Early Apple CarPlay Reviews Cite Ease of Use, Excellent Siri Voice Integration
Apple and several of its partners showed off CarPlay at its official unveiling earlier this year, mainstream users are finally getting their hands on the system with Pioneer’s release of its promised CarPlay update for for several of its aftermarket car audio receiver yesterday.
Early reviews of CarPlay from Consumer Reports and Australian technology and car blog EFTM suggest the system is indeed easy to use and effective at reducing driver distraction, thanks to excellent Siri integration.
Consumer Reports points out the many benefits offered by Siri, which allows you to send text messages, get directions, set reminders, and more without touching your iPhone.
As handy as Siri’s natural speech recognition is when you’re just walking around with your phone, it really comes into its own in the car. Siri makes it easy to choose music, get directions, and read or send text messages—all by using your voice with natural speech, rather than menu-driven, formulaic commands.
Consumer Reports also notes that updating the AVIC-5000NEX unit was easy, requiring the owner to download the firmware to a USB stick, plug the stick into the receiver, and wait for unit to update itself.
For his part, Trevor Long of EFTM provides a detailed walkthrough with screenshots of CarPlay’s major features. Demoing Pioneer’s AVH-X8650BT stereo installed in a 2010 Mazda 2, Long shows how easy it is to make phone calls, interact with visual voicemail, listen to music, and more.
CarPlay is a revolution in in-car entertainment. While many of the features have been available for some time on other cars, the genuine integration with your smartphone and capabilities that have been added make it well worth considering if you’re an Apple iPhone user who spends a great deal of time in your car.
If you’re shopping for a new car – ask the dealer – is CarPlay available? and if no – will it be available via a firmware upgrade in the future?
Pioneer this week released its CarPlay firmware update, making it the first aftermarket receiver manufacturer to offer CarPlay to consumers. Among Pioneer’s U.S. models, CarPlay is available for the $1400 AVIC-8000NEX, the $1200 AVIC-7000NEX, the $900 AVIC-6000NEX, the $750 AVIC-5000NEX and the $700 AVH-4000NEX. CarPlay is also compatible with Pioneer’s new $600 smartphone receiver, AppRadio 4. Consumers can generally find Pioneer’s units at significant discounts from list price from a variety of retailers.
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OnePlus One pre-orders are live with a bonus offer
OnePlus One is a beast of a phone. Ignore the bad press and faulty PR team, it is one of the better options out there. Especially for those into theming and root functionality.
A while ago, OnePlus announced that they would have a limited pre-order period in which anyone with the money for a OnePlus One can order.
Well now the pre-orders are live. Along with an added bonus. The first 20,000 people to fill out a Google Form with only their email can get an invite. No random drawing, no spamming your social network.
Pure and simple. The first 20,000 to enter the form will get their invite within 48 hours.
If you have been wanted this mystical beast, but have never been able to get an invite, this is your chance!
Deals, Discounts, Freebies, and More! Click here to save today!
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Accessory of the Day: Samsung 16GB MicroSDHC card $11.10
If you need a little expansion for your current memory situation, this Samsung 16GB MicroSDHC card will fit the part quite nicely. It features high speeds which really come in handy when working with HD video or running beefy apps from the card itself. Have a friend or relative that is always complaining about having maxed out their phone’s memory with photos of the grandbaby or recent trip? This would make a perfect gift. With a 48MB/s transfer speed, excellent reviews, and a price of just $11.10 (Prime eligible) it’s almost silly to not grab one.
Deals, Discounts, Freebies, and More! Click here to save today!
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Artist convinces people to sell their private data for a cookie
There’s been a huge debate about how companies use personal data, with Apple and Ello squaring off against data-driven companies like Google and Facebook. We place a lot of trust in these corporations, not bothering to read the terms and conditions before clicking agree. Of course, this was how one cyber security firm tricked unwitting Londoners into signing away their first born child in exchange for free WiFi. But it does raise the question of if we’re walking blindly into a privacy nightmare of our own making, which is what Risa Puno sought to investigate. The New York-based artist baked 700 cookies in the logos of various social networks, but rather than selling them for cash, she asked passers-by to sell her their personal information.
Image Credit: Talisman Brolin / Courtesy of Risa Puno via Mashable
Talking to ProPublica, the artist revealed that people were happy to sign away their name, address, driver’s license number, phone number and their mother’s maiden name. As part of the deal, Puno also took pictures of each candidate, and in some cases asked for (and got) fingerprints and the last four digits of what people claimed was their social security number. If anyone asked what she planned to do with the information, the artist pointed to a terms and conditions sheet written in impossibly small text mirroring the sort we routinely ignore when we sign up to a new website.
Overall, 380 people participated in the event, but Puno has yet to decide what to do with the data, although she does have the right to share and display the information in public. We’re sure that plenty of people faked their social security numbers, but perhaps this is a lesson that, if we don’t want to be worrying about what Risa Puno is doing with our fingerprints, we should all take a little more care of our privacy.
Filed under: Internet
Via: Gothamist
Source: ProPublica, Mashable
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Hulu Plus on iOS looks a lot flatter and cleaner now
The word “reimagining” can be a bit scary at times. At its worst you get stuff like Johnny Depp playing Willy Wonka, but on the other side of the coin is SyFy’s Battlestar Galactica. Hulu’s redesigned iOS app seems to fall on the latter portion of that spectrum. The application’s gotten an overhaul, with a keen eye toward making it cleaner and, above all, easier to use. First things first: the landing screen is now divided into three sections; Home, Shows You Watch and Navigation. Home is where content curated by Hulu resides, while Shows You Watch and Navigation are pretty self-explanatory. The kicker is that now when you swipe either left or right from anywhere within the app, you’ll pull up either of the latter, respectively.
The streaming outfit didn’t neglect the video player itself, either, tidying up its appearance and adding controls for captions and Chromecasting within the viewing window. It all resembles HBO Go and YouTube’s Android apps a bit, but compared to what Hulu on iOS looked like recently it’s hard to complain. When those on Google’s mobile OS will see a similar patch is up in the air for now.
Filed under: Cellphones, Home Entertainment, Software, HD, Mobile, Apple
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‘Siren’ dating app wants to keep women safe from creeps
While Tinder solves a few of the problems women face with online dating — like being smothered with lascivious messages from anyone and everyone — there’s still an issue of privacy that it fails to address. That risk of not being nearly as anonymous while looking for a mate as one would hope is what inspired Seattle’s Susie Lee to create Siren. What sets it apart from every other dating app is that it keeps a woman’s picture private until she deems it appropriate to share with a possible suitor. As Seattle Times notes, a lady can peruse the profiles of men at their leisure and if, say, she’s into a guy’s answer to questions like what their three magic-lamp wishes are, she can then show him her picture. The idea is to give ladies the control here and base matches on real-world personality, not a dry series of surveys akin to eHarmony.
Access is fairly locked down at the moment. There are around 1,200 current users and you can only get in if you’re living in grunge-music’s birthplace and have an iOS device. Perhaps more restrictive is that it lacks options for anyone other than heterosexual men and women. Lee says that despite the app’s abilities, though, if you use it like any other dating service and focus on shallower interests like how handsome a mate is, you’re likely to remain sleepless in Seattle. And really, who wants to go through another break-up again anyway?
Filed under: Cellphones, Internet, Software, Mobile
Source: iTunes, Seattle Times
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Google now rolling out Android 4.4.4 OTA to Nexus 7 LTE (2013)
Nexus 7 LTE (2013) owners everywhere can rejoice as Google has begun rolling out Android 4.4.4 to devices across the land via an OTA update, bringing the build to KTU84P.
What Android 4.4.4 brings is somewhat of a mystery a present, although there are some carrier enhancements for the LTE radio as well as the usual bug fixes and performance improvements.
Have you grabbed the updated yet?
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Littlebits’ Halloween kits make old-school decorations more techy
So you want to make your Halloween just a little more geeky, but you’re not quite ready to port Tetris to a pumpkin — maybe LittleBits is more your speed? The modular prototyping platform has created a series of themed kits that should make augmenting holiday easy. There are three in all: a sound-activated jack-o-lantern light, a “creepy portrait” that moves when someone walks by and Halloween “stick figure costume.” All of them are cute, but they’re also a little less than what they seem.
The stick figure “costume,” for instance, is a pack with battery, power, pulse and light-were modules that can be used to sew a glowing stick-figure into clothing, but doesn’t actually come with anything to wear. Likewise, the “hack-o-lantern” and portrait packs seem to only have the modules needed to build the projects, but not the requires pumpkin or wall-art to complete the effect. Naturally, there’s some assembly required, but the projects do look pretty fun. Want to get started? LittleBits’ Halloween packs can be had for between $29 and $65, depending on the kit.
Filed under: Misc
Source: LittleBits
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EU officially approves Facebook’s purchase of WhatsApp
US regulators may have given Facebook’s $19 billion acquisition of WhatsApp the thumbs-up some time ago, but the social network was still waiting for the EU to do the same. Now, thankfully, approval has been handed down from European Commissioner Joaquin Almunia, who says that, thanks to the presence of healthy rivals like Line, Viber and iMessage, the deal won’t hamper competition in the messaging market. Zuckberg and Co. had to agree to protect user privacy in the States before getting the official go-ahead, and in Europe antitrust watchdogs sent questionnaires to the competition in order to gauge the impact on the messaging game before deciding. In May, Facebook looked into getting the European Commission involved to bypass the holdup of waiting on each country to okay the deal. Of course, there’s a lot of sexting to take into account across the pond, so officials had to be careful with the due diligence.
Filed under: Internet, Software, Mobile, Facebook
Via: Reuters
Source: Europa
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Hands-on with Tesco’s Hudl2
Tesco announced its Hudl2 tablet today, and by now you already know what it’s about and how it stacks up against the original Hudl. Well, we’ve had a chance to play around with the device, and it’s immediately clear this is a significant upgrade. Despite a notably larger 8.3-inch screen, the Hudl2 saves on width and thickness, with a taller frame accommodating all those extra pixels. The chunky bezels of Tesco’s first tablet have all but disappeared, giving the Hudl2 a much sleeker look that betrays its £129 price point.While the Hudl looked like very much like a budget, entry-level tablet (no offense intended), its successor has much more of a mid-range vibe — you could easily mistake it for something that came from a way more established brand, the likes of Google and ASUS included. Everything is just that little bit tidier this time around. What was once chubby is now slim; where bezel dominated there’s now more screen; and even the stereo speaker grilles have a flashier, ‘bubbled’ design.
Beneath a new look, pretty much every spec has been improved upon, too, just as Tesco promised. A faster processor, double the RAM, and better cameras for starters. The screen has also been given a resolution bump to match to the increase in size. In the controlled environment of the demo area, at least, the 1,920 x 1,200 pixel display certainly appeared bright, crisp and well-calibrated. The Hudl2 is a little bit heavier than the first at 410 grams, but thanks to more favourable dimensions, it’s just as easy to grip with one hand in portrait mode as it is to use with two when in landscape orientation.
We’ll have to reserve the true stress test for the review, but once out the demo mode Tesco had the Hudl2 running in, it seemed to be nippy enough when cycling through the main menus or hopping in and out of apps. Speaking of software, Tesco’s bundled the Hudl2 with what looks to be a way more robust parental control app, knowing the original Hudl was popular with families. You can set up to 7 user profiles, and control exactly how much screen time your kids are allowed on weekdays and weekends, where exactly on the web they’re allowed to go, and what’s apps they have access to.
Tesco has improved the integration of all of its services into the Hudl2, as well. You have access to a standard menu, but there’s also a Google Now-like card view that incorporates real-time information, like when your next online shop is due to be delivered. How visible all of Tesco’s blinkbox properties are on the device also throws doubt on speculation the supermarket is looking to sell them off, with a Tesco exec suggesting the ecosystem won’t be changing as much as some may believe.
Tesco is also giving customers the chance to add a more personal touch to their Hudl2, with double the colour options (eight in total), and tons of cases and other accessories to coordinate or clash. The new hues, like the pink you see above, are super bright in a way that’ll make you love some of them and detest others. A minor point, but it’s nice that there’s a good selection of colours rather than the generic monochrome palette.
We’re looking forward to using the device for more than a few minutes and getting some proper impressions together, but that enthusiasm in itself should tell you the Hudl2 is so far looking like a significant upgrade on the first, both inside and out. And with a £129 price point, Tesco could even be set to surpass what it managed to achieve with the Hudl, making a decent tablet affordable and accessible.
Filed under: Tablets
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AIVAnet 