Oct 05

So the apple conference came and went. No word on the iPhone 5 yet, but apple did officially announce the iPhone 4S, an improved iPhone 4 that may just be worth the upgrade. So what are these major improvements to an already popular iPhone edition? Voice. It seems the next generation of smart phones are really pushing voice control and the iPhone 4S touts Siri, an advance voice recognition software. In the testing room many people got to try out this new software and one of the first things many people tried to do was slip it up. The folks over at Engadget.com asked it weird requests “We tried to psych it out with a bunch of random requests, including the history of Chester, Vermont (a lovely town) and the best Ramen places in San Francisco. Siri never faltered, never missed a beat.”

Google may have had the first step into the future of Near Frequency Technology, but Apple now has their foot out the door with advance voice controls. No matter what people threw at the new Siri software it seemed to keep up with them almost every time. Voice control may seem like a minor thing until you try it out, I get slight chills every time I am able to control movies on my Xbox 360 via the Kinect voice controls like characters did with their computer on Star Trek. But voice controls aren’t the only thing the new iPhone 4S is packing!

The iPhone 4S has quite the hardware, like the apple A5 dual-core processor, making menu navigation and app start ups appear much quicker. Not only does the iPhone have a new processor, it also has a new camera. The iPhone 4 had a 5MP camera with 720p video capture. The new iPhone 4S has a 8MP camera and 1080p video capture. When being tried out in the test rooms, it appeared the camera had better resolution, but it was difficult to tell if it was better at capturing images. The room was, apparently, inadequate for testing such a thing, so we will have to wait for hands on reviews of the camera to find out if it has improved in capturing as well. The battery has taken a bit of a downgrade, though that can be blamed on the new hardware. In standby, the iPhone 4S lasts about 200 hours, which is 100 less than the iPhone 4. Depending on what you do for a living, and how often you charge your phone, this may be an issue.

Already, people are beginning to trade in their iPhone 4′s for the upcoming iPhone 4S, even though the iPhone 5 may be just around the corner. The new iPhone 4S will retail from $199 for the 16GB model, to $399 for the 64GB model. If you’re looking to update to the iPhone 4S and want to get rid of your iPhone 4, you can trade in your old iPhone 4 with us at TheBlueDot.net

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Sep 21

CitySourced-Logo

The political action group FreedomSpeaks.com has recently launched a company called CitySourced, whose goal is to give the average citizen the ability to improve their city. CitySourced will soon release a pretty cool application for Blackberries, the iPhone, and Palms. The app will allow smartphone users to report any problems that they encounter in their city such as potholes, graffiti, fallen trees, etc., instantly. Via the app, any notification sent from a citizen will go straight to the city department responsible for fixing the issue.  GPS will even tell the department exactly where the problem was reported.

The program was demonstrated at the TechCrunch 50 conference in San Francisco earlier this month, and the city of San Jose, California has already purchased the program. Palm has also invested in the program, and they plan on marketing the app in conjunction with their phones in the near future. The app should be available for Blackberrys and the iPhone by the end of November.

Pete Constant, a member of the San Jose City Council who participated in CitySourced’s demonstration said that, “Currently, people typically wait until they get home to report a problem and may not do it for a few days, he said. The tool should also save city workers some of the time they now spend looking for problems.”

Once the program is in place in your city and you encounter a problem, filing a report will be quite simple. You need only to take a picture of the problem, open the application, choose a report type from a menu, type a few words in the report box, and hit send. There will also be a way for you to rate the severity of the problem so that the city will be able to prioritize responses.

The app seems like a great idea as long as the city is quick to respond by fixing the reported issues. Undoubtedly, conscientious citizens of major cities across the US are eager to participate in the improvement of their city, given the convenient opportunity. For more, visit the complete article from The New York Times.

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