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Sunday, October 30, 2011

Some Tips For Siri And iPhone 4S Dictation

If you are the proud owner of a new iPhone 4S, it probably won’t belong before you dictate an email, text message, or something else using Siri or the new Dictation feature. However, unlike the natural speech that Siri herself loves, Dictation needs a little bit of extra TLC in your speech to get everything exactly the way you want it. So, when you are dictating text, remember to use these tips for improving the accuracy of your dictation.

First, in general, speak clearly and distinctly. Dictation accuracy will drop if you are less than clearly enunciating your words.

FORMATTING:

Cap to capitalize a word: ‘I was shopping at cap Target”

Caps On for titles: “I was reading caps on The Washington Post”

All Caps to capitalize the next word: “Can we go now all caps PLEASE”

All Caps On and All Caps Off are Caps Lock: “This is all caps on NOT A JOKE all caps off so stop playing”

No Caps, No Caps On, and No Caps Off are the exact opposite of the above: “I like Amy and no caps amy”

Space Bar not only inserts a space, but can be used to prevent a hyphen in normally hyphenated words: ‘A long-lasting or long space bar lasting peace. ‘

No Space for words you want together: ‘Surf on the World no space Wide no space Web ‘

No Space On & No Space Off for words you want together: ‘I was running no space onreallyreallyfast no space off the entire time ‘

New Line starts the following text on a new line, and New Paragraph begins a new paragraph (effectively 1 and 2 carriage returns, respectively).

PUNCTUATION, SYMBOLS, OTHER TIPS:

Say punctuation: period comma apostrophe open-parenthesis close-parenthesis asterisk open quote close quote. Note that you do not need to say apostrophe for possessive names such as ‘Joe ‘s ‘.

There is a difference between a hyphen — like this — and a dash-like this. Similarly, point (in numbers) and period have spacing differences.

Special symbols: Note that many of these will automatically be placed in context, such as thedollar,cent, degree, percent, and at signs:

% – percent sign
© – copyright sign
® – registered sign
§ – section sign
$ – dollar sign
¢ – cent sign
° – degree sign
^ – caret
@ – at sign
£ – pound sterling sign
# – pound sign

Note: You must use cent sign explicitly. Saying ‘The price is fifty three cents ‘ will yield ‘The price is $.53 ‘. Say ‘The price is fifty three cent sign‘ to get ‘The price is 53¢’ “.

Email addresses should generally be prefaced with no caps on; most common domains (such as Gmail, Yahoo, etc) are recognized, but you may have to spell others.

Saying ‘www ‘ will result in the formatting of a URL: ‘www.isource.com/ ‘. Oddly, unlike the desktop version, saying ‘http ‘ does not do the same thing in my testing. I got ‘HDTV ‘ instead.

Hopefully this quick reference will help you make the most of Siri and Dictation. Happy dictating!

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Samsung Galaxy Nexus (Prime) revealed: Slower than iPhone 4S, Galaxy S II

Courtesy of the loose lips of Japan’s leading cellular carrier, NTT DoCoMo, we now have the specifications for the Samsung Galaxy Nexus (Prime). Software-wise, there are no surprises: it will run Android 4.0, Ice Cream Sandwich, but on the hardware front… well, there’s no easy way to put this: the Galaxy Nexus has a lower spec than the iPhone 4S and Galaxy S II, and it’s even comparable to the Nexus S in terms of graphics power. (Updated @ 23:00 EST: The following specs have now been confirmed by Samsung and Google.)

Now, rest assured that the Galaxy Nexus Prime will look the part: it has a vast 4.7-inch 1280×720 AMOLED screen, and the handset and screen have more curves than a curvy thing — but beyond that, this is hardly a landmark phone. There’s 1GB of RAM either 16 or 32GB of internal storage (and seemingly no SD card slot), a 5-megapixel camera, and it supports the complete gamut of 2G, 3G, and 4G wireless technologies (except WiMax). Most importantly, though, the brains of the operation is the OMAP4460 application processor which has two Cortex-A9 cores clocked at 1.2GHz — quite fast, certainly, but it isn’t the 1.5GHz Exynos that we were hoping for.

Leaked Galaxy Nexus specs from DoCoMo

It is because of the OMAP4460 processor that the Galaxy Nexus will only have the PowerVR SGX540 GPU, an antiquated beast from 2007 that can actually be found underneath the hood of last year’s Nexus S, and in the Droid Bionic. The SGX540 is very weak compared to the Mali-400 GPU found in Samsung’s Exynos SoC (the one that powers the Galaxy S II), and it’s positively snail-paced against the Apple A5′s SGX543MP2.

What this means is that the Galaxy Nexus is going to be slightly faster than the Droid Bionic, slower than the Galaxy S II by a small margin, and significantly slower than the A5-powered iPhone 4S. The Galaxy Nexus might have a larger, brighter, higher-resolution screen than the iPhone 4′s Retina display, but it won’t necessarily have the graphics chops to actually render OpenGL games at 1280×720 at smooth framerates.

At this point there is still hope that NTT DoCoMo’s specs are incorrect, but in all likelihood it now seems confirmed that tonight’s event will be all about Ice Cream Sandwich, rather than the device itself. We will probably have to wait for next year’s Galaxy S III and the Exynos 5250, a Cortex-A15-based SoC, before we see an Android phone that can compete with Apple’s iPhone 4S.
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Why the Nexus One can’t run Ice Cream Sandwich (Google, Android cell phone news, update)

On a frigid January day in 2010, Googlechanged Android forever by introducing the Nexus One. This pure Google device was to be the first in a series of phones that showed off the unaltered Android platform in all its glory. It was called a “superphone” by Google at the event, but less than two years later, the Nexus One has reached end-of-life. Google has announced that the Nexus One won’t be updated to Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS).

According to Google’s Hugo Barra, the Nexus One is just too old to run Android 4.0. This caused many Nexus owners to collectively scratch their heads. The Nexus One has a 1GHz Snapdragon system-on-a-chip (SoC), 512MB of RAM, and a WVGA screen. On the surface, this sounds a lot like the Nexus S, which will be first in line for the Android 4.0 update. So what’s wrong with Google’s original baby?

Let’s start with the Snapdragon S1 SoC, which is downright old, having first shipped in 2009. The clock speed is fine, but the chip does less work each clock cycle than newer Qualcomm processors. Of greater concern is the Adreno 200 GPU which is capable of just a fraction of the performance seen in other GPUs. Android 4.0 makes use of hardware acceleration for 2D drawing, so a sluggish GPU could be an issue.

Perhaps the most serious impediment to the Nexus One getting Ice Cream Sandwich is the small storage space. We aren’t talking about user-accessible SD storage, but the internal ROM where apps and the operating system reside. The Nexus One was designed by Google and HTC to have just 512MB of ROM, 190MB of which was dedicated to user apps.

Anyone that used the Nexus for any length of time probably remembers bumping up against that storage limit. ICS is going to be larger than Gingerbread was, and it is very possible that it just doesn’t fit on the internal storage, or if it does, it might take up a large part of the app storage space. This would not be an upgrade in the true sense of the word for users.

But it doesn’t end there…

snapdragon 8250 Nexus One So these shortcomings are more than likely colluding to keep the Nexus One from getting a taste of Ice Cream Sandwich, but what about otherphones? The Nexus One was such a big deal when it came out that it was used as the template for other phones like the HTC Desire, Droid Incredible, and HTC Evo 4G. There are a few differences here that may offer some hope, but things are looking grim for these phones too.

All these devices run on the same Snapdragon S1 SoC that the Nexus One uses, with the same Adreno 200 GPU, but the Evo and Incredible have a bit more internal ROM space. If that was the deciding factor, they might still be able to handle Ice Cream Sandwich. The HTC Desire has almost identical specs to the Nexus, so it’s certainly in the same boat.

Even if the hardware supports ICS, we know that HTC would prefer to move on from these old phones. The company attempted to avoid building a Gingerbread ROM for the Desire, citing its low storage space. Eventually HTC relented and got the update out, but that does not bode well for an Android 4.0 update.

All told, the Nexus One will have had full support for roughly 22 months by the time ICS arrives in November. Given the issues with Android updates, this is about as good as it gets. Users that want Ice Cream Sandwich on their Nexus Ones will likely have to root and go the custom ROM route. The community is sure to strip the OS down to make it fit on the Nexus’ limited system partition, if at all possible. However, with official support ending, this feels like the end of the line for an iconic device.

BlueBiped: A human-like walking robot that requires no power source

Today’s groundbreaking entry into the Uncanny Valley is a pair of mechanical, robot legs that are propelled entirely by their own weight: they can walk with a human-like gait without motors or external control. If this sounds too good (or crazy) to be true, watch the first video at the end of the story, wipe the tendrils of drool off your chin, and then find your way back up here for an explanation.
BlueBiped, passive robot walking legs
Without making this accomplishment any less awesome, these robot legs — called BlueBiped, and made by researchers at the Nagoya Institute of Technology in Japan — are basically just an imitation of human physiology. There are thighs and lower legs made out of aluminium that are the same length as their human counterparts, and ankles and knee joints for articulation, but… that’s it. No sensors, no computers, no “musculature” — the legs are completely passive, you just give them a push… and they carry on walking. As long as there’s a slight downwards slope, anyway — there has to be some source of energy, after all, and in this case it’s gravity.

BlueBiped uses the “principle of falling,” much in the same way that humans walk by falling forward. As long as the robot’s weight is pitched slightly forward, the momentum of each step is enough to throw it into another step, and so on. Presumably, with the addition of motors, BlueBiped could also walk horizontally and up hill, but then you’re into MABEL or AlphaDog territory — and that doesn’t seem to be the purpose of this project.

Last year, BlueBiped successfully walked for 13 hours continuously — 100,000 consecutive steps, 9 miles (15km) — without human intervention. Now the researchers seem to be thinking of actual, commercial applications for BlueBiped. They have tested a modified version that can be worn like an exoskeleton, which apparently can help people walk. In the video, “sports equipment” is also mentioned, though we’re not sure what that means —

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BlueBiped: A human-like walking robot that requires no power source!

Without making this accomplishment any less awesome, these robot legs — called BlueBiped, and made by researchers at the Nagoya Institute of Technology in Japan — are basically just an imitation of human physiology. There are thighs and lower legs made out of aluminium that are the same length as their human counterparts, and ankles and knee joints for articulation, but… that’s it. No sensors, no computers, no “musculature” — the legs are completely passive, you just give them a push… and they carry on walking. As long as there’s a slight downwards slope, anyway — there has to be some source of energy, after all, and in this case it’s gravity.

_______________________________________

This post is uploaded via Apple iPhone 4,

sponsored by Dr Mobiles Limited (Location Map)
1 Huron Street, Takapuna, North Shore 0622
Tel: (09) 551-5344, Mob: (021) 117-2222

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Can Google Siriously compete with Apple? Apple iPhone 4S Repair and Unlock News by drmobiles.co.nz

Apple’s release of iOS 5 and the unveiling of Siri has everyone talking excitedly about the benefits of a digital assistant that can understand natural language. Having seen the demo of what Siri is capable of, though, I cannot help but think of how much better Google’s implementation of a similar service might be. More than that, with the raw data Google has access to, there’s no reason Big G shouldn’t unveil a competing service — and a couple reasons it should.

Google already has the infrastructure glued together at the seams of your interaction with the web. How much work would it be for them to utilize that data? If you look at Google’s history, it hasn’t exactly been amazing in the field of social media. Google Buzz was an absolute flop, and social services like Orkut that Google ran never really got off the ground worldwide. With that being said, the opportunity is there. Google Plus looks pretty close to social media done right (mostly), which might finally mean Google’s ready to break out of the impartial, robotic search space and into something a little more personal.

Let’s take a closer look at the pieces of the Google-Siri puzzle.

Search

The cornerstone of Google’s offering is, of course, search. So ubiquitous that it’s become a verb in common parlance, users “google it” millions of times a day, and those searches help Google as much as they help the user. Google saves searches for 18 months, and what you search for is as critically important to Google as is how you frame the searches. With instant searches and location-based services working on both mobile and normal searches, Google has the capability to save what you’re looking for and where, as well as what you end up clicking on.

This is an incredible advantage from any advertising or sales perspective, as tracking user habits is more or less money in the bank if you can place your product correctly and in a timely fashion. If you’re using your mobile phone to perform the search, all the better; Google knows exactly where you are and what you’re looking for. Who’s in a better position to offer you products and services than a company with that information?

Location services

Touched on above, this bears a further mention. Companies like Yelp, Foursquare, Gowalla and others all desperately want to know where you are and what you’re doing in order to offer you targeting advertising and services. It’s said that losing a star in your rating on Yelp can cost a company thousands of dollars in revenue, and extra stars will benefit in the same fashion. With the number of smartphone users exploding worldwide, location-based services should expect the same sort of popularity increase. It’s yet an untapped market.

Enter Latitude; Google’s answer to these services, tied into Google Maps and prominently seen in Google searches. The integration with Maps makes it seamless enough that you might not even know it’s there — you’re just looking for a place to eat. Google knows, though, and it remembers where you’ve been — and you can be sure it’s paying attention to where you’re going, too.

Social networking

On the face of it, Google Plus doesn’t seem like it would tie into the sort of service being discussed, but you’d be leaving out an incredibly important facet of Google’s growing clout out of the picture: the power of social media and free advertising. Google’s fledgling social media creation has netted some 40 million users at this point, and it’s not a coincidence that Latitude check-ins post to your public Circles by default. The best advertising is free, and as more and more users rank and check in to businesses using Google, everyone wins.

Purchases

This seems obvious. It doesn’t get any more basic than tracking your purchases viaGoogle Wallet. By itself it might seem an innocuous convenience; an escape from having to carry a bulky wallet. From Google’s perspective, though, it’s filtering your money through their services. It’s another facet of your life that becomes data on a Google server. Marketable data, when correlated with other services.

Gmail

Again, putting this together with Google’s other services might seem odd. But if you think about how Google improved search to learn from your input, the advantage of having your email available for data mining becomes an invaluable tool. Google can already read enough into a message to say things like “You’ve mentioned something was attached to this email, yet nothing is. Do you want to attach a file?” This means Google is already scanning your email for important words and phrases. Expanding those search terms to include, well, everything, is what Google does best.

Minority report

Make no mistake. Google isn’t going to use this data to simply catalog what you do, where you go, or what you buy. It’s going to put all of this information together into a big heap and then squeeze it through computations to try and figure out what you’re going to do next.

Google eggs... in one basket. The real money is in Google as a predictive service. For example, Google Latitude has an option that allows “auto check-in” at any location. That might not seem like much at face value, but it means your phone is obviously keeping track of where it is most of the time. Latitude already knows the location of thousands of businesses, and it has all of the data to know your routine. Knowing that you go to a particular gym three times a week is one thing. Being able to take that data and turn it into specialized deals and incentives are what’s going to separate Google services from the likes of Apple. Google intends to know what we’re going to do before we do, so it can be there to offer us whatever we need, whether it be products, services, or a helping hand.

Think about it from Google’s perspective of “Don’t be evil.” Taking all of this data and turning it into a goldmine of your personal habits will make Google the best possible personal assistant. Everything you’ve ever wanted, as long as you searched for it, Google knows. Everything you’ve purchased, via Google services, Google knows — and it knows when, and where. Things you’ve talked about in your daily dealing with social media or email, Google can parse. Everywhere you go, what route you take, and how long you stay Google will also know.

Apple’s Siri can tell you the weather. It can take dictation to send text messages. It can even setup calendar appointments and configure alerts and reminders. What it can’t do is spin years of search habits, purchases and information into a road-map of where you’re going to go, and react appropriately, effectively ahead of your own wants.

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Five (5) Ways Apple iPhone 4S iOS kicks Android in the Teeth! drmobiles.co.nz

Apple iCloud
Yesterday, at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference, iOS 5 was announced. Out of 200 new features, just 10 were shown, but the implications are clear: Android has been sucker punched into submission, and if it doesn’t rise quickly, Google might be out for the count. Of course you will point to Android’s zealous adoption by carriers and the platform’s swelling market share, but that doesn’t mean that people want to own Android smartphones: it just means that they’re more easily obtainable.

With yesterday’s keynote, Apple outlined a slew of features that outstrips Android’s current and prospective offerings — and best of all, with a fall release date, Cupertino might just squeeze out iOS 5 before Google’s Ice Cream Sandwich. While Google struggles to consolidate the rushed tablet-specific Honeycomb and its next smartphone OS, Apple has simply grabbed iOS and started running. Apple, which has always been a fan of gentle evolution over revolution, has thrown off the chains and begun beating a new mobile computing trail.

Here are five ways in which Apple, iOS 5, and iCloud have utterly punished Android and Google.

1. iCloud Photo Stream
If you take a lot of photos — and the iPhone camera is the most popular digital camera in the world — then Photo Stream will be a complete life saver. Emailing photos to yourself is clunky, and Dropbox is a stopgap solution. With Photo Stream, when you take a photo on any device — your PC, iPhone, iPad or iPod — it is automatically synchronized with every other iCloud-connected device.

Similar functionality can be achieved with Android and Picasa, but it’s a lot messier — and because it isn’t baked into the OS itself, no one actually uses it. As usual, Apple hasn’t exactly invented a crazy new idea — it’s just executed it properly.

2. iCloud API
Ironically for a developer conference, there was only one developer-related utterance — but boy was it a big one. iCloud, Apple’s free cloud storage service, will have an API that developers can freely tap into. Apps will be able to store their data and preferences in the cloud, easing both device transfers and cross-platform compatibility. You’ll be able to save your Angry Birds progress on your iPad, and continue from the same place on your iPhone.

It’s not that Android app developers don’t have access to a cloud storage API, but you can’t guarantee that a user will have the requisite Dropbox or Box.net account. With iOS 5, every user will have their own piece of free, service, and easily accessible cloud storage — a utopian situation that will have almost every iOS app developer salivating. Again, Apple isn’t introducing a new concept; it’s simply bringing cloud storage to the masses — it’s making cloud storage part of the overarching experience.

It’s also worth noting that the iCloud API might also be available outside native iOS apps, which would mean Android and web apps can also use the iCloud API…

3. Post-PC freedom
The single biggest change in iOS 5 is the fact that it will be Apple’s first standalone mobile operating system. When you turn on an iOS 5 device, you won’t have to install iTunes on your Windows or Mac PC and plug in your iPhone, iPad, or iPod — you’ll simply be greeted with a welcome screen and proceed to use your iDevice. Instead of backing up to iTunes, you will back up to iCloud.

Android already stores a lot of your data in the cloud, but it doesn’t back up photos or videos, and app developers have to do some leg work to make sure their apps are backupable. Furthermore, data backup to Google’s cloud services is not guaranteed to exist on all Android-powered devices. Switching between Android devices, in short, requires a PC go-between and a fair bit of manual labor.

With iOS 5, app developers will be able to write apps that completely free from their PC oppressors. After all, not every house owns a PC — but almost everyone wants an iPhone… and now they can!

4. iMessage
With the introduction of iMessage, Apple is making a leap into relatively untested waters. A unified TCP/IP-based guaranteed-QoS replacement for SMS and MMS isn’t new — RIM has done it for years with BlackBerry Messenger — but this is definitely a bold ploy. Will iOS users relish being further locked into the system? You will only be able to iMessage other iOS 5 users, too — and as Android gains in market share, that might be more of a hindrance than a gain.

It might not matter, though. iMessage will be built into the current Messages app, which could mean that iMessage is seamlessly and transparently used when communicating with other iOS users, with SMS and MMS acting as the fallback for cross-network communication. Everyone can be have their fill — except for RIM and its failing market share, of course.

Both Android and iOS have unified messaging solutions in the form of third-party apps, but Google hasn’t shown any inclination towards building a first-party solution that sidesteps carrier-based messaging. The mobile form factor desperately needs a unified, cross-platform messaging protocol — and with iCloud, Apple could provide it! If only iMessage didn’t use a proprietary protocol…

5. Safari and iCloud

Android’s stock browser has always been a bit of a joke, especially with Google sinking truly insane amounts of time and effort and money into Chrome. The story is a little rosier with the Honeycomb browser, but third-party offerings are still a lot more powerful. To be fair, though, Mobile Safari has always been rather gimpy, too — and third-party alternatives don’t exist on iOS. With iOS 5, Safari finally gains its surfing legs with support for multiple tabs and a faster rendering engine. Exact details and benchmarks aren’t available yet, but iOS 5 should make web apps a lot more viable on older iDevice hardware.

Beyond tabs, Mobile Safari includes deep Twitter integration, “save to reading list” functionality, and a Reader button that strips ads and formatting to make websites more readable. In other words, Safari now builds in the functionality of Instapaper — and yes, you can save your reading list to iCloud for future reading on your other devices; and no, Apple didn’t ask web property owners if they liked the idea of every iDevice owner surfing with a built-in ad blocker.

All of this functionality is available to Android users via third-party apps and bookmarklets, but as always, it’s too clunky and the barrier to entry is set a little too high. The initial release of iOS and Mobile Safari revolutionized mobile surfing, and even today, despite its smaller share, Safari is still the most popular mobile browser. iOS 5 will completely change and empower the mobile surfing experience yet again, while Android wallows with a stock browser that has a nifty bookmark and data sync, but that’s about it.
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