The New York Times recently reported a heartwarming story about a lost digital camera being returned after a kindhearted stranger analyzed the photos on the camera to find the owner.
The camera was left in the backseat of a New York taxi, and contained sightseeing photos of Manhattan, as well as Florida snapshots including people wearing name tags. Leads took the hunt to Ireland, back to New York, and finally to Syndey, Australia, where the rightful owner lives. He was "over the moon" with gratitude to get his camera back.
This story has a happy ending, and perhaps most of us would be glad to get our camera back in that situation, but it also made me uneasy to realize how much personally identifiable information was stored on one camera card. I would rather have a locked camera than could not be accessed if it was found, than have a stranger be able to peer into my photos.
The situation is even more crucial when it involves smartphones. ... Read more
While Windows Vista is slowly adopted, subsequent waves of users may make the mistake of downloading the latest version of ActiveSync to hook up their Windows Mobile device.
This is a bad idea. ActiveSync withers when it comes into contact with Vista's radiant style sheets. Instead of creating ActiveVista, or some similarly named offshoot, Microsoft opted for an overhaul. And lo, Windows Mobile Device Center was born.
Sadly, Windows Mobile Device Center (for 32-bit and 64-bit desktops) only syncs your cell with up to two computers; hard luck for someone with an office rig, a laptop, and a desktop (or two) at home. Other than that, the snappy Vistafied app cleans up ActiveSync's muddled interface with sliding tiles for tweaking settings, accessing files, downloading multimedia, and running utilities.
Windows Mobile Device Center + Vista = Usability.
There's no staging area for quick installations; however, you can transfer a file from the desktop into the device folder (which you can get to through the file management folder of Windows Mobile Device Center) and then run the file from the phone.
Machine won out over man in a text messaging competition at a mobile-communications industry event this week in Orlando, Fla.
The John Henry of the event was Ben Cook of Utah, the Guinness World Record holder for texting, who lost to Nuance's Mobile Dictation software that converts human speech into text on a mobile phone. The losing round used the same text message that Cook typed to win his record title: "The razor toothed piranhas of the genera Serrasalmus and Pygocentrus are the most ferocious freshwater fish in the world. In reality they seldom attack a human."
Cook took 43.22 seconds, while the Nuance software did it 16.32. No contest.
Not that it would have mattered much based on the point spread, but maybe Cook should have been given a true texting equivalent like: "rzr 2thd piranas of genera Srraslms & Pygocntrs R mst frocious H20 fsh in wrld. IRL sldom attck U." And doesn't speaking sort of defeat the purpose of the privacy that text messaging offers?
The Nuance mobile speech software works on any Windows Mobile or Symbian OS device, and can be ported to other applications, according to Nuance. Users may like to know that they can dictate with Nuance automatically whenever the blinking cursor appears on their mobile text screen.
The application is probably also handy for quickly texting those not up on their texting lingo, IMHO.
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