Gadgetstronics

Barely two weeks ago, we bemoaned the state of note taking applications on the iPhone, not least of which was Apple’s own Notes application. The reason? While some of them show promise, and some are downright awesome in either their iPhone or desktop guises, none of them managed one thing: true, two-way synchronization of notes between a computer and an iPhone.

Some got around this by having a web component for either the phone or the PC, but we didn’t find anything which would keep a local, offline copy on both devices. In the last two weeks, though, two of those applications have been updated to offer just his.

Evernote is an amazing little app, with clients for Mac, PC, iPhone and other mobile devices. There is also web access. Evernote’s standout feature is its text recognition in photographs — you snap a picture of a business card or scribbled recipe (using your webcam, your iphone’s camera or just a photo from your hard drive) and it will perform an off-site OCR of the image. It also adds in location data, tags and all the other niceties you might like, but it is still easy to use.

Now, though, Evernote has offline storage on the iPhone. You take any note and mark it as a favorite, and from then on you don’t need an internet connection to view it.

The downside is that you only get access to notes you have specifically marked. The advantage, though, is that you only get access to notes you have specifically marked, which works well, as you don’t get your iPhone’s flash memory stuffed full of non-essential items. So, is Evernote now the king of not taking iPhone apps? Still no, sadly. You can create a note on the iPhone, but you still can’t edit it, rendering it useless as anything but a mobile reference.

The other update comes from the very slick NotePad, from Polar Bear Farm. We like this one because it has a very elegant, straightforward interface, with smart folders, full note search and even allows you to sort notes based on where you made them.

In fact, on the iPhone side, NotePad is almost perfect. The trouble came when you got to the computer. The execrable Sink application would clunkily gather notes from your iPhone, wirelessly, and allow you to read them. That was it. Yesterday, Polar Bear Farm pushed an update of both NotePad and Sink, and you can now create notes on your computer (Mac or PC) and sync in both directions.

But Sink still stinks. It’s ugly, probably a symptom of its cross platform-ness, and offers none of the features of the iPhone application: no folders – smart or dumb – no search, no access to location data.

Worse, if you synchronize after making edits on the computer, those changes are lost if you don’t save them first, and the only way to save is to switch to another note and wait for the prompt asking you if you’d like to save. If you skip straight to the sync screen, you get no such prompt. And if that sounds tortuous, it’s because it is.

It’s a real shame, as the developers can clearly do better — the iPhone app is lovely, it looks great and is fast to use.

We also tried out a couple of new applications. SyncBook, suggested by Gadget Lab reader Mark P, has an interesting approach to local editing on the Mac. The notes are synced (easily) with the application, but actual editing is done in your default text editor. It sounds clunky, but you can sort and create notes in the SyncBook application and when you click on one, it opens it in, say, Text Edit. Hit save and you’re done.

The notes are even stored in a folder on your hard drive in plain text format, which means you can drop text files created elsewhere into the folder and they will be synchronized. The iPhone part, though, isn’t nearly as slick as that of NotePad.

Another couple of mentions. The excellent online to do list, Remember the Milk, now has a native iPhone application, and it works very well. It’s more a list-maker than a note-taker, though, but if you’re an RTM fan, you should check out the free trial.

Finally, Note*Spark is a a promising looking application, currently in beta, which I’m testing thanks to the kind folks at, well, Note*Spark. The iPhone-side keeps local copies of everything, but on the computer you are currently limited to the web interface, so it’s not really what we’re looking for.

The good news is that we’re getting there, and the competition in this category is causing the developers to works fast. All the elements we want are already out there. They’re just not yet in the same application.

Product page [Evernote]

Product page [NotePad]

Starting today, I’ve decided to become an ornithologist — a bird watcher.

Oh, but not just any bird watcher, mind you, but a gadgety one. I will be using Wingscapes’ motion activated Birdcam to look at the oddest type of bird there is: San Francisco residents.

"I think it’s the perfect way to see street wildlife in its natural habitat," said Associate Editor Joe Brown, after suggesting we could probably end up seeing a few ‘deals’ being made in the alley across the street. I never see any businessmen shaking hands there but I take him at his word. There does seem to be activity there as I write this.

The Wingscape camera is a new weatherproof digicam that captures bird photos and videos. It uses an infrared sensor (that means dangerous lasers!) to detect bird motion and then it automatically picks up bird pictures or videos. It comes with 32 MB of built-in memory, and can take an 4 extra GB with an SD card. It records AVI video at a resolution of 640 x 480 (10 sec at 10 fps).

This set-up is best used for close-ups for the birds, but our initial tests have found that it can safely record across the street. 

I’m not the only one who has taken a gadget made for something else and then co-opted it for a more unusual or industrious application as this one. For example, the mighty telescope was made to explore the stars, but instead, it’s been used for  . . . covert operations and such. Same thing for the long-range cameras. But they’ve always been used for good, right? So there’s nothing to worry about.

I’m going to leave the Wingscape dangling in place for the next few days. I’ll write a follow up describing the results (and will probably also get around to using it on actual feathery birds) and let people know about how to best use it.

Somehow, I don’t think that the readers of this blog will manage to disrupt the experiment by placing themselves in the street frame of the camera and act ridiculously. Right? Because we wouldn’t want that. 

After the jump, you can check out a picture of the street alley where the camera is currently pointing.

Poor Kodak. The company is fast turning into the Howard Hughes of photography. Once unstoppable, the beloved company practically invented amateur photography. Now it is shuffling around its apartment, wearing old Tri-X boxes fashioned into makeshift shoes and muttering insanities.

The latest? According to Amateur Photographer, Kodak’s professional film boss Scott DiSabato says that “film is far from dead and has a ‘bright’ and ’sustainable’ future.” You know; just like the PDA.

DiSabato’s claims cites the remixed T-Max 400 and Tri-X as leading the resurgence in black and white film, popular with young and arty photographers as well as old stick-in-the-muds. The thing is, he doesn’t mention sales figures, so when DiSabato says that Tri-X is still “king of the hill”, we have to wonder if that hill is much bigger than Hughes’ pile of discarded tissues.

Am I being cynical? Yes. I love film, but it’s hard to see it as ever being more than a niche product. We’re reminded of music on vinyl: it’s surely not going away, but it will never again be more than a minor column on the accountant’s spreadsheet.

KODAK: FILM IS FAR FROM DEAD [SHOUTS Amateur Photographer]

Photo: John Kratz/Flickr

One of the biggest stories to break this year in the HDTV world is Pioneer’s announcement that they are going to produce LCD HDTVs.  Pioneer have been strictly a plasma HDTV manufacturer, and have never released a LCD HDTV under their prestigious KURO name. Many will known that the Pioneer Kuro plasma HDTVs are the best plasma set you can buy, with the best black levels and contrast.

So naturally at first it seemed strange that the king of plasma’s were going to produce LCD HDTV under the very same name, Kuro. They announced three sizes, 32, 37, 46-inches, as written about here: Pioneer Kuro LCDs.

The middle, 37-inch model the Pioneer KRL-37V has a full HD 1080p resolution of 1920×1080 with a quoted contrast ratio of 10,000:1 and a nice looking design with a brushed aluminum finish and decent built quality. The Pioneer Kuro KRL-37V features 100Hz high frame rate technology, to better handle high motion scenes, and Pioneers PureCinema engine to detecting the source type to handle the image in the best way.

There is a dynamic backlight for improved contrast, a high contrast filter, 3x HDMI 1.3 inputs, component, 2x scart and PC VGA input. TrustedReviews were lucky enough to get a look at the KRL-37V and said, what I noted was that black levels look slightly deeper, richer and definitely filled with more shadow detail than is commonly the case in the LCD world. Then I noticed that colours are better than usual, too, with sumptuously rich saturations going hand in hand with some startling tonal richness and subtlety. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that the 37V’s colours when watching HD are among the most expressive and accurate I’ve seen on any LCD TV to date. Summing up the image quality with “Is Pioneer’s first KURO LCD TV good? Yes it is. Does it produce better pictures than the Sharp TVs it shares its heritage with? Definitely. Does it produce better pictures than most other LCD TVs period? Yes.”

NTT DoCoMo has added the Sharp SH-01A cellphone for their Winter collection. Measures 111 x 50 x 15.6mm and weighs 145 grams, this GPS-ready handset comes with a 8-megapixel CMOS camera with face detection function, HSDPA connectivity, Bluetooth with A2DP, and a 3.3-inch VGA ASV AQUOS screen that capable to provide a top-notch 16:9 video / TV viewing mode, thanks to a built-in 1 Seg TV tuner. The SH-01A also support to playback a video and audio files with Virtual 5.1ch Dolby Mobile, that ability to produce very good sound.
[Source]

Hey, hey, just as expected out pops Sony Ericsson’s latest Walkman from the rumor mill. The quad-band W705 (aka RIKA, the G705 clone) with UMTS/HSPA 900/2100 support shares the same Clear Bass / Clear Stereo audio quality found in the W980 Walkman while packing DLNA-certified WiFi, shake control and SensMe music manipulation, a “large” (uh, hardly by today’s standards) 2.4-inch display, 4GB of bundled memory card storage, an FM radio, 3.2 megapixel camera, Google Maps, and an accelerometer for what’s quickly becoming a ubiquitous auto-rotating display feature on cellphones. It also packs Bluetooth, allowing it to stream audio out to the newly announced MBS-900 Bluetooth speaker. You know, if you’re a fan of compressed audio and short battery life. Just sayin’s all. Both will be available in select markets as of Q1 of the new year.
[Source]

by Thomas Ricker, posted Oct 28th 2008 at 2:55AM
While many of you are still waiting for T-Mobile’s RC28 update to hit your G1, at least one reader has trumped us all. KoSoVaR is sitting on fresh, over-the-air software after receiving an update notice a few minutes ago. The process rebooted his G1 “a few times” only to stabilize at RC29. Hard to say what’s new at this point but we’ll get back to you if we hear about anything more than bug fixes.

P.S. For what it’s worth, we’re still kicking it old skool back at RC19 — waiting… and waiting… for the automagic to begin.

Update: Another reader is up on RC29 now as well. Took 5 minutes start to finish and required a single reboot. Snap of the update screens after the break.

[Thanks, KoSoVaR and David]

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Filed under: cellphones

We’re not particularly sold on non-phone touch screens yet here at Gadget Lab, mostly because of the Gorilla-Arm problem, but that doesn’t mean there’s not a market for them.

The folks at Hoda Technology know this, and they also see the willingness amongst netbook buyers to open up their cheap machines for warranty-voiding hacking projects. The TouchKit is a fairly cheap ($95) kit that adds resistive touch (not the fancy iphone and G1 capacative touch) to your Acer Aspire One or your Eee PC 900/901.

And a hack this certainly is. Although no soldering is required, you’re going to have to get pretty deep into the innards of your machine to fit these things. Happily, netbooks are pretty simple and, in our experience of the MSI Wind, at least, pretty easy to take apart.

The screen hooks into the computer’s USB interface, and there are drivers for Windows and Linux and Mac. That last shows that the Hoda folks are aiming clearly at the hacker market, as currently the only Mac netbooks are Hackintoshes.

The kits are currently available through Ebay, and Hoda promises that “TouchKit will be available in other netbook models such as Dell Inspiron, MSI Wind, etc.. in the coming year”. We can’t wait. The original Gadget Lab Hackintosh is going touchscreen, gorilla arms be damned!

Product page [Ebay. Thanks, Joe!]

I think all of you seen those cowboy guys with their belt buckles as huge as their hands, so it stands to reason that someone should put a picture on a belt buckle.

A company called Kimbra Studios has figured out a way to do this with some new technology that they were showing off at the PhotoPlus Expo in New York. All a user needs to do is go to the Web Site and select the belt buckle option.

By the way, you can also request other pieces of jewelry such as a bracelet for your photos. The company website allows you to upload the photos, and you should receive your photogenic buckle or other piece of jewelry at your door within two to three weeks.

So it sounds like you will have yet another way to proudly display your photos. I have to admit that I like this technology, but the picture that you see here looks a tad touched up. In fact, what interested me in this product was it looked like this person has an iPhone on their waist. I could easily make an inappropriate joke such as “is that an iphone on your waist, or…” I won’t make that joke, of course.

If you want in on this tech, the prices vary. The lowest priced item is a mobile phone charm at $14, but the bracelet will set you back $260.

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