Wahoo Fitness Pack Turns iPhone Into Personal Trainer

Wahoo’s Run/Gym Pack is a great place to start for prospective fitness nerds

Fitness apps for the iPhone aren’t exactly thin on the ground. Hit up the App Store and you’ll see a confusion of GPS-enabled trackers for running, biking and probably even skipping. What is slightly less common is hardware that lets these apps do more than simply tell you how far and fast you were.

Wahoo, which sounds like something Mario might shout in his more recent outings, is a “run/gym pack” which includes a heart-rate belt and companion dongle that slots into the dock port. It works with Wahoo’s own free app, but will also play nice with most any other fitness app or measuring device on the market thanks to its industry standard ANT+ integration.

The best thing about heart-rate monitor (apart from letting you go all “bondage chic” in the summer as you strap it around your naked chest) is that you can more accurately determine calories burned. Plain GPS trackers guess at this, but they’re often horribly inaccurate. With a heart-rate monitor, you can correctly determine the exact amount of donuts needed to redress your energy inbalance.

The new run pack costs $110-$130, and is available now.

Run/Gym Pack [Wahoo. Thanks, Brad!]

See Also:


Siri shows up on an iPod Touch, no longer plays favorites in the iOS family

That Siri gal is certainly making the rounds these days. When she’s not answering your questions on a 4S, she’s showing up on iPads and elder iPhones. Not one to play favorites, Siri’s now lending her considerable talents to an iPod touch. Two enterprising young hackers, euwars and rud0lf77, are the ones who put Siri on the iPod, and you can see the results of their labor in the video after the break. Of course, Apple’s servers still aren’t as friendly as the virtual voice assistant, so Siri’s latest cameo remains a silent one — but some Siri’s better than none, right?

Continue reading Siri shows up on an iPod Touch, no longer plays favorites in the iOS family

Siri shows up on an iPod Touch, no longer plays favorites in the iOS family originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 25 Oct 2011 19:24:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |   | Email this | Comments

Mosoro Bluetooth LE iOS accessories improve your golf, if the weather’s right

So far the appcessories — yeah we said it, APPcessories — we’ve seen include some good ideas, and some less so. The Bluetooth LE 3D-Sport and Weather offerings from Mosoro fall into the former category (if they make their way into a shipping product that is). The 3D-Sport is a motion capture device you attach to sports equipment. The on-board accelerometer, gyroscope and magnetometer beam motion data to your iOS device, where it can be analyzed by Rocky-style Russian coaches to see where your throw or golf swing is going wrong. The latter is a mini weather station that reads temperature, humidity, elevation, and barometric pressure to tell you the conditions where you are right now. More usefully, it nabs your GPS location and uploads it all to Mosoro’s aptly named “Cloud” Server that presumably maps out some crazy real-time crowdsourced weather report. Both also use Bluetooth 4.0’s low energy technology so they won’t need to see a charger for a long time. Now we just need a company that likes collating personal data, perhaps with a weather service, to snap this one up… any takers?

Continue reading Mosoro Bluetooth LE iOS accessories improve your golf, if the weather’s right

Mosoro Bluetooth LE iOS accessories improve your golf, if the weather’s right originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 25 Oct 2011 11:35:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |   | Email this | Comments

Nokia Maps officially arrives on iOS and Android, touts offline storage

Nokia Maps is still getting development love, despite the Finnish manufacturer pinning its smartphone hopes and dreams on Windows Phone. The HTML5-powered maps are now willing to play ball with iOS and Android devices. Previously one of Nokia’s strongest built-in functions on its own phones, the maps perform well on rival hardware — although pinch-to-zoom isn’t working on our Google devices. With Microsoft’s Windows Phones touting some impressive HTML5 credentials, it wouldn’t shock us to see something very similar running on Nokia’s incoming WinPho. There’s a smattering of online settings, including transport directions, but the best part is a new offline mode that will download neighborhood maps from your WiFi connection. Navigate your phone browser to the source link below to see how it works.

Nokia Maps officially arrives on iOS and Android, touts offline storage originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 25 Oct 2011 11:11:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink The Handheld Blog  |  sourceNokia Maps (Mobile), Nokia Ovi Blog  | Email this | Comments

Garmin launches Fit App, motivates you to lose that freshman fifteen

Garmin, the company responsible for helping you navigate to the mall food court, is now hoping to help you work off those cheese fries with the introduction of its $.99 Fit App for Android and iPhone. The mobile app — which works a lot like the Nike+ — measures distance, time, calories and speed walked, run, cycled or traveled to capture your calorie burning journey. Connected users can also set goals, track their workouts and share results with others addicted to the burn. In addition to the app, Garmin is rolling out a $49.99 ANT+ adapter for iPhone, which monitors heart rate and cadence when paired with another optional sensor like a footpod. If you can’t muster up the energy to try it out right now, we’re sure you can at least head on past the break to check out the PR.

Continue reading Garmin launches Fit App, motivates you to lose that freshman fifteen

Garmin launches Fit App, motivates you to lose that freshman fifteen originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 25 Oct 2011 07:45:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |   | Email this | Comments

Square makes a larger mark on the brick-and-mortar scene, available in more outlets

Best Buy, Target, Walmart, The Shack, Apple. All of the above are now proudly selling the Square credit card reader, according to a tweet sent out by CEO Jack Dorsey. It’s great news for anyone willing to shell out a ten-spot in order to conduct business from their iOS device right away, rather than waiting between two and five days for a free one to show up in the mail. If you need one today, you’d best be calling up your local retail outlet to make sure they have some in stock.

Square makes a larger mark on the brick-and-mortar scene, available in more outlets originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 24 Oct 2011 13:46:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |   | Email this | Comments

VueScan Mobile: Use Almost Any Wireless Scanner With Your iOS Device

I can neither confirm nor deny that Hamrick’s choice of source material influenced my decision to write this post

VueScan Mobile is an iOS app which will let you scan from your wireless scanner direct to your iPhone or iPad, no computer required. The list of supported scanners is huge, and the software works with pretty much every wireless Epson, Canon and HP scanner out there.

Hamrick software’s Vuescan desktop app has been around for years. It has proved a good way to use old scanners with modern computers when they have been abandoned by their manufacturers. And the software offers an embarrassment of advanced features not found in the makers’ own drivers.

Vuescan Mobile is a lot simpler, although it uses the same source code as its older brother. It connects to scanners on the same Wi-Fi network (the details are on the site, along with a list of supported machines) and pulls scanned images across the network straight to your device.

From there, you can mail images, save them to your camera roll or open them as JPGs or PDFs in any other apps that support this. Thus, you could scan a page of text and pictures and send it straight to Evernote to be magically OCR’ed.

I no longer own a scanner, but if I did, I’d grab this $5 app right away. I used the OS X version for years, and the app store reviews say it works flawlessly.

Vuescan Mobile product page [Hamrick]

Vuescan Mobile app page [iTunes]

See Also:


Google Voice app returns to iTunes, iOS 5 crash bug fixed

Less than a week after it disappeared from iTunes, the Apple-friendly Google Voice app is back and declared iOS 5 friendly, per its official Twitter account. Also improved is operation sans-internet connection, since now there’s no data required to dial numbers you’ve previously called. Hit the source link below for v1.3.1.1891 — we’ll never go back to the dark days of v1.3.0.1771.

Google Voice app returns to iTunes, iOS 5 crash bug fixed originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 21 Oct 2011 19:10:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink @Google Voice (Twitter)  |  sourceiTunes  | Email this | Comments

Steve Jobs Bio: Its 6 Most Surprising Reveals

Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs doesn’t go on sale until Monday, but advanced copies have been delivered to the New York Times, Associated Press and Huffington Post, all of which have been dribbling out telling insights and factoids about Apple’s former CEO.

We’ll be getting our own copy of the book — simply titled Steve Jobs — on Monday. Until then, enjoy these surprising peeks into the life and psyche of the 21st century’s most famous, if not celebrated, CEO.

Steve Wanted to go ‘Thermonuclear’ on Android
Jobs was livid when HTC introduced an Android phone that shared a number of iPhone features in early 2010. An excerpt from the book:

“I will spend my last dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every penny of Apple’s $40 billion in the bank, to right this wrong,” Jobs said. “I’m going to destroy Android, because it’s a stolen product. I’m willing to go thermonuclear war on this.” He told Google’s Eric Schmidt, “I don’t want your money. If you offer me $5 billion, I won’t want it. I’ve got plenty of money. I want you to stop using our ideas in Android, that’s all I want.’’ [AP]

Interesting to note: Jobs’ vendetta is still going on full force — just look at litigation battles between Apple and Samsung over patents owned by Apple. One of the most recent developments could be seriously detrimental to the Android platform. An Australian judge issued a temporary injunction banning the sale of the Samsung Galaxy Tab in Australia because it infringes on two patents held by Apple relating to multitouch. Because multitouch is such a broadly defined technology, the injunction could impede any Android product release in Australia.

Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs. Image: Barnes and Noble

Steve Expected to Die Young

Jobs confided to former Apple CEO John Sculley that he believed he would die young, and therefore needed to accomplish very much very quickly in order to make his mark on Silicon Valley history.

“We all have a short period of time on this earth,” he told the Sculleys. “We probably only have the opportunity to do a few things really great and do them well. None of us has any idea how long we’re going to be here nor do I, but my feeling is I’ve got to accomplish a lot of these things while I’m young.” [Huffington Post]

Jobs’ now famous 2005 Stanford commencement speech expanded on his views of life, death and our limited time on earth. At that event, he said, “Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life.”

Steve Became an Expert on Cancer Treatment — If Only Too Late
Despite pleas from friends and family, Jobs initially declined surgery to treat his cancer, waiting nine months before going under the knife. As the book reports: “The big thing was that he really was not ready to open his body,” Jobs’ wife, Laurene Powell, said. “It’s hard to push someone to do that.”

However, when Jobs finally did come around to traditional medical treatments, he did so with all the intellectual penetration of Apple product development. Or so reports the book:

“When he did take the path of surgery and science, Mr. Jobs did so with passion and curiosity, sparing no expense, pushing the frontiers of new treatments. According to Mr. Isaacson, once Mr. Jobs decided on the surgery and medical science, he became an expert — studying, guiding and deciding on each treatment. Mr. Isaacson said Mr. Jobs made the final decision on each new treatment regimen.” [NYT]

Jobs became one of only 20 people in the world to have all the genes of both his cancer tumor and normal DNA sequenced — a project that cost $100,000 at the time. The innovative treatments Jobs received would soon turn cancer into a “manageable chronic disease,” a doctor told him. Jobs told Isaacson that he felt that he was either going to be one of the first “to outrun a cancer like this” or be among the last “to die from it.”

Steve Was Intent on Setting Up Apple For Future Success
Acutely aware of his own mortality, Jobs wanted to ensure Apple remained strong in his absence.

“Hewlett and Packard built a great company, and they thought they had left it in good hands,” Jobs told Isaacson. “But now it’s being dismembered and destroyed. I hope I’ve left a stronger legacy so that will never happen at Apple.” [AP]

Jobs worked diligently to groom top talent, according to The Wall Street Journal, after his initial cancer diagnosis. Indeed, Apple reportedly has a program called “Apple University” that began in 2008 and acts like an MBA program to pass on Apple culture and business ethos to top executives — ensuring that Jobs’ ideals will live on long after he’s gone.

Steve Didn’t Think Apple Was Ready For Apps
The book shares that Jobs at first “quashed the discussion” when Apple board member Art Levinson attempted to persuade him that mobile apps would be the next big thing.

Apple board member Art Levinson told Isaacson that he phoned Jobs “half a dozen times to lobby for the potential of the apps,” but, according to Isaacson, “Jobs at first quashed the discussion, partly because he felt his team did not have the bandwidth to figure out all the complexities that would be involved in policing third-party app developers.” [Huffington Post]

Steve Was, Yeah, Sort of a Hippie
Jobs’ early experiences with LSD in the 1960s, along with a character-forming trip to India, are well documented. And it seems the effects of these experiences reverberated through the rest of his life decisions.

Jobs said that he tried a number of different diets, including solely of fruits and vegetables. When he named Apple, he told Isaacson he was “on one of my fruitarian diets.” Jobs had just returned from an apple farm. He believed the name sounded “fun, spirited and not intimidating.”

Jobs also said LSD “reinforced my sense of what was important — creating great things instead of making money, putting things back into the stream of history and of human consciousness as much as I could.” [AP]

The Beatles were one of his favorite bands, and he always hoped to get the iconic group’s music on iTunes. This was eventually accomplished in late 2010.

New York Times, Huffington Post and Associated Press


Myriad’s Remarkz HTML 5 web annotation app hands-on

It wasn’t that long ago that Myriad gave us an exclusive sneak peek at its platform agnostic Android app emulator, Alien Dalvik 2.0. While we were there, the company gave us a glimpse of another project, called Remarkz, that piqued our interest. Remarkz is a slick little HTML 5 application that lets users annotate web pages with text and drawings and share the marked up pages via email, Facebook and Twitter. As opposed to using screen grab programs like Skitch or Jing, Remarkz keeps the web page links live and only requires adding a bookmark to get started. Additionally, a timeline feature lets you see when new notes are made on a page and who made them — giving it greater potential for use as a collaboration tool. True to Myriad form, it works on any platform (tablets, PCs and Macs) using any browser that supports HTML 5. It’s still in beta for now, but the app works pretty well despite a small bug here or there. Plus, given its egalitarian nature, Myriad hinted that we may see it on more screens (think big) in January at CES, which would up its cool quotient considerably. Interested? Check out a video walkthrough of the app after the break, and hit the source to start using it yourself.

Continue reading Myriad’s Remarkz HTML 5 web annotation app hands-on

Myriad’s Remarkz HTML 5 web annotation app hands-on originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 20 Oct 2011 22:22:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |  sourceRemarkz  | Email this | Comments