, however — this isn’t your ordinary 4D sickness-inducing amusement park thrill. The F-35 is by far the most advanced Lockheed jet to date, with updated radar, all-internal weapons, improved tracking systems, 360-degree infrared coverage with a visor readout, and a full-stealth design, not to mention the incredibly capable glass cockpit powered by more than 9.3 million lines of software code, and an overall smoother experience for pilots that could end up spending shifts of 12 hours or longer in flight.
The F-35 has already seen plenty of field time in the US, with more than 500 flights already in 2012, and it’s set to make its way to the UK armed forces next week and the Netherlands later this year, but while the aircraft is quite familiar to the pilots tasked with flying it, the public hasn’t had an opportunity to experience Lockheed’s latest airborne warrior. We flew a simulated mission within a grounded duplicate of the flyable F-35 cockpit, and the capabilities and improvements are quite clear — you definitely don’t want to encounter an F-35 from a previous-generation aircraft. The dual 8 x 10-inch touch-enabled displays combine to give you 8 x 20 inches of real estate, with dedicated modules for the weapons systems, targeting, and navigation easily accessible — you can also move them to different panels depending on your current objective. A pair of joysticks at the left and right side provide direct access, letting you move a cursor to track enemy crafts or ground-based targets as well, and a very slick heads-up-display mounted in the helmet provides infrared mapping and instrument readouts. Overall, it seems to be an incredibly powerful system. Unfortunately, the mock-up on display here isn’t accessible to the public, but you can join us for a behind-the-scenes look just after the break.
Seemingly anyone who’s used an iPhone (and often the iPad) knows Tweetbot — it’s often the go-to Twitter app for those who prefer not to go the official route. It’s to those users’ delight, then, that Tapbots just posted a free alpha version of Tweetbot for Mac. As you’d anticipate, it’s an attempt to bring much of the app’s power user mojo to the desktop world: you can check just retweets of your content, mute overly chatty people or hashtags, and otherwise get more control than just watching your stream drift by. It’s even (mostly) Retina-ready for that new MacBook Pro. Alpha does mean that there will be a fair amount of things missing; it won’t tap into iCloud or Mountain Lion’s Notification Center until it’s official, for example. But if you’re willing to deal with that and a few potential bugs, it may be time to brush other apps aside — just note that you’ll need Mountain Lion or newer when the app is ready to face the Mac App Store, even though it works with Lion today.
We’ve had a quick spin with the app, and it largely does what it says on the tin: it’s Tweetbot, on the Mac. The primary differences are changes that make sense when a mouse pointer and a larger screen area are available. You can reply, retweet, or view whole conversations from buttons that appear as you hover, rather than using the myriad taps and swipes of the iOS apps. It’s a wonderfully minimalist app, if that’s your thing, and you can open multiple windows (currently through a keyboard shortcut) to get some of that TweetDeck-style power user layout. Our main gripe? Tweetbot on the Mac always updates in a live stream, and there’s no option for intervals; if you follow a lot of people, there’s a chance you might miss something. Still, for an alpha, it’s a decidedly polished and useful effort that doesn’t leave us wanting like a few clients, including Twitter’s own.
This week you’ll be seeing the oncoming wave of Samsung Galaxy S III cases get just a little bit sweeter as SPIGEN SGP enters the race with two new bits of protection for themselves. First is the Folio faux leather case which closely resembles the Samsung-made flip-cover we saw with the release of the AT&T and T-Mobile editions of the phone. Then there’s the Ultra Thin Air, a back-only case which comes with a Steinheil plastic coat screen protector for the front of the device.
The Ultra Thin Air case is rather simply, lending a UV Matte coated extra tiny layer of plastic to the back and sides of your device while it remains tiny enough to not cause you to wonder if it’s worth the effort to protect your phone. You’ve got the ULTRA NANO CLEAR screen protector in the box as well, so your front will be fine for the duration of your Galaxy S III experience. This case is available in 8 colors, the one we’re looking at here being “Smooth Black.”
Next is the Folio faux leather case, this one acting like a smooth operator by fitting perfectly around the sides, front, and back of your device, holding it in place for the cover to come around the left and over the top. The cover also has a business card slot so you’re never without. The whole case feels rather nice, but just like the Samsung-made flip-cover, the same problem remains: the cover doesn’t attach to anything, so it’s always flopping open. Of course just like a baseball glove, eventually it’ll find its place and will stay down without effort – but if you’re without patience, watch out.
This case also comes in three colors, the one we’re looking at here being “Navy Blue.”
Both cases are of the highest quality you’re going to find on the market, and both are available through SPIGEN SGP’s online store right this minute. The Folio case will cost you $39.99 in pink, blue, or brown. The Ultra Thin Air case will cost you $19.99 in black, white, gold, mint, silver, tangerine, and two kinds of pink!
Have a peek at the rest of our hands-on experiences with SPIGEN SGP in the timeline below!
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