TomTom re-launches Go Mobile navigation for Android
Smartphones have certainly made a dent in the GPS navigation hardware market, but TomTom is back with its new Go Mobile app, which aims to go above and beyond your regular maps package.
The app includes support for offline map storage, so you won’t have to eat up all your data as you drive around, real-time traffic updates, speed camera warnings, save-able settings for your regularly visited locations, a 3D view of buildings and nearby landmarks to help you grab your bearings, and more. TomTom’s app also includes a global license, which enables access to all the features above in countries around the globe without the need for data connectivity, which is a big bonus over regular data based map packages.
Customers can use the app for free for 50 miles each month, but will have to upgrade to a yearly unlimited subscription if they want to travel further under TomTom’s guidance. Upgrades can be bought as in-app purchases, costing £14.99 for one year’s access or £34.99 for 3 years. You can download the app from Google Play for free.
Do you have any need for dedicated navigation apps these days, or does Google Maps have you covered?
OEM flip shell cases for BlackBerry Q10 are only $14.95 today!
The BlackBerry Flip Shell case offers full protection around your Q10 in a durable, lightweight shell made from hand-crafted, genuine leather. The front of the case flips down, exposing the screen and keyboard of your device. The message notification light is visible through the front flap so you always know when to check your phone, even while it’s being protected.
Popular arena shooter Crimsonland makes its Windows Phone and Windows 8.1 debut
Crimsonland, the popular top-down arena shooter from Finland-based developer 10tons that was first released for the PC in 2003, has made its debut today for Windows Phone and (Windows 8.1) as a universal app for $9.99.
This OtterBox-style case for iPhone 6 Plus is only $29.95 today
Packed with multiple layers of protection, the CONVERT Combo from Seidio shields your iPhone 6 plus from intense impacts, giving you complete peace of mind. It includes a built-in kickstand that’s great for watching movies on the go and even a sturdy belt clip holster to keep at your side.
Apple to build a new research and development facility in Yokohama, Japan
Apple is building a new research and development center in Japan. The facility will apparently be located in the city of Yokohama.
We first heard that Apple would be building a new R&D facility in Japan back in December. The Yokohama mayor Fumiko Hayashi announced in a press conference that Apple had purchased a space that once belonged to Panasonic for the construction of such a facility, according to Japanese news site NKH (translated from Japanese):
Apple plans to build a large technology development facility of approximately 25,000 square meters floor space, and will have already bought part of the Tsunashimahigashi Kohoku-ku, Yokohama Panasonic Factory site.
The building will reportedly be environmentally friendly, keeping energy usage to a minimum. Construction of the building will begin later this year, with goal of completing it at some point in 2016.
Source: NKH, Asahi Shimbun via: Macotakara
Nyrius Smart Outlet review
The conversion of everything in the home to be part of a wireless network is not all about the ‘cool factor.’ Home automation makes for convenient and cost-efficient living. Items will activate and shutdown when necessary rather than being turned on manually and staying on for an infinite amount of time. The Nyrius Smart Outlet works manually, with timers, or by proximity to control electronics in the home with a smartphone app. Each Smart Outlet costs less than $40, making home automation with Nyrius relatively affordable.
Hit the break for the review.
The design of the Nyrius Smart Outlet is plain and that does not matter because of where it will reside. In fact, being so plain actually helps the Nyrius Smart Outlet because of where it will be used. There are not any colors, oversized logos, or even buttons to be found. What you see is what you get. The device is completely white with the Nyrius logo embedded into the front. Below the logo sits a small light indicator. Around the curved sides are the reset clicker and the outlet itself. The Nyrius Smart Outlet will look fine regardless of location because of its look.
The placement of the outlet on the bottom could pose a problem for some users but should not be considered a deal-breaker. The Nyrius Smart Outlet’s footprint will not allow for it to connect the top outlet of a stacked setup; therefore, connecting to the bottom would would be ideal and preferred. Or connecting to an outlet with a side-by-side setup will work because the Nyrius Smart Outlet is not very wide. The outlet on the device is turned ninety degrees and that will help with certain fitting issues. Although it really depends upon the outlet, I found the Nyrius Smart Outlet to fit tightly and securely.
Choose an outlet and a home electronic and the Nyrius Smart Outlet is almost ready to work.
Aside from having the appropriate hardware, the Nyrius Smart Outlet app is necessary to start automating electronics in the home. The app takes users through the quick setup process and then offers some controls. Launching the app will display the available Nyrius Smart Outlets ready for syncing. Of course, a Bluetooth connection is required for everything to start working. The app will then offer a list of outlets.
Each individual outlet has its own settings so that nothing is bound by any other outlet. Want the bedroom lights to turn on when you enter the room? Or do you want the living room lights to remain on from 7:30PM to 11:59PM? Do both with the Nyrius Smart Outlet. They are both self-explanatory. The proximity feature waits for someone with the app to be nearby and the timer provides schedules so users can forget about managing outlets closely. And, if those options are too automated for you, the app has a manual selection to turn outlets on and off. The settings area has options for device naming and security enhancement.
The uses for products in the home automation space really vary. I gravitated towards lamps and other light fixtures in my home the moment I took the Nyrius Smart Outlet out of its box. However, I asked around and wanted to know what others would use it for. Most, as Nyrius suggests, said they would use it for items such as space heaters and fans. No matter where or how it will used, the Nyrius Smart Outlet saves money. The proximity and timer features ensure that electronics are used when they must be used.
Remember, though, that Nyrius’ solution for home automation is a simple one. Aside from this one, Nyrius only sells one other product for home automation (in the form of a light bulb). The company’s competitors have a slew of devices to really automate everything in the home. The Nyrius Smart Outlet performs well for what it does, but the company does not have anything else to go beyond that right now. Nyrius wrapped a decent feature set and a simple design in a package that undercuts its competition by nearly $20 all while keeping things simple.
The Nyrius Smart Outlet is currently available through a Kickstarter campaign that ends in a few weeks. It will then be sold to the masses in May.
Come comment on this article: Nyrius Smart Outlet review
Prestigio MultiPhone 5550 DUO review
Budget phones are a brilliant way to break into the market, but it often means compromising on certain features in order to hit that price point. Prestigio have released their MultiPhone 5550 DUO and we took a look to see just how it stacks up.
Sporting a 5.5-inch IPS display at 1280×720, the 5550 DUO has a vibrant screen and great colours, even if the resolution is on the lower side. It is built using Gorilla Glass 3 so is very strong and resists some of the lighter scratches.
Under the hood is a 1.3GHz Quad-Core MediaTek MTK6582 CPU with 1GB of RAM and a MALI-400MP GPU. The performance of the device was good and I didn’t notice any stutters when multitasking or photo editing. The device did begin to struggle under graphically demanding games but for the most part it ran everything without too much issue.
It comes with 8GB of internal memory, although only around 4GB of this was usable so an expandable memory card will be essential.
The Prestigio MultiPhone 5550 DUO comes with a 13-Megapixel camera with a Sony IMX179 sensor which yields suitably satisfying photos. It’s not going to replace your DSLR, but for a budget device it certainly does the job.
The big feature here is the dual-SIM slot that is offered by the 5550 DUO which is brilliant if you need to run two plans, for work and personal for example. The supported bands are GSM 850, GSM 900, GSM 1800, GSM 1900, WCDMA 900, WCDMA 2100.
The 5550 DUO runs Android 4.4 KitKat and comes with a number of pre-installed applications from Prestigio themselves. Think of it as Samsung but without the TouchWiz – their applications are actually really useful and contain some nice content.
The Prestigio 5550 DUO comes in navy blue, gunmetal, and graphite black and is available for £119 (around $170) from Prestigio.
The post Prestigio MultiPhone 5550 DUO review appeared first on AndroidGuys.
Are you good enough for ‘Bloodborne’?
Am I “good” at games? I don’t know.
I’m 30 years old: I’ve been playing video games for 25 of those years, give or take, and covering games professionally for just over six years. I spent two weeks this year completing Mega Man 1 through 4. I’ve sunk hundreds of hours into Spelunky. Whether I’m “good” at games is up for debate; I love challenging games. Despite this, I’ve never loved the divisive, feverishly adored/hated Souls games (Demon’s Souls, Dark Souls 1 and 2). Their challenges felt too great to overcome, their systems too inscrutable, their technical issues too great in number. They felt frustrating instead of challenging.
Bloodborne — the latest entry in the series and the first without a “Souls” moniker attached — changes that. This is a game I love to hate. But I mostly just love it.
Really quickly, for those of you who don’t know what kind of game Bloodborne is:
- It’s a third-person action game.
- You play as an avatar of your creation made at the start of the game.
- The game’s narrative is largely unimportant; its setting is not. Bloodborne is set in a monster-filled version of Victorian England (a fictitious town named Yharnam).
- Each enemy, however weak, can easily kill you. Bloodborne (and the rest of the Souls games) demand careful planning and strategy with every single fight.
- It’s a game of exploration; specifically, it’s a game of exploring one massive, interconnected world.
Death
So, what makes Bloodborne different from previous series entries? It’s not nearly as much of a dick as previous games. Yeah. Really.
I’m not trying to be flip — that’s a totally serious statement. While previous games punished players incessantly with compounding measures, Bloodborne encourages you to keep trying. That is a crucial difference in game design, and one that should make the PlayStation 4 exclusive appealing to a much larger audience than other Souls games.
Death in previous Souls games imbued status effects on your character — namely, lower overall health. That’s to say, “Each time you died, you started your next life with slightly less health than before.” Oh, and all the (terribly hard) enemies reappear after each death. If you got frustrated in your last attempt at an area and tried rushing through it on subsequent attempts, you were likely to die again. And quickly. That actually remains the case in Bloodborne — no rushing! But if you do rush, the worst that happens is you have to start the area over from your last save point (that is a punishment unto itself: save points are represented by in-game lamps placed throughout the world).
Numbers
I used the word “inscrutable” earlier in reference to the systems of previous games. Bloodborne is, by contrast, concise and easily understood.
Your character wields a large sawblade melee weapon that transforms into a longer version of itself (which takes a bit more time to swing). He or She has a firearm in their other hand, and you use weapons by pushing the shoulder buttons and triggers. Simple!
There are a handful of “origins” to choose from at the start of the game. These are tied to your characters stats (seen below) — just seven boxes to dump points into (stuff like strength and vitality). Again, simple! I’ve been pushing mine into strength, vitality and stamina. Bloodborne demands offense far more often than defense, so I’ve spec’d up my character to be the stone-cold killer he needs to be.
There is only one currency in Bloodborne, which is used both for items (new weapons, armor, ammo, etc.) and for leveling up your character. Hilariously, the currency is called “Blood Echoes” (the replacement for “souls” in previous series entries). Everything in Bloodborne has the word “blood” in it. It’s charming and gross and silly, like so much of Bloodborne‘s themes. It’s the Uglydolls of video games.
You get these “blood echoes” from killing enemies. Should you die in battle, a blood stain remains on the ground, holding your precious money until you return to that spot. In a messed up twist, sometimes the very enemies you were fighting gank your money. Revenge is a must; not just because it feels good, but because that’s the only way to get your money back. Messed up! But, again, thankfully simple!
The hunt
Maybe don’t fight the electric beast first thing
Every game in this series, from Demon’s Souls through to Bloodborne, is about understanding and mastery. Mastery isn’t just about knowing the levels and the enemies, but knowing your own character’s strengths and weaknesses. Knowing when to fight and when to run. Knowing when not to go into a certain part of the world just as much as knowing when you should.
In the first part of Bloodborne, you’ve got two main pathways to go: toward two different bosses. One is hard, but beatable. The other is nigh impossible in the early stages of character development.
Again, maybe I’m not very good at games.
This is “the hunt.” Bloodborne says you’re a hunter, destroying the beasts that plague Yharnam. A hunter who should know better than to shoot a grizzly with a Derringer.
Instead of pushing me down, Bloodborne forces me to play smarter. And it doesn’t make me feel like a jerk when I don’t. I don’t know if I’m good enough for Bloodborne, but I’m trying to be.
Google Docs, Sheets and Slides updated with UI tweaks
Google is rolling out new updates for its Docs, Sheets and Slides apps, aimed at further refining the user experience. The updates don’t bring any sweeping changes to the apps, but subtly adjust the way a few features work, to make the user interface a little more friendly.
First up, the FAB new document feature, which allows users to create either Google or Microsoft formatted files, has been tweaked with a new washout look that partially covers the background folder. It’s a purely cosmetic change, but helps to separate the options from any similarly colored background images or text, which is useful.
Secondly, the “keep on device” option, which stores documents locally, has been made more prominent and is now featured directly in the overflow menu accessible within each file. Previously, this option had only been available through the main folder menu, and is still there for if you prefer managing cloud saves the old way.
Google has been regularly updating its Docs suite with new tweaks and features, but competition for office services is likely to heat up this year. Microsoft has recently moved its Office software suite for Android out of beta and is offering Word, Excel and Powerpoint apps for free to tablet owners, which might tempt some regular Office users away from Google’s Docs.
If you haven’t received the update in your region yet, you can download the APK files from the links below.
‘Fantastical 2’ Launches for Mac With Yosemite-Style Redesign, Full Calendar Window
Flexibits today launched the much-anticipated Fantastical 2 for Mac, a completely new app that overhauls the existing Fantastical for Mac app and introduces a long list of new features.
Flexibits CEO Michael Simmons spoke with MacRumors about the new Fantastical 2 update for Mac, and he told us that while the original Fantastical app reinvented calendar apps, the new update reinvents Fantastical. The Flexibits team took everything they learned from Fantastical 2 for iOS and brought it over to the Mac.
To begin with, Fantastical 2 has been designed from the ground up to fit in with the Yosemite aesthetic, adopting a flat design, simple outlines, cleaner fonts, and brighter, bolder colors with two available color themes. It’s also adopted many Yosemite-only features like a Notification Center widget, Handoff, and Action and Share Extensions.
The biggest change to Fantastical 2 is the introduction of a full calendar window. The original Fantastical Mac app was housed in the Mac’s menu bar in a mini window, forcing users to open the built-in Calendar app if they needed access to a desktop calendar, but Fantastical 2 is a full-featured calendar app that combines that original menu bar calendar with a complete calendar window.
The new calendar window includes Day, Week, Month and Year views on the right, along with a left-hand menu bar that shows the current month and a list of upcoming tasks. Reminders and events are separated in the new version of Fantastical, and a toggle button at the bottom of the calendar window will switch the view from events to a list of reminders. Reminders can be added to Fantastical by prefacing entries with “todo,” “task,” or “reminder,” and can be location-based with dates and time information attached.
Fantastical 2 continues to offer the same menu bar mini calendar window (now re-positionable), featuring the new design and the same toggle to switch between a list of upcoming events and a list of reminders. There’s also a new Notification Center widget that displays a list of events for the day.
In addition to offering existing features like natural language parsing, deeply customizable alerts, automatic alarms, Reminder integration, and quick search tools, Fantastical 2 for Mac adds a powerful feature called Calendar Sets. Most people use several calendars with Fantastical, and with the new Mac app, it’s possible to group different calendars into separate sets and switch between them using an easily accessible toggle at the bottom of the calendar window.
With Calendar Sets, work calendars and home calendars can be grouped together, and it’s even possible to add geofencing to have calendar sets swap automatically depending on your physical location. Fantastical 2 for Mac also includes Japanese support for the first time, with full Japanese-language parsing, a feature that’s also coming to iPhone and iPad in the next few months. It’s also fully localized in English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish. The app’s language parsing engine is more robust, better understanding repeating events and offering more options for adding alerts.
Fantastical 2 for Mac’s natural language parsing engine has been updated to be even more friendly and flexible. The parsing engine now understands expressive repeating events such as third Thursday of every month, every weekend, last weekday of the month, and more. Plus, users can now add alerts by ending their natural language input with phrases such as “remind me tomorrow at 3PM”, “alert 1 hour before”, or “alarm 3PM.”
Fantastical 2 for Mac is Yosemite-only because it incorporates several Yosemite features. When a user has an iPhone or an iPad with Fantastical for iOS installed, it’s possible to switch off between the iOS and Mac versions of the app with Handoff. With the new extensions, it’s possible to highlight text in Safari, for example, and send it automatically to Fantastical with a link, or to add events directly from within apps like Evernote.
Fantastical 2, which is an all-new app, can be downloaded from the Mac App Store beginning today for $39.99. The app will be priced at $49.99 in the future, but it’s currently being offered at a discount to celebrate its launch. [Direct Link]
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