Hasta La Gadget!

Touchscreens have become a big hit among cellphone users. But what’s next after tap to click and the two-finger pinch and zoom?

Synaptics’ Fuse experimental phone shows a device that you can interact with by squeezing, gripping, flexing and tilting the phone. The device melds multiple technologies such as multi-touch capacitive sensing, haptic feedback, 3-D graphics and proximity sensing.

“It’s not a product but a prototype that showcases a lot of key input technologies,” says Robyn Palmer, marketing specialist for Synaptics. “Our focus was on how to make mobile phones mobile again.”

Fuse tackles the difficulty of single-handed usage and the need to constantly look at the screen, two big challenges that users face today with current generation touchscreen devices, says Synaptics.

With Fuse, touch sensors at the back of the phone means users can poke it to receive or initiate calls. Force and capacitive touch sensors on the sides of the phone also allow you to squeeze the phone to select icons from the phone’s menu. Incorporating the accelerometers into the user interface also means you can tilt the phone to scroll and grip the phone tight to stop.

Synaptics’ silent video demos some of these ideas.

Fuse uses Synaptics multi-touch touchscreen, capacitive scroll strips, a Texas Instruments OMAP 3630 processor, three accelerometers, force sensors on the sides of the phone, a 480 x 800 high-resolution AMOLED display and a 3.7-inch screen.

The phone–which was created in partnership with Texas Instruments, Immersion and U.K. design firm The Alloy, among others–won’t make it to market as a product. But Synaptics plans to license parts of it to handset makers that are looking to take user interface on mobile phones to the next level.

The Fuse concept phone will be shown at the Consumer Electronics Show  in Las Vegas next month.

Photo: Fuse/Synaptics

If you’re a student, an Android phone could be one of your most valuable tools. From looking up a word in the dictionary to recording a lecture while browsing the web, Android has it mostly covered.

The tools available for students also provide a compelling answer to the question, “Is multitasking really necessary?” Unlike the iPhone, Android’s background processing capability allows apps from independent developers to keep their current state when you switch to another app. That means you can switch through multiple non-native apps without losing information.

Wired.com’s Brian Chen recently wrote about the successful results seen at Abilene Christian University, where the school provided 1,000 students with the choice of an iPod Touch or iPhone, encouraging the students to integrate the gadgets into their curriculum. But even if your school doesn’t give you a free iPhone, you can still use a smartphone to make yourself a smarter student.

Here are 10 Android apps that have made my bag significantly lighter and helped me get the most from my classes.

Students: Any other must-have Android apps that you use? Post your suggestions in the comments.

1. StudyDroid (free)

This app will help you free a few dollars for your ramen fund by allowing you to create unlimited packs of flash cards on your phone, instead of index cards. Simply create a pack, add a card, fill out the front and back, and keep adding cards as you need them. When you’re done filling out the cards, swipe left or right to move to each card and tap on the screen if you need to see the back. You can also mark a card as “known” and StudyDroid will keep track of your pack knowledge by displaying a percentage of known vs. unknown.

2. Droid Scan (free)

If you’ve ever taken a picture of a white board with a regular camera, it probably hasn’t turned out quite right: Unless you’re directly in front of the board, it won’t look square. Droid Scan uses perspective correction to convert images into high-quality scans instead of distorted messes. After snapping a picture, set up four points to crop around your content. From there, you can share your shot via email, Picasa, or SMS.

3.  3banana Notes by Snaptic (free)

3banana Notes makes it easy to store your notes in a cloud and access them anywhere. Any information you throw into 3banana will sync to a free web account at Snaptic.com. You can also create notes on the web and see them appear on your phone which provides a seamless connection between your notes and devices. There are also a lot of options to share your notes so if someone missed a class and wants to borrow your notes, put ‘em in 3banana.

4. HandyCalc (free)

Less stuff to carry, more money in your pocket; it’s a scientific calculator!

5. Wapedia (free)

While Wikipedia.org has a mobile-friendly site, Wapedia is a lot faster. First of all, you don’t have to open the browser and type in Wikipedia’s URL, which saves precious time during fast-paced classes. Second, it offers access to a lot of alternative wikis: You can search for a keyword and it will display a list of other wikis that mention your search term.

6. SciencePal ($1)

SciencePal is a great bundle for referencing a lot of your science needs. It includes elements, constants, polyatomic ions, the solar system and nuclides. Each tool is detailed and quick to access.

7. CoursePro (free demo, $3 for full)

With CoursePro you can track your classes, assignments and grades. Create a class, insert assignments and enter information like meeting times, the percentage each assignment counts toward your overall grade, alerts for due dates and any other additional notes you need to keep yourself focused and on track.

8. Elements (free)

A periodic table of the elements is a handy app for your science courses. Just click on an element to look up its melting point, appearance, atomic radius and more.

9. ColorDict (free)

ColorDict is hands-down the best dictionary app on Android. It’s hampered by slightly confusing installation: You need to install the software first, then download the data that goes into the dictionary (the actual words). There are many options for different kinds of data as well (such as a thesaurus plug-in). Once you’ve downloaded each of these plug-ins to your phone’s SD card, the dictionary is ready to go. I have a dictionary, thesaurus and spelling data in my ColorDict and they all appear under any search term, color coded.

10. Voice Recorder (free)

This app does exactly what it says. After you finish your recording you can save the audio file and e-mail it to yourself. If you want to keep the recorder on while using other apps, press Menu, go to Preferences and enable background recording.

Photo by Sam Rayner via Flickr Creative Commons

Earlier this week we asked Wired.com readers to submit and vote on their favorite iPhone apps of 2009, and the winners have been chosen.

The voting process was simple: Add your favorite app(s) using our Reddit widget, then vote up or down on each other’s submissions. Surprisingly, the list of your favorites is fairly short. So many of you adored one particular app that rather than vote on the existing submission, you decided to submit it over and over and over. That led to about 80 redundant submissions of the app, giving it a resounding victory.

In the end, only five iPhone apps accrued enough votes to be deemed your favorites of 2009. That’s OK — quality over quantity, right? Here they are.

1. Words With Friends

Yes, the iPhone game that readers loved so much they nominated it again and again was Words With Friends. It’s an iPhone version of Scrabble, which is hardly original, but the social integration of the game is done beautifully. You can invite and play with multiple iPhone users at the same time; you can chat within the app; and you can also set up Words With Friends to send you a push notification whenever it’s your turn to make a move. All very Web 2.0 savvy.

My favorite feature is a pair of eyeballs that pop up in the corner of the screen, signifying when your opponent is looking at the board. That’s just darn cute. There’s a free version, Words With Friends Free, which is ad-supported, and the $3 version, Words With Friends, is ad-free.

2. The Moron Test

Apparently a lot of you enjoy gauging your intelligence (or lack thereof), because The Moron Test received a lot of votes. The app is a series of tests evaluating your ability to understand and follow directions. Touch the ducks from biggest to smallest, for example, or tap the green button twice, then the red button and the blue button. Whenever you mess up, the screen reads “FAIL!” and you can either choose to start over or use a continue. Fun stuff, albeit a jokey method to test one’s smarts. Moron Test is $1 in the App Store.

3. Pocket God

When you’re sitting around bored at work, do you ever fantasize about torturing small creatures for fun? Clearly, a lot of Wired.com readers do, and fortunately their outlet is not their pets or younger siblings, it’s an iPhone app called Pocket God. It’s a free-form scenario of sorts where you assume the role of a sadistic god and you can abuse the living hell out of a group of islanders, known as Pygmies. You can control the environment in countless ways to kill the Pygmies: throw lighting bolts, feed them to the sharks, harpoon them underwater and so on. Politically correct it is not. Pocket God is $1 in the App Store.

4. Adobe Photoshop.com Mobile

Taking good photos with the iPhone is a challenge, thanks to the gadget’s shoddy camera. Even the superior autofocusing camera on the iPhone 3GS only goes part way to fixing the problem. That’s why Adobe’s Photoshop.com app is a huge help, because it can make you look like a less crummy photographer. The app features very basic editing tools that are extremely easy to apply, such as setting exposure, adding soft focus and adjusting tint. That’s pretty nifty, and the best part is it’s free.

5. Thirty One

A sizable number of you voted on the card game Thirty One. In the game, each player gets dealt three cards, and the goal is to get a hand with an added value of 31 (or closer to it than your opponents) by only counting cards in the same suit. It’s a buck in the App Store.

See Also:

• The Top iPhone Apps of 2009: Apple’s Picks and Yours
• 10 Most Awesome iPhone Apps of 2008
• Wired.com Readers’ Best iPhone Dongleware Inventions
• Top 10 iPhone Games, as Voted by Wired.com Readers
• Apple Promotes All-Time Top iPhone Apps

Photo: Stephen Hackett/Flickr

Video entertainment was “the one that got away” from Apple, but recent moves reveal the company is taking a second stab at the category, and that streaming video will play a major role.

The addition of video cameras to Apple’s latest iPhone and iPod Nano were just the first hints of the company’s new personal-media strategy. The company is also building a 500,000 square-foot data center in North Carolina, which could provide the massive bandwidth required for ubiquitous streaming video. And Apple’s recent acquisition of Lala suggests it’s interested in rebooting iTunes into a streaming service, according to Wall Street Journal. That means music, in Lala’s case, but the same infrastructure could be shared with streaming video.

The final piece of the puzzle was Apple’s approval this week of iPhone apps with live video-streaming capability. The company previously forbade this functionality, reserving live video as a private API. But a letter from an iPhone developer convinced Steve Jobs to release Apple’s restrictions, and now live video-streaming apps Ustream and Knocking Live Video are available for download in the App Store.

All these recent developments point to a significant new strategic market for Apple: personal broadcasting, or sharing personal experiences. YouTube and Flip are already big players in this young space, and the logical competitive move for Apple is to make personal media deliverable and accessible anytime, anywhere.

That means in the next few years, we’re likely to see video cameras with live-streaming software built into future iPods and iPhones (and the rumored touchscreen tablet, if it ever exists). These features will likely be integrated into iTunes, which Apple would convert into a social experience with real-time sharing services, in addition to being a storage tool.

It’s no wonder Jobs gave the green light on live video-broadcasting apps for the iPhone: He could use app developers to help Apple get started.

In a September iPod event, Jobs made it clear Apple was entering the consumer video market.

“We want to get in on this,” Jobs said when he presented the video-equipped iPod Nano’s main competitor: the Flip camcorder.

Building a data center, putting a video camera on the iPhone and approving iPhone apps with live video-streaming functionality are all precursor steps necessary for Apple to build for an always-connected, share-everything future.

“I would look at it and say, ‘You’re Apple. You can’t just refresh your existing line. What’s your game changer?’” said James McQuivey, a Forrester analyst who focuses on consumer video. “It’s getting into personal broadcasting, which is essentially what this is.”

Live video in its current state is mostly a bunch of niche applications. Satellite trucks enable broadcast journalists to televise live scoops. In the business space, professionals use live video conferencing to communicate remotely. Consumers use live video broadcasting with webcams to video-chat with each other, and a few exhibitionists broadcast themselves over websites like Ustream and Justin.tv.

So what’s the big deal if you put live-video capability in a phone? You can carry it everywhere and broadcast live from anywhere, and that opens a whole new world of applications for the technology. John Ham, co-founder of video-streaming startup Ustream, predicts live video will give birth to a new world of citizen journalists.

“People always have a cellphone on them,” said John Ham, co-founder of Ustream. “You can’t always predict life, and there are going to be moments where you want to share…. We’ve seen people take out devices and streaming earthquakes or planes landing, and now there are going to be all sorts of citizen journalism events now if we have millions with this application over iPhone.”

The developer of Knocking Live Video, an app that broadcasts live video between iPhones, said anywhere-video broadcasting is the evolution of Twitter.

“We are focused on phone-to-phone, not uploading to the web,” Pointy Head developer Brian Meehan explained to Ars Technica. “Who really cares about fleeting moments other than friends and family seeing it as it happens? With Knocking, people share what they are doing right now. Our testers have referred to Knocking as a ‘visual tweet.’”

And then there are those who are already using video cameras in phones and point-and-shoots to capture events like concerts or soccer games, which eventually get e-mailed or posted on Facebook. Sharing his personal experience, McQuivey said he went to a concert with his daughter recently and saw about 100 pocket video cameras shooting the show on the main floor.

“The performers even said, it used to be what goes on tour stays on tour, but now it ends up on Facebook,” McQuivey said. “Apple would be foolish not to try to be the center of that buzz.”

“Google is going to want to go with this, too: They have YouTube,” McQuivey noted. “This could be really interesting.”

And what about Lala? According to The Wall Street Journal, Apple is working with Lala’s engineers to revamp iTunes into a streaming music service that lets users buy and listen to music through a web browser.

“For consumers, such changes could make it far easier to manage and access large libraries of music, which need to be stored, maintained and backed up on computer hard drives and portable devices,” The Wall Street Journal wrote.

Why stop with music? Adding video to the mix would turn iTunes into a personal media hub.

In a nearer term, McQuivey says Apple has an easy opportunity to integrate video from the fifth-generation iPod Nano into iTunes, enabling users to share recordings with one another through the software.

“This puts Apple in an important place it hasn’t occupied until now: It makes Apple software the potential hub for personal media, something that is poised to explode in the next 2-3 years,” McQuivey wrote in a blog post when the video-equipped Nano was released in September.

“Even Flip’s success has not guaranteed that people use Flip software to manage the videos they capture,” he added. “But Apple’s iTunes has always been the glue that makes Apple’s ecosystem work. And now it just acquired superadhesive properties.”

See Also:

• Apple’s New Data Center Likely to Focus on Cloud Computing …
• Rhapsody to Apple: ‘Get Off of My Cloud’
• Apple’s Purchase of Lala Could Signal Cheaper, Streaming iTunes …
• Dropbox Brings Cloud Storage Within iPhone’s Reach

Photo: michaelhilton/Flickr

Tesco, the UK supermarket known and loved for both cheap prices and for (allegedly) ousting almost every independent grocery store from Britain’s streets, is days away from selling the iPhone in its stores.

The offering isn’t, as you might assume, just one more place to pick up a handset. The iPhone will actually be on Tesco’s own-label network, Tesco Mobile, a joint venture between Tesco and the original UK iPhone provider, O2. Tesco has just announced the tariffs for its plans and while they aren’t much different to what you’d get from either O2 or Orange, they are straightforward and cheap.

Monthly plans begin at £20 ($33) and get you £60 ($98) worth of calls and text messages (all outgoing — in the UK nobody charges to receive an SMS) and unlimited data (which we believe is actually unlimited). £60 a month will buy you unlimited everything (with a £500 “fair use” policy).

The Pay As You Go options are as excellent as they almost always are in Blighty: buying £10 of credit a month is enough to get you a year of free internet, and if you buy £15 or £20 then Tesco will double your call and SMS credit to £30 or £40.

The iPhone will be in Tesco stores from next Monday, December 14th, and will run from free up to £538 ($874) depending on tariff and model.

iPhone 3GS now available from the 14th December”) [Tesco Mobile]