Digital Urban is reporting about a project just launched by the city of Philadelphia smartly calledVirtual Philadelphia that allows anyone to walk the streets of the city from the Internet. Sadly it is a Windows only experience, but from the videos it looks pretty freaking impressive. Is it really useful? Who knows. I guess it is nice to have a general idea about a city before you go, but I have also found that walking out of a train station in the middle of a foreign land is an exhilarating experience.
Archive for February, 2009
Gizmodo laid their eyes on the 20th anniversary edition of the original lime green Super Soaker. I had one of these and they were pretty awesome. Never moved into their more technical models — I guess I’m a fan of basic no frills utility.
I enjoy my iPhone, mostly because of it’s size, the way it meshes with my computer and the easy way to access hundreds of thousands of semi-useful applications. The GPS is amazing, and the fact that I can carry the best of my music collection is also a bonus (I’ve actually stopped carrying my 80gb iPod). However, it’s not all puppy-dogs and rainbows. I loath the lack of customization in notifications of emails, SMS and phone calls (why the heck can’t I set SMS and email notification to vibrate, while having phone calls on vibrate then ring — that’s a late 90’s feature) and the camera is essentially useless. It’s good that the iPhone has been so popular, because it’s driven other players to bring out amazing products, and the latest to enter the market is a new device from Samsung.
Samsung has announced the Omnia HD which is a new smartphone that runs Symbian and offers a 3.7-inch (360×640) screen, HSUPA, GPS, Bluetooth and either 8 or 16GB of storage along with an additional MicroSDHC slot (up to 32GB card) plus an 8MP camera and 1280×720 video recording at 24fps. That sounds pretty ridiculous.
Google has added push syncing of contacts and calendars for the iPhone via Microsoft Exchange. I’ve set up the calendar sync and it works pretty slick. The only small drawback is that it is limited to 5 calendars, and I have 6 that I’d like to sync (only because I have two birthday calendars: one pushed from Facebook, and another for people who don’t have Facebook). I haven’t tried the contact sync, as my Gmail contact list is a horrific mess. I’ve put a lot of work into my local address book that has most people I email on a regular basis. Now if only Google would activate push email, I’d be a really happy camper.
Bill Gates gave a talk at this years TED conference that is already online. It’s not a huge deal but in the background on a table is an old Macintosh Computer saying ‘Hello’. I’m sure someone somewhere will make a big deal about this, and I’m also sure similar things happen all the time. By the way, the talk is worth checking out. It’s nothing off message for Bill, but he did release mosquitoes into the audience when talking about Malaria.
Google Earth 5.0 just got released and it’s a pretty impressive update. The feature with the most ‘cool’ factor would have to be the ability to view historic images of an area. Google has provided many years of satellite photography that the user can scroll through, thus seeing how an area has changed over times. Other notable additions are under water views and the ability to record your movements in the program.
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