Now this is pretty fly for a white guy. Until recent most iPhone translation apps were limited to text input or a phrase dictionary. Select the phrase and an audio bite would play. But what about speech-to-speech translations? Well, it’s coming, albeit to the military.
Created by a company called Sakhr, their speech-to-speech translator iPhone app can translate English to Arabic and Arabic to English in real time. The accuracy of the app, for lack of better words is remarkable and appears to have a very high accuracy rate, although I shouldn’t take the below video as a true testament since it isn’t real world testing.
As previously mentioned this app is intended for military use only, but it clearly demonstrates the power of the iPhone. Too bad I didn’t have one of these in 9th grade French class.
Is Grand Theft Auto coming to the iPhone? There is no way to know for sure, but coming-on-iphone.com has a teaser video that indicates just that. Of course, this could just be a knock off GTA game and by adding a dash of anonymity they figured they could leverage the GTA brand equitity. Or some kids on summer break had nothing better to do with their time than get our blogosphere panties in a ball. Nonetheless, the video says it’s coming this summer, so we’ll just have to wait and see.
Of note: Reghardware said they reached out to Rockstar UK and they wouldn’t confirm or deny the game. And of course the URL registration info is set to private, but the domain was just registered on May 25th.
In this day and age, just about any mobile phone allows you to snap a pic of someone and assign their face to their contact info. Cool, but what about the people who live far and away or for some odd reason don’t have a Facebook profile? Enter Persona, an iPhone app that allows you to create individual avatars that can be assigned your contacts. TUAW played with the app and although they state that it is a good idea, the amount of customization, or should I say individualism that you can create is pretty limited. In fact, each Avatar or face is always staring in the same direction. But hey, at just $0.99 why not?
Of note, this makes me wonder why Microsoft doesn’t build a free app for us Xbox 360 users? Sure, they’re are the fine proprietors of Window’s Mobile but let’s be honest, they’ve got a pretty significant strong hold on the market already and if you can’t beat them why not join them. Without going too delusional, perhaps they could even enable the app to show when my Xbox friends are online and enable me to chat with them while playing or not. It would also be a great delivery method for upselling game add-ons through push notification as well as Xbox news. I found this free app that allows you to see when your friends are online and what game they’re playing.
If you’re anything like me you’re not willing to Jailbreak your iPhone for the opportunity to tether the device to your computer for go any where Internet surfing. Additionally, the folks at iPhone-Dev have yet to figure out how to Jailbreak the iPhone 3GS, although word on the street is that it’s coming any day now.
Well, fortunately there is a work around that requires no Jailbreaking or messy hacking to Tether it up. Just follow the below instructions and you’ll be tethering with your iPhone 3GS or 3G running iPhone 3.0 software in no time flat.
Point your iPhone’s browser to help.benm.at
Scroll down to the blue button that says “Mobileconfigs’ and click it
Next select your country
Then choose your carrier
You’ll then be prompted with a profile install which you should do
Once that is complete click the iPhone’s Home button>Settings>General>Network>Internet Tethering>On
Select USB or Bluetooth (I choose USB)
Then plug your iPhone into your computer
Those on Macs, your Network settings screen should automatically pop up under system preferences
Select the iPhone (called Ethernet Adapter (en2) ) and the system will configure the DHCP info accordingly (this will probably happen after you click apply) and click Apply
Surf the net!
Note, we still don’t know what kind of action AT&T will take against those who perform heavy Internet surfing on a tethered iPhone, or any tethered iPhone as it’s completely unsanctioned and may either break the contractual terms or cost you some serious dough.
Update: Many people seem to be having trouble getting this to work. If you’d like some help please email info [at] gadgetreview.com.
Update 2: A German iPhone user on T-Mobile just wrote in and said this is what he/she had to do to get it working: “you have to install the mobile config, restart, delete the config, install the config, restart and then you can use it!”. Interesting that you should have to install it twice, but who knows and if it works so be it!
H2Audio has been making some heavy duty underwater iPod cases for some years now and the iDive300 is their first foray into deeper waters. Designed to hit depths of up to 300 feet deep, the iDive300 is priced at $350 and is an extremely niche product that only seriously bored divers would need. Sporting watertight controls and over the ear speakers I can’t imagine a large production batch for this item. Beyond that, the iDive300 has a warranty for your iStuff in case something goes awry once submerged. What do we think? Cool or worthless?
I really gotta hand it to PhoneSuit. Why? Because, they continue to stick to their guns and battle it out in the iPhone accessory market. Although I wasn’t floored with their first battery back, the Mili Pro iPhone Video Projector looks to be the stuff dreams are made of. They’ve combined a tiny LCOS LED projector with their battery pack to produce a highly portable - palm sized in fact - projector that can display up to a 40-inch 640×480 image (it can go as large at 70-inches, but 40 is optimal). There is no official word on playback time, but it does include a built-in speaker, RCA inputs, a 10 lumen output and is compatible with all iPhones and iPods. Price of the Mili Pro iPhone Video Projector is TBD and you can expect it to arrive this September just in time for the holidays.
As soon as I received the news that the 3.0 App Store was going to have parental ratings I started pressuring my smart friend to learn the development code. This will be a goldmine for certain I was thinking. Most recently however, the very first nude content app “Hottest Girls” has been removed from the US App Store. Rated ages 17+ for “frequent/intense sexual content or nudity” and “frequent/intense mature/suggestive theme,” I love how it’s under the “lifestyle” category. How true that is! This undoubtedly marks something really big. Can you imagine the power of what these types of apps will behold?
Anybody got an Apple TV? Tired of that crappy little controller? Apple has just released a 3.0 version of its Remote App that now supports controls for Apple TV. It also features gestured moves that allow you to control your Apple TV with greater accuracy. Sources report that the app dramatically improves the flexibility of the Apple TV controls allowing you to move the screen on your phone and search using the keyboard. I also just wanted to mention that the Remote App is really cool to use in a wireless iTunes scenario. My buddy can set his iTunes to Party DJ and I can roll through and make song requests on my iPhone using his library. If more than one person is making requests, you can vote on songs and they will go to the top of the playlist. The updated Remote App is available now for free.
Turn-by-turn GPS navigation has officially arrived on the iPhone in the form of AT&T’s Navigator. It includes the usual features, such as traffic alerts, 3D maps, speech recognition, auto map updates, 10 million business listings, auto reroutes and the choice between traffic optimized’; ‘fastest’; ‘prefer streets’;’prefer highways’ and ‘pedestrian mode’.
Course, it ain’t cheap, as it costs $9.99 per month. The app is free and from the sounds of it once you download it and fire it up you’ll begin to incur the charge on your AT&T bill automatically. Best part yet is that if you delete the app you’ll still be charged the monthly fee. Thanks AT&T, you make things so conveniently difficult for your customers. My suggestion: just buy a last year GPS model and you’ll probably save over $100 in the first year alone.
While we anxiously await Powermat’s offering and Apple to embed a solution directly into the iPhone, Wildcharge has officially announced the availability of their wireless charging solution for iPods and iPhones. Much like Powermat, a ’skin’ containing the necessary components is attached to the iPhone and when placed onto a Wildcharge pad begin to charge sans wires. Of course, the pad has to be plugged into the wall and it is said that inductive charging, the technology currently behind today’s wireless charging isn’t as efficient as the traditional method, which of course gets all the watch dog groups in a huff. The iPhone Wildcharge wireless charging solution ships in early July while you can pick up the iPod version now for the same price of $34.99. Or you can opt for the bundle, which is $79.99.
