Mobile posts

Forget preconceived ideas that the techi world’s digital destiny is run by the boys, for the boys – it looks like the girls are driving the digital home, with women downloading twice as much mobile content as men. Surprised? Perhaps, but these are the fresh findings found by US mobile ents firm, Myxer (a peddler of ringtones, wallpapers and video clips). Myxer claims its female users downloaded twice as much content in April as its male users. Women accounted for 67% of its content downloads for the month: 4.5 million in total. Men downloaded just 2.2 million items during the month. Myxer admits…

Robots, man. Freaking robots. Your robotic fix today comes from PhD student Ji-Dong Yim, who has built two cell phone robots, Callo and Cally (get it? call-y? cell phone? ah, never mind). Both bots run on Nokia N82 handsets, and can move and show emotion based on user input, be it by text, voice, or even facial expression. Yim claims the aim is to explore social robotic products, in an attempt to build better relationships between robots and their owners in the future. So, like a Furby, then, JD? Because these are way cooler than a Furby. Give yourself some credit, man. Totally brought some videos for…

He may not be able to call anyone on his Android-iPhone hybrid, but blogger and erstwhile hacker David Wang (known more widely by his handle, planetbeing) can surf wi-fi and perform most of the other tasks associated with a smartphone with the beast that he has created. Any task that doesn’t require audio support can be performed on the Android-modded iPhone. After the modification, the Android OS can be accessed easily from the boot menu via an Android icon, allowing you to choose either the Android OS or the iPhone OS. Very handy once you do want to return your device into phone mode. Audio support…

Straight outta the Enterprise’s engineering lab comes the newly-launched Google Goggles for mobile platforms, which can translate text from photographs in English, Italian, French, German and Spanish. No word on Klingon, yet. But seriously, this is for real – just snap a photo of the desired text and Goggles will translate it into your language… or another one, if you don’t feel like making any sensible use of the app. Any way you slice it, this is possibly the biggest boon to prolific world travelers in decades, as it renders obsolete the awkward practice of thumbing through a translation…

It was only a matter of time before the iPad started seeing spyware surface. But I, for one, sure couldn’t have guessed it’d be like this. Mobile Spy is an app (I use the term loosely – I’ll explain in a moment) that allows an individual to collect the usage data of the target device, be it an iPad, Android phone, Blackberry, or Windows Mobile device, and view it via an online account. Said James John, CEO of Retina-X, the company behind the software: “Any device that can browse the Internet or send email can lead to unauthorized activities. Before now there was no method to monitor activities of children…

This isn’t the first Rubik’s-cube-solving Lego robot that’s been viral in the last few months, nor is it the fastest (25 seconds), nor is it the most intimidating. But this one’s special for another reason entirely – this one’s powered by the Motorola Droid. Designed as a promotional vid for chip manufacturer ARM, builder David Gilday must be crying himself to sleep for missing his chance at YouTube kingship by a mere two months. You’re still number one in our hearts, Dave. [Via Make]…

The headline pretty much says it all. Keep reading anyway. It’s true: in a recent study by self-proclaimed ultimate electronics marketplace Retrevo of when it’s okay to answer a text, 10% (yes, TEN PERCENT) of people under 25 declared it perfectly acceptable to text during sex. Think about it. That’s one in ten. And that’s awful. Have we really become this disconnected? Other statistics from the study in the same under-25 demographic cited 49% during eating, and 24% while using the toilet. The toilet one I can understand. After all, it gets kind of lonely during those leg-numbing extended trips…

You need a computer you can take anywhere, a laptop designed for life on the site or the road. You need it to be shock-resistant, but you want it to have power. For you, good news, with Panasonic today updating some of the models in its Toughbook laptop range. The Toughbook CF-52 now runs on the Intel Core i5 (up to 2.53GHz) processor and includes 2GB RAM and up to a 250GB shock-mounted hard drive. It also has a bevy of wireless connectivity options. We like that this machine’s been drop and spill-tested and features a magnesium alloy case (with a weird-looking but sturdy carry handle). There’s even…

Use your iPhone to monitor your baby remotely. Automatically log your baby’s activity so you gain insight into its sleeping patterns or receive instant notifications when it cries with the app playing a recording your own voice to sooth your child until you arrive. So, I’m a geek, my wife’s a geek and we’re engaged in bringing up a new generation of geeks, and that’s why we’re really pleased to have come across this really rather useful Baby Monitor and Alarm app for the iPhone. What it does? It does it all, really. It will monitor noise in the room of your sleeping child and send an SMS message…

If you’re one of those new million iPad owners then you need to know about Dropbox for iPad. This free app is the missing link if you want to use your iPad for some light business. It works with the online Dropbox service, which offers you 2.2GB of free online storage. That storage syncs with your Mac or PC’s Home directory – where all your data sits – so you get access to all your most important files from wherever you happen to be. Dropbox on the iPad/iPhone/iPod touch lets you access those files. Better, if you have the right app it lets you open and work on those files. You can open a PowerPoint presentation…