One day we’ll all communicate using memes and gifs, but until that day comes we will have to deal with language barriers. We’ve already seen a couple of translatorapps, but Sigmo looks like it could be the most practical and affordable alternative yet. It’s a wristwatch-sized Bluetooth device that relays voice translation.
Note that I said “relays”, because the Sigmo doesn’t do the translating. Instead it connects to your iOS or Android device via Bluetooth via the Sigmo app. The app then connects to language translation services online to translate what’s being said. The people behind Sigmo didn’t say exactly which services the app connects to, only that Google Translate is one of them. Here’s how Sigmo works:
It’s definitely not perfect, but it seems to get the job done. Sigmo says that the app won’t drain your mobile device’s battery. As for the 2-way speaker, its battery should last up to 300 hours on standby and is good for up to 8 hours of use.
Its dependence on a mobile device and an Internet connection hampers it a bit, but it’s way better than nothing. Pledge at least $40 (USD) on Indiegogo to get a Sigmo as a reward.
Currently, the Sigmo app can translate 25 languages: English (US), English (UK), English (Australia), English (Canada), Spanish (Spain), Spanish (United States), Spanish (Mexico), French (France), French (Canada), Finish, German, Italian, Japanese, Chinese (China), Mandarin (Taiwan / Hong Kong), Catalan, Korean, Dutch, Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, Portuguese (Portugal), Portuguese (Brazil), Polish, Russian, Arabic, Indonesian, Hebrew, Czech, Turkish, African and Malay.
The folks over at Nokia were kind enough to put one of their Lumia 1020 Windows smartphones in my hands for the last couple of weeks, so I’ve put together some of my thoughts on the device to share with you here.
As you’ve probably seen in the commercials, the Lumia 1020 touts a camera with an incredible 41 megapixel sensor, which makes it the highest resolution camera phone on the market by a great deal. The phone is no slouch in other departments either, running the latest build of the Windows Phone 8 operating system, and offering full HD video capture as well. It also offers stereo microphones for high quality audio recording. It works on major 4G data networks, including LTE and WCDMA standards, along with 802.11 a/b/g/n, Bluetooth and NFC support.
The phone itself looks sleek and modern, coming in a white, yellow or black polycarbonate shell, with a bright 4.5″ AMOLED touchscreen at 1280×768 resolution. This results in a pixel density of 334 ppi. The colors and rich blacks on the display really look awesome, though it is a bit of a fingerprint magnet. Under the hood, it’s powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 processor. Measurements for the Lumia 1020 are 71.4mm (w) x 130.4mm (h) x 10.4 (mm) thick. That added thickness is due to the camera’s lens and xenon flash assembly which protrudes from its back. The main body of the phone is actually a couple of millimeters slimmer. In fact, it’s virtually the same thickness as my iPhone 5.
Having that camera lens assembly on the back of the device – plus a dedicated shutter button – really does make a statement that Nokia wants this phone to replace your camera, and in a lot of ways, they’ve succeeded. Not only does the camera capture incredible amounts of detail, but it offers manual controls heretofore not found on smartphones or point-and-shoots.
The 41 megapixel sensor is Nokia’s solution to the zoom lens problem. Since it’s thus far been impossible to cram the optics of a high-powered zoom lens into a smartphone, Nokia opted for the highest resolution sensor they could find, combined with the largest lens the could cram into a phone’s form factor. This combination results in the ability to zoom into your images AFTER you take them, instead of trying to frame them up at the time you shoot. In my experience with the Lumia 1020, this is very effective – especially in daylight shots. Take a look at the image below for a zoomed out view along with a zoomed in portion:
Pretty incredible, no? Sure, there’s a bit of grain in the closest up portions of images, but it’s still impressive that you can get that sort of detail from a smartphone camera. Despite its 41 megapixel sensor, one thing I found odd is that the highest resolution 16×9 image the camera stores are actually 34 megapixels (7712 x 4352 resolution), along with a 5 megapixel (3072 X 1728) version for sharing. If you switch into the 4×3 aspect ratio, you can shoot 38 megapixel images. Either way, it’s way more pixels than your current phone has.
As I mentioned, the camera offers manual controls, which include white balance, focus, ISO (100 to 4000), shutter speed (1/16000th to 4 seconds) and aperture (from -3.0 to +3.0 ). All of these controls are accessible within the Nokia Pro Cam app, the default app that’s tied to the shutter button. Accessing manual controls requires a simple touch and drag action from the icon on the right of the screen. This reveals slider controls which provide immediate visual feedback of everything but shutter speed (which makes complete sense.) You can also go into the settings menu to enable a grid overlay to help with your composition, in rule of thirds, golden ratio, crosshairs or square variants.
I’m not an expert on camera optics, but I’m pretty sure they have to do these things digitally. Regardless, these fine-grained controls allow for images you definitely can’t produce with post-production image software. For instance, being able to capture long-exposure night shots or true depth of field focus effects.
One other nicety is that Nokia includes a library of short tutorials for budding photographers, which provide interactive examples of what each of the controls does, along with pointers on various photographic techniques. The lessons aren’t deep, but they’re a great thing to have if you don’t know your aperture from your ISO.
In order to put the camera through some of it’s paces, I captured a few images at this weekend’s Wizard World Comic Con in Rosemont, Illinois. Here are some sample shots.
Be sure to click on the images to see the full hi-res originals:
There’s no question from those examples that the images are detailed, and capture colors impeccably – especially with good lighting. There’s a sort of pastel effect if you zoom in all the way, but I’m still impressed – especially compared to every other smartphone I’ve ever used. Nighttime shots do suffer from added grain, but I don’t think they can do much about that unless they could put a bigger lens on this thing. Here’s a closeup shot I grabbed in near darkness, with no flash and the ISO jacked up to 4000. Not bad. Try this with another phone. Click image for hi-res original:
The camera also works with Nokia’s Smart Cam app which allows you to capture multiple images in rapid succession so you can pick the best image, create composite motion shots or even remove moving subjects from the scene. There are also a variety of “lenses” you can download from the Windows Phone Marketplace for adding effects to your images.
One thing that is a bit irksome is that there’s not an easy way to share the full hi-resolution images from the phone. Microsoft Skydrive, email and social networks all seem to get a low-resolution 5MP version instead, so the primary way to pull full-res images off of the phone is to connect it to your computer. If you happen to be an AT&T user (which was the carrier for my review sample), there is a way to save hi-res images with their AT&T Locker service – which offers 50GB of free storage.
Individual hi-res image files can be quite large (9 to 15MB each), so you’ll definitely want to be conservative about when you upload hi-res images if you’re on a mobile data plan anyhow. As a Mac user, I also couldn’t get the Lumia to transfer directly to iPhoto either. You have to download an extra app to transfer images for some strange reason. I also found it difficult to locate images imported into iPhoto. The best thing was to create a Smart Album for images from the Lumia 1020. That worked like a charm.. Ah, the Microsoft vs. Apple battle rears its ugly head once more.
Still, once the photos are transferred, they’re quite impressive. Video quality is very good as well, with the main camera capable of shooting full 1080p action at 30fps (or at 24 or 25fps). Like most smartphone video cameras, it does quite well in daylight conditions, but definitely exhibits noise in the dark. Unfortunately while shooting video, the manual controls are limited to flash, white balance and focus, so you can’t increase ISO to see if that can help. Here’s couple of quick samples I captured, one with ample lighting, the other without.
As for the phone itself, there’s not too much to complain about. It’s plenty fast for tasks ranging from email to browsing the web, to playing games – and the Windows Phone 8 interface quickly grows on you. The only real issue with the OS at all is the relatively small number of available apps compared to iOS and Android. I won’t really go into the Windows OS itself, as it’s pretty much stock, with the addition of a few useful Nokia apps, such as HERE Maps and Drive for mapping and navigation as well as Nokia Music.
Phone call quality was satisfactory, but nothing to write home about (or maybe that’s just the AT&T network). I also found battery life to be less than thrilling. With typical usage (and standby time sitting in my pocket,) I was down to about 25% battery life after 10 hours. In the same conditions and time, my iPhone 5 still had 42%. That said, I spent much of my time in areas with poor coverage or too many people (i.e. a convention center), so I’m sure that some extra battery was burned while it was searching for a connection.
That all said, as a camera, this thing rocks. No, it’s not going to replace a high-end DSLR, but Nokia has definitely raised the bar for smartphone cameras, and all but killed what’s left of the point-and-shoot market with this thing. If you want a good Windows phone, you’ll be totally fine with a Nokia 920 or 928. But if you’re looking for a smartphone that is first and foremost capable of taking impressive photos, you won’t be disappointed in the Lumia 1020.
The folks over at Nokia were kind enough to put one of their Lumia 1020 Windows smartphones in my hands for the last couple of weeks, so I’ve put together some of my thoughts on the device to share with you here.
As you’ve probably seen in the commercials, the Lumia 1020 touts a camera with an incredible 41 megapixel sensor, which makes it the highest resolution camera phone on the market by a great deal. The phone is no slouch in other departments either, running the latest build of the Windows Phone 8 operating system, and offering full HD video capture as well. It also offers stereo microphones for high quality audio recording. It works on major 4G data networks, including LTE and WCDMA standards, along with 802.11 a/b/g/n, Bluetooth and NFC support.
The phone itself looks sleek and modern, coming in a white, yellow or black polycarbonate shell, with a bright 4.5″ AMOLED touchscreen at 1280×768 resolution. This results in a pixel density of 334 ppi. The colors and rich blacks on the display really look awesome, though it is a bit of a fingerprint magnet. Under the hood, it’s powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 processor. Measurements for the Lumia 1020 are 71.4mm (w) x 130.4mm (h) x 10.4 (mm) thick. That added thickness is due to the camera’s lens and xenon flash assembly which protrudes from its back. The main body of the phone is actually a couple of millimeters slimmer. In fact, it’s virtually the same thickness as my iPhone 5.
Having that camera lens assembly on the back of the device – plus a dedicated shutter button – really does make a statement that Nokia wants this phone to replace your camera, and in a lot of ways, they’ve succeeded. Not only does the camera capture incredible amounts of detail, but it offers manual controls heretofore not found on smartphones or point-and-shoots.
The 41 megapixel sensor is Nokia’s solution to the zoom lens problem. Since it’s thus far been impossible to cram the optics of a high-powered zoom lens into a smartphone, Nokia opted for the highest resolution sensor they could find, combined with the largest lens the could cram into a phone’s form factor. This combination results in the ability to zoom into your images AFTER you take them, instead of trying to frame them up at the time you shoot. In my experience with the Lumia 1020, this is very effective – especially in daylight shots. Take a look at the image below for a zoomed out view along with a zoomed in portion:
Pretty incredible, no? Sure, there’s a bit of grain in the closest up portions of images, but it’s still impressive that you can get that sort of detail from a smartphone camera. Despite its 41 megapixel sensor, one thing I found odd is that the highest resolution 16×9 image the camera stores are actually 34 megapixels (7712 x 4352 resolution), along with a 5 megapixel (3072 X 1728) version for sharing. If you switch into the 4×3 aspect ratio, you can shoot 38 megapixel images. Either way, it’s way more pixels than your current phone has.
As I mentioned, the camera offers manual controls, which include white balance, focus, ISO (100 to 4000), shutter speed (1/16000th to 4 seconds) and aperture (from -3.0 to +3.0 ). All of these controls are accessible within the Nokia Pro Cam app, the default app that’s tied to the shutter button. Accessing manual controls requires a simple touch and drag action from the icon on the right of the screen. This reveals slider controls which provide immediate visual feedback of everything but shutter speed (which makes complete sense.) You can also go into the settings menu to enable a grid overlay to help with your composition, in rule of thirds, golden ratio, crosshairs or square variants.
I’m not an expert on camera optics, but I’m pretty sure they have to do these things digitally. Regardless, these fine-grained controls allow for images you definitely can’t produce with post-production image software. For instance, being able to capture long-exposure night shots or true depth of field focus effects.
One other nicety is that Nokia includes a library of short tutorials for budding photographers, which provide interactive examples of what each of the controls does, along with pointers on various photographic techniques. The lessons aren’t deep, but they’re a great thing to have if you don’t know your aperture from your ISO.
In order to put the camera through some of it’s paces, I captured a few images at this weekend’s Wizard World Comic Con in Rosemont, Illinois. Here are some sample shots.
Be sure to click on the images to see the full hi-res originals:
There’s no question from those examples that the images are detailed, and capture colors impeccably – especially with good lighting. There’s a sort of pastel effect if you zoom in all the way, but I’m still impressed – especially compared to every other smartphone I’ve ever used. Nighttime shots do suffer from added grain, but I don’t think they can do much about that unless they could put a bigger lens on this thing. Here’s a closeup shot I grabbed in near darkness, with no flash and the ISO jacked up to 4000. Not bad. Try this with another phone. Click image for hi-res original:
The camera also works with Nokia’s Smart Cam app which allows you to capture multiple images in rapid succession so you can pick the best image, create composite motion shots or even remove moving subjects from the scene. There are also a variety of “lenses” you can download from the Windows Phone Marketplace for adding effects to your images.
One thing that is a bit irksome is that there’s not an easy way to share the full hi-resolution images from the phone. Microsoft Skydrive, email and social networks all seem to get a low-resolution 5MP version instead, so the primary way to pull full-res images off of the phone is to connect it to your computer. If you happen to be an AT&T user (which was the carrier for my review sample), there is a way to save hi-res images with their AT&T Locker service – which offers 50GB of free storage.
Individual hi-res image files can be quite large (9 to 15MB each), so you’ll definitely want to be conservative about when you upload hi-res images if you’re on a mobile data plan anyhow. As a Mac user, I also couldn’t get the Lumia to transfer directly to iPhoto either. You have to download an extra app to transfer images for some strange reason. I also found it difficult to locate images imported into iPhoto. The best thing was to create a Smart Album for images from the Lumia 1020. That worked like a charm.. Ah, the Microsoft vs. Apple battle rears its ugly head once more.
Still, once the photos are transferred, they’re quite impressive. Video quality is very good as well, with the main camera capable of shooting full 1080p action at 30fps (or at 24 or 25fps). Like most smartphone video cameras, it does quite well in daylight conditions, but definitely exhibits noise in the dark. Unfortunately while shooting video, the manual controls are limited to flash, white balance and focus, so you can’t increase ISO to see if that can help. Here’s couple of quick samples I captured, one with ample lighting, the other without.
As for the phone itself, there’s not too much to complain about. It’s plenty fast for tasks ranging from email to browsing the web, to playing games – and the Windows Phone 8 interface quickly grows on you. The only real issue with the OS at all is the relatively small number of available apps compared to iOS and Android. I won’t really go into the Windows OS itself, as it’s pretty much stock, with the addition of a few useful Nokia apps, such as HERE Maps and Drive for mapping and navigation as well as Nokia Music.
Phone call quality was satisfactory, but nothing to write home about (or maybe that’s just the AT&T network). I also found battery life to be less than thrilling. With typical usage (and standby time sitting in my pocket,) I was down to about 25% battery life after 10 hours. In the same conditions and time, my iPhone 5 still had 42%. That said, I spent much of my time in areas with poor coverage or too many people (i.e. a convention center), so I’m sure that some extra battery was burned while it was searching for a connection.
That all said, as a camera, this thing rocks. No, it’s not going to replace a high-end DSLR, but Nokia has definitely raised the bar for smartphone cameras, and all but killed what’s left of the point-and-shoot market with this thing. If you want a good Windows phone, you’ll be totally fine with a Nokia 920 or 928. But if you’re looking for a smartphone that is first and foremost capable of taking impressive photos, you won’t be disappointed in the Lumia 1020.
NFC (near-field communication) is gradually making its way into everything from smartphones, to credit cards, to cargo containers, to product packaging, as a method of carrying a small amount of data or authentication information along with virtually everything.
Now, some smarty pants over in the UK has come up with the latest use for the technology – wearable NFC, in the form of jewelry.
Created by John McLear, the NFC Ring is a bold and minimal metal ring which has two NFC chips embedded into it. This allows you to use the data stored within with NFC readers. This data can be used to do everything from unlocking doors or mobile phones to sending your contact information to smartphones with NFC capability. I suppose it could even be used to enable mobile payments at some point.
It’s actually a pretty ingenious idea, since it places the NFC data in a much more personal place than a credit card or your wallet, plus you never have to take anything out of your wallet to make it work. The ring has two sides – a larger one which stores public data, and a shorter one which stores private information.
The ring also works with a companion Android app (a Windows Phone version is coming too) which lets you create actions for accessing specific websites when you place the ring at the back of your smartphone.
The NFC ring is available via a Kickstarter campaign until the morning of 8/19/13 – and it’s already blown through its fundraising goal. To get your own NFC ring, you’ll have to pledge between £22 and £25 (~$34 to $39 USD), depending on your ring size.
As we store and transport more and more information online, we’ve gradually come to realize how easy it is for others to access that information without our permission. From Facebook’s privacy policies to the ongoing NSA leaks, it seems like the ordinary online user has enough reason to log out. Well, I’ve got more bad news for you: anyone can build a powerful spying tool using off the shelf parts, and for under $60 (USD).
Brendan O’Connor is the founder of security and software consultancy company Malice Afterthought. Last week he made headlines when he shared how he built F-BOMB, a small device that runs a software that he calls CreepyDOL . The DOL stands for Distributed Object Locator and “Creepy” with a capital ‘C’ is the perfect word to describe it. O’Connor built the F-BOMB using the popular Raspberry Pi microcomputer and added a Wi-Fi sensor to the device. The cost? $57 (USD). He built 10 F-BOMBs and hooked them up to Reticle, a “command & control system” that he made. Finally he hooked it up to a “data visualization system,” which you can see in the image above and in O’Connor’s video below:
In case the video wasn’t clear enough, the F-BOMB can gather a disturbing amount of wireless data. As New York Times reported – and as the video above proves – with the F-BOMB you can find out not only information on a wireless device but what the user is currently using or accessing through the device: geolocation, websites, email addresses, programs and more.
In my brief chat with O’Connor, he revealed that the device can snoop on wireless devices within about 160ft. He can add other sensors to the F-BOMB as well as adapt it to snoop on wired connections. Further, O’Connor said the F-BOMB is a passive device, so you have no way of knowing if it’s snooping on you. Finally, I asked O’Connor if the situation really is as hopeless for consumers as the New York Times article seemed to indicate. Here’s what he said:
Yes, it really is that hopeless. There are vulnerabilities in all the relevant layers of the stack. The application developers need to stop leaking so much data outside encryption envelopes (e.g., why does iMessage send hardware make and model, and iOS version, unencrypted?). iOS (I’m picking on it here because I use it, but the same problem is larger) should have OS-level support for blocking all non-VPN traffic until a VPN connection is established (once it’s up, the connection is opaque, but while it’s going up, I’ve usually got all the data I need). And the low-level protocol needs to stop encouraging devices to *beacon out all their known networks constantly*. So since there needs to be culture-level shifts at all the layers of the stack, yes, for end-users, the situation is hopeless at the moment.”
In other words, not only is it possible to make a surveillance tool that is small and cheap, the devices that we use are practically inviting prying eyes to take a look at our data. It falls upon us as end users to nag Apple, Microsoft, Google and other companies who create the hardware and software that we use to step their security game up. It would be foolish to believe that they know nothing about the disaster that they’re courting (with our privacy and security at stake). But for some reason they’re not doing anything about it, nor are they telling us how much danger we’re in.
O’Connor intends to sell F-BOMBs soon. Fellow black hats and tinkerers can sign up at Malice Afterthought’s website to find out more about the F-BOMB and when it will go on sale. Ars Technica also has a thorough technical report on the F-BOMB. As for the rest of us? I guess we’d better start learning how to communicate telepathically.
The ability to to make perfect copies is one of the most convenient advantages of working with digital content. That’s why software developers make it easy to copy and paste content between applications. But what about copying and pasting to and from different computers? What if you could drag content from one screen directly to another screen? That’s what the people behind the Tagtal tStylus claims it can do.
The tStylus works with companion desktop and mobile apps to let you copy what’s on the screen of a desktop computer or an iOS device, and then transfer that to another iOS device. All you have to do is press the tStylus on the screen of the source device, wait a couple of seconds, then do the same on the recipient iOS device. The devices don’t need to be connected in any other way; they just both have to have the tStylus app. Once you’ve dropped an image, you can trim it down using the tStylus.
Aside from transferring screenshots between devices, there’s also a specialized tSylus app called Tagtal Album, which you can see in the image above. With Tagtal Album you can copy and paste images to and from Instagram, Facebook, Picasa or Flickr using the tStylus.
Finally, the tStylus app also has a color picker feature:
Pledge at least $29 (USD) on Indiegogo to receive a tStylus as a reward. Tagtal claims that the stylus will eventually be sold for $80, so you’re getting $51 off. If they add the ability to copy text from one device to another, I’m sold.
I love traveling. Who doesn’t? What I don’t love as much, though, is how I usually go over the budget that I had initially set for myself. Apparently, this is a pretty common problem that most of my travel buddies share.
It’s easy to forget (or ignore) your budget when you’re out and about in a new city. Where can I buy this? Where else can I experience this?, you might think, before handing over your credit card. The full extent of how much you spent usually hits you when you’re back home.
Don’t let this happen to you again. It’s easy to get sidetracked when you’re on vacation, but a tool called TripSaver might just be the thing you need to budget better.
It’s essentially a travel expense tracker that features a neat and easy-to-use layout. I especially like the counter that shows just how far or how close you already are to spending your daily limit.
All you have to do is fire the app up and enter any expenses you incurred throughout the day. The app draws up attractive pie and bar graphs of your spending so you can gauge your spending quickly and easily.
The TripSaver app is currently up for funding on Kickstarter, where a minimum pledge of $1 gives you access to the app before its release (and at half of its $1.99 retail price). TripSaver has already surpassed its funding goal, so it should definitely be released.
Canadian telecommunications company WeWi will soon be launching a solar-powered notebook called the SOL Laptop. While it’s not the first of its kind, it has at least one impressive feature that makes it one to watch: WeWi claims that the built-in solar panels can charge the laptop in just 2 hours.
I got in touch with WeWi Founder & CEO David Snir to find out more about the SOL Laptop. David said that they were motivated to make their own solar-powered laptop partly because of their projects in Ghana, where weekly outages frequently left them with no access to electricity.
David is still keeping his cards close to his chest with regards to the laptop’s solar panels, but he did say that they’re currently getting about 16.08% efficiency. Pair that with the laptop’s entry level guts – an Intel Atom D2500 1.86GHz dual-core CPU and Intel GMA 3600 integrated graphics – and you get a 2-hour charge time. The laptop’s battery can store enough energy to power the laptop for up to 10 hours, but David said that the laptop can run “directly by sunlight”: as long as its solar panels are exposed to sunlight, you can use the laptop even if the battery is nearly empty. It’s like plugging into the sun.
The SOL Laptop’s solar panels will also be detachable; you’ll be able to work in the shade while the panels soak up the sun. WeWi is also working on an accessory that will let you charge other devices using the laptop’s solar panels.
Like its power-sipping CPU and integrated graphics, the rest of the SOL Laptop will only excite people stuck in 2010. It has a 13.3″ 1366 x 768 LCD screen, a 320GB HDD, 2-4GB DDR3 RAM, a 3MP webcam, 3 USB ports and a card reader. But it does have Ethernet and HDMI ports, as well as support for modern wireless standards: GPS, Wi-Fi 802.11n and Bluetooth 4.0. It even has a cellular modem that supports 3G & LTE.
David also said that the laptop’s case is made of a “special polymer with unique treatment for strength.” Finally, the laptop will come with an unspecified version of Ubuntu installed. I guess by now you can see what all of those bullet points are describing: an affordable netbook that’s at home outdoors.
The SOL Laptop will be released at the end of 2013 in African and Middle Eastern countries, with U.S. and Canada soon to follow. It will have two variants, a $350 (USD) standard model and a $400 Marine model that’s water-resistant.
Assuming that the 2-hour charge time claim holds up in real world usage, what’s most disappointing about the SOL Laptop is that it’s actually a SOL Netbook. But David also said they’re working on other solar-powered devices; perhaps a high-end version of the laptop is in the works as well.
It seems there are a squillion different Bluetooth speakers on the market these days, so how do you choose which one to buy? You could pick one because of its size or sound quality, or you could just pick one because it looks cute. Fortunately, these speakers from bēm and The Public Zoo satisfy all of the above criteria.
These loveable little speaker cubes measure just 2.35″ x 2.35″ x 2.5″, and are embellished on three sides by the whimsical art of illustrator Han L. Lee. I can’t decide which of the three designs is my favorite, but I think I have to go with the panda bear with the eyepatch. Yes, the eyepatch has eyes of its own. How goofy is that?
The little bēm speaker connects with any Bluetooth device, and in my testing I found it easy to set up and provided very good sound quality for its size. I had to crank it up to its highest volume level before I experienced distortion, and at reasonable volume levels, the little speaker can fill a small room or office with its omnidirectional sound. It’s even got pretty decent bass thanks to a sound-conductive rubber pad on the bottom. You can recharge the speaker via its Mini USB port, and it also has a aux 3.5mm input for wired gadgets.
So put on your eyepatch and red bowtie and head over to bēm, where you can get The Public Zoo Bluetooth Speaker for $69.99(USD).
So you made a rash decision and used BreakupText to end things with an otherwise awesome guy (or girl.) What now? Well, you could grovel on your knees and beg for their forgiveness… or let another app do the work for you: MakeupText.
Created by the same people behind BreakupText, the MakeupText app offers the user with a bunch of reasons for making up. The “something shiny caught my eye” and “kidnapped by Russians” mistakes are ever present, but the groveling begins on the next screen.
Here’s a sample of the mindless sweetness the app can come up with:
I left you because I thought I found something great, something different, something worthy of my attention. It sucked me in, like a hypnotic octopus with bright and heavy tentacles dragging its willing partner further and further underwater. Until I suddenly realized I was being tricked. Their glitter was sand, their shine only the sun’s reflection off their cold, metal self. You, my dear, my love, are the sun. You are nothing but glitter, I know because it fills me every time we speak, every time I see you it’s all lightning flashes, you can light up the night’s sky. I left you because I’m an idiot, because that dastardly farce. I miss you, let us be together, let me take in your light. If you can find it in you to forgive me, I will spend every day worshiping your sun, you will never lose me again.
While BreakupText costs $0.99 to download, MakeupText is available for free – for a limited time. So if you unwittingly broke up with someone who you still want to be with, download this now before they start charging for it.
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
