MobileViews Blog

Todd Ogasawara and Jay Stone discuss seven (7) holiday mobile tech gift ideas in this podcast.

Jay
1. Learning Resources Zoomy Handheld Microscope
2. Romo Smartphone Robot
3. Lytro camera

Todd
4. Windows 8.1 tablets like the Asus T100 and Dell Venue 8 Pro
5. Viki.com $3.99 per month subscription to TV shows and movies from all over the world (with subtitles)
6. Digital camera with a GPS data logger (e.g., Canon SX280)
7. Raspberry Pi with the new Wolfram Language and Mathematica

FYI: You can subscribe to this podcast in iTunes. Search for MobileViews Podcast.

One of the things I found interesting about the old Motorola Xoom (one of the first Android tablets) was that it had a barometer sensor. It seemed like a great feature to enable crowdsourcing weather information. As the Xoom faded from my memory so did the notion of having a barometer on me all the time.

Listening to a discussion of all the sensors in the new Nexus 5, I wondered what sensors my previous generation Nexus 4 has. So, I installed CPU-Z and learned the 4 does indeed have a barometer. I haven’t found any app/service that crowdsources barometer sensor data. However, there are a few free Android apps that work with the sensor. I’m trying Barometer Monitor right now.

You know the saying “stuck in the middle of nowhere”? Well, according to Forecast.io I, apparently, am. Granted, Hawaii is the most remote island populated island chain in the world. And, Honolulu is the most remote major city with a population over 500,000 (ref: ESRI Blog: The World’s Most Remote Island Group: Hawaii?. But, still…

Note: Forecast.io is one of the best examples of an HTML5 site that is has both good functionality and a good user interface design.

This special combined MobileViews and ComicsViews podcast let Todd Ogasawara, Jay Stone, and Emil Reyes catch up on iOS 7, Windows RT 81, Arrow (CW TV show) and Agents of Shield (ABC) in one podcast.

Todd Ogasawara and Emil Reyes discuss the pros and cons of the recently released iOS 7 for iPhone and iPad in this podcast. Neither one bought a new iPhone 5c or 5s. So, their experience is based on upgrades to the iPhone 5, iPad mini, and iPad 2.

They also devote a segment of the podcast to discuss the news that the Computer Chaos Club has found a way to fool the iPhone 5s’ fingerprint reader.

Apple added the HDR (High Dynamic Range) photo feature way back in iOS 4.1 (Fall 2010). After playing with this photo option for a couple of weeks, I stopped using it. With the release of iOS 7 last week, I decided to take another look at HDR on my iPhone 5. However, my first test pair of photos (iOS provides the option to save a normal photo along with the HDR photo) barely seemed to be different from one another (normal vs. HDR) – [see below for the first photo pair].

I ended up creating a test scene that would be sure to look different when comparing a normal photo to the HDR one. The photo above is that test scene. The photo on the right is the HDR version. This time I could see the difference.
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The latest in the series of Angry Birds games is out for both iOS and Android devices. But, while it costs a very reasonable 99 cents for iOS, it is even more reasonably priced for Android users: Free.

Angry Birds Star Wars II Free

Anyone try it with the new Telepod figures that interact with the digital game?

The iOS 7 iTunes Radio feature is a lot better than I expected. So far, it has done a good job of auto-building radio play lists even when specifying non-U.S. artists. This is something that Google Music All Access does very poorly in my experience. This is mostly because Google’s U.S. music store does not have much “world music” from what I can tell. Once it became apparent that I was going to use iTunes Radio going forward, I started looking for an option to make sure all this streaming was done only when I am connected to a WiFi network. I couldn’t find this option.

However, as you can see from the screenshot here, iTunes Music appears to be set by default to only play when connected to a WiFi network. This screen appeared when I paused the stream to run off to a meeting. While walking, I turned on my iPhone to check on my email and noticed the screen shown here (the last thing I did was pause iTunes Radio).

The biggest headache iOS 7 has caused so far (less than 12 hours after installing it) is that it breaks Google Voice. To be honest, it doesn’t cause the Google Voice app to crash or be unable to receive texts. However, after upgrading my iPhone 5 to iOS 7, I see this message continually after launching Google Voice and then signing into my account. Pressing the OK button dismisses the pop-up window only to have another window pop-up. No amount of pressing OK breaks the loop. Even worse, pressing the Home button doesn’t take me out of the app. Only a soft-reset gets the iPhone 5 out of the loop.

I’ve reinstalled the app several times. And, yes, I connected it to iTunes as the message recommends. It turns out that this may be a somewhat common problem after upgrading to iOS 7. The “fix”, unfortunately, is a hard reset and restore. Anyone who has done that on a “mature” device knows that this can be a long process. So, I’ll try this on Friday evening when I have some time. In the meantime, it is a good thing I also have an Android phone so I can continue to deal with text messages using Google Voice.

You can see what others have said about this problem in the Apple Support Communities site:

ios 7 push notifications not working

I brought in a portable USB battery charger into the office today. It can charge larger devices like tablets and has two USB charging ports.

More later…

Todd Ogasawara, Jay Stone, and Emil Reyes discuss the recently announced iPhone 5c, iPhone 5s, and the near future release of iOS 7 in this podcast.