I had a sense of this a number of weeks ago - around early August I was asked for an opinion on the various smartphone technologies. And here today is more evidence of why I'm a Android-leaner, seeing it as the long-term winner. I believe it will be the dominant platform in the not-so-distant future; and RIM will be tossed to the scrapheap of forgotten tech.
I like Apple, but it feels like they work to make themselves so exclusive they become almost obsolete. I was willing to give up Sprint (who I love) for ATT to get an iPhone, except their coverage in my last locale was so poor, it was a bad choice. I considered them again after I moved until found out how much they are charging (because its an iPhone) - they're parallel plan was nearly double what I was paying at that point. ($60-$80 with taxes per month vs. over $100 without.) I closed the gap by $10 when I signed up for the 4G/Enhanced 3G network for my Epic. Because BDH griped about that, they gave us $50, and later another $25 credited to our account.
Cost and coverage issues aside, Earlier in this thread I briefly posted my thoughts on Droid vs. the Apple OS - I like Droid much, much more for my phone use. I find Droid easier to move around in and more user friendly.
ohhh! I like the barscan thing. I'm going to check to see if they have an iphone version.
do you have the name of the app company that made it?
Fat Secret
http://www.fatsecret.com/ I didn't see an Apple Widget there, but I didn't see a Droid one either. You can sign up to their website and then be able to log stuff in both places, but all I need is the phone.
The barcode scanner is awesome. And its not super finicky on my phone. As long as I can hold reasonably still, it scans.
"Calorie Counter" is a great free app for anyone who keeps a food diary. You can search food items or, this is why I'm really digging it, you can scan its barcode. Either way it instantly gives you calories, fat, vitamins, etc. You can also enter brand name and restaurant items. There are options for tracking exercise and calories burned. There is also a place for weigh-ins and journal entries if you are tracking other things outside the scope of the app. I keep a food diary and have always gotten annoyed with having to tote my notebook everywhere. Additionally, you can enter your height, weight and goals and it will calculate how many calories you need to be consuming.
I hate the name, but I like the fact that this is replacing my old notebook.
ohhh! I like the barscan thing. I'm going to check to see if they have an iphone version.
do you have the name of the app company that made it?
"Calorie Counter" is a great free app for anyone who keeps a food diary. You can search food items or, this is why I'm really digging it, you can scan its barcode. Either way it instantly gives you calories, fat, vitamins, etc. You can also enter brand name and restaurant items. There are options for tracking exercise and calories burned. There is also a place for weigh-ins and journal entries if you are tracking other things outside the scope of the app. I keep a food diary and have always gotten annoyed with having to tote my notebook everywhere. Additionally, you can enter your height, weight and goals and it will calculate how many calories you need to be consuming.
I hate the name, but I like the fact that this is replacing my old notebook.
Another member asked me about my phone, versus my thoughts on my admitedly limited experience with Apple's OS via my Touch and here is everything I shared about my phone with her. My last phone was a Palm Pre, running the Palm OS. I've had my phone about a week and this is what I've discovered so far.... Its a little rambling. Sorry about that. But for those of you in the research phase, this may be helpful info. I have a Samsung Epic, running Android 2.1 on a Sprint Everything Plan (unlimited data, texting and cell calls - 450 landline call minutes, base price $69.99 plus a $10 premium for the 4G/Enhanced 3G network.)
Things in my google calendar went to the phone seamlessly. Things entered into the phone don't seem to go back to google calander. I haven't figured this one out yet, but I am sure there is a solution.
Contacts synch like buttah... both ways. One of my pet peeves with Palm was that items entered in the phone went to Gmail, but not the other way. I can also synch FB into it, so all my contacts whether Gmail or Phone or Facebook all end up on the phone and in Gmail.
You can't synch with iTunes because Steve Jobs is a proprietary doofus. That being said, its easy to put music on the phone even if it would be nicer to do it through iTunes. You connect to your computer and treat it like a thumb drive...drag the music you want on your phone over to it and bam, its there. It reads iTunes files fine. I just dragged the whole folder for whatever artist and it all moved and was instantly playable - I didn't have to drag song by song or anything. I don't know if that makes sense - Example: I have Alanis Morrisette songs from 6 albums in iTunes. In my iTunes folder, there is an AM folder, within that there 6 folders, one for each album and then within those are the individual songs. I only had to drag the Alanis Morrisette folder over and all the songs translated over. There is an standard app that somehow hooks up to my computer remotely and would let me play any media there through the phone, but I haven't figured out to make it work yet.
The camera (still and video) is as good, if not better than any point and shoot camera I have used.
I have an iPod Touch and as far as how it works and ease of use, this is better for me. Now I don't have an iPhone but I did use the touch with wi-fi and I just never like the way it rolled. And I don't like only having a touch screen keyboard. This phone has both. I also like the apps in the Droid Market better — lots more free stuff. It has a removable 16 GB mini SD which can be upgraded to a 32 GB. The disc is easy to remove if you have a reader for it on your computer (which I don't, but I don't really see the need for it since it hooks up to the USB ports.) Conceivably if I wanted to give up my iPod and carry music in my phone, I could and have plenty of memory left over. I'm not quite there yet, but the more I play with the phone, the more I see it as a reasonable possibility. I do prefer that iTunes fills my iPod, and sometimes grabs artists I may not have thought to load, so for now, I'm keeping all music functions on the iPod. I'm willing to bet that as the Droid market expands someone will (or may already have) come up with something that will make the music functionality "Smarter."
I have great internet. This is a 4G phone, but there isn't 4G in this area. Even still, it gives me enhanced 3G and it is superfast. The phone itself is also superfast, as far as moving around within it. It does so much I am just amazed by it. I know I've barely scratched the surface. The screen, acording to the techie geeks is the bomb. Brighter and really big. I struggled with my old phone's screen because everything was tiny. I can watch video on this and its as clear as watching something on TV, but a little smaller. Its a 4" screen. The HTC Evo (Sprint's other Droid/4G phone) has a slightly bigger screen, but overall the reviewers are calling it for the Epic over the Evo. Plus, right now, you can't get an Evo to save your life - manufacturing issues. The phone is a bit bigger than average but, the benefits of the bigger screen is worth it for me. It's not very thick and the weight is pretty light... its thinner than and no heavier than my Palm Pre which didn't do a fraction of what this does.
BDH and I both love Sprint's customer service. When we first considered a 4G phone, we balked at the $10 premium. They couldn't waive it for us, but they did give us a $50 credit on our bill. When we moved here, I had no coverage in the house. They sell an item called the AirRave for $149, plus a $5 premium. Because I am in a bad area, acording to the maps, they sent me the AirRave for free and waived the monthly charge. It works like a personal cell tower in the house. And they are just plain nice to deal with. No matter what we've called about (billing, equipment, whatever) they are always friendly and have always resolved whatever issue we had in one phone call. They work to retain their customers, which I am a huge fan of.
I cannot express just how much I love my new phone. And I'm sure I've only scratched the surface with it. I don't dig the FB app, but I didn't like it on Palm either. I prefer having more control that it offers - its still pretty nice. But other than that, everything I've downloaded works great and everything is super fast. The synching is almost instant and awesome (unlike the one way mess that was the Palm OS synch).
Anyone have any recommendations for apps that you think are must have? I already have ATK and a nice little detailed battery monitor that shows the exact percentage of juice left. I don't like having to go in and kill apps, but whatever.
And I am addicted to live wallpapers, which I know are total juice suckers, but I'll stop using them when the fascination factor wears off.
Cookie doesn't have anywhere near the level of charm that I have. And have you seen how everyone is dumping on him lately? Wow! That plus airfare to Canadia is cheaper than flying out to see Cookie in NZ.
So there. You need me.
Well the airfare is cheaper, but I wouldn't push it too far, snookums.
Nothing surprising here. And if the .gov wanted it and Google didn't help, they would get someone else, or staff up and do it themselves. How do you think they got all those separate systems built over the last 40 years? It's not like this is all that new, Google is just a really good integrator. As I said in the other post - the telcos have been in bed w/ the .gov forever. The .gov has colocated sites where they collect information. They fund telco projects and get hooks into those systems early, and yes, they listen to your phone calls. As for mapping, google maps has a public API, anyone can use it. And if you want conspiracy: Lucent technologies (phone/communication gear company) was doing mapping technology in the early 90s... http://www.allbusiness.com/health-care/health-care-overview/7058911-1.html why would a telecom company do that?
This should concern everyone and please see the hotlinks in the article. This isn't a good thing.
The investment arms of the CIA and Google are both backing a company that monitors the web in real time - and says it uses that information to predict the future.
The company is called Recorded Future, and it scours tens of thousands of websites, blogs and Twitter accounts to find the relationships between people, organizations, actions and incidents - both present and still-to-come. In a white paper, the company says its temporal analytics engine "goes beyond search" by "looking at the ‘invisible links' between documents that talk about the same, or related, entities and events."
It's not too likely that your ISP really tracked your specific usage of the Innarwebs. They just know who you are and what IP of theirs you are assigned.
When BDH connected somewhere to do that download, he was most likely connecting with other persons aka peers — and all peers doing the same download at that moment can see each other's IP. If one of those peers is a sneaky monitoring service employed by Big Record /Movie Label, they'll make a note your IP. They have no idea of who you are, but they know who your ISP is based on your IP.
So sneaky monitoring company forwards the info off to $Copyright Holder, and they send a form letter to your ISP, stating that on such and such date and time, a computer using your IP was noted downloading a copyrighted work. The ISP is obligated to advise you that your infringement has been noted by a concerned party - and they'll advise you to cease such activities.
Or that's pretty much how it works according to how my brain wants to structure the info at this hour.
And it was the stupit kid, not the husband. The kid still has some boundary issues... I can, therefore I will.
There are some legitimate concerns. Google gets a lot of data from you - location, things you are searching for, things you buy, what people send you in e-mail. They also conceivably have access to what you write/save in google docs, and content of your calls and voicemails from google talk, and could theoretically even be tracking which planets you are looking at w/ google sky.
But Google is a commercial company. They use this information for marketing purposes. Even if they are not 100% up front with it, they do typically give you the ability or at least the choice to decide if you don't want them using the info that way (sometimes the choice is just not using that service). Sometimes them having this information can actually be beneficial as well - what local lunch spot is having a special?.
And yes, they cooperate with all requests from legal authorities. Every company does this btw - your utilities, your credit card companies, your ISP, your bank..... if you are under investigation by the feds, an FBI agent will contact some one w/ a warrant and get information on you and you will know nothing about it - this happens all the time.
The question is do they actively share data with the feds for non-investigative purposes? I don't think so. I do know that certain telcos have done this in the past and probably still do. But I think that was more from the legacy position they found themselves in after being subsidized by the .gov to build the telecom infrastructure in a different world (cold war and all). And the .gov has a lot of other resources they can deploy if they want more info on you. They don't need Google, and as I said if they do want something google has and have a legitimate reason they will show up w/ a warrant just like they do anywhere else.
So far, Google has a pretty good track record of mostly being good w/ our collected data. They have screwed up on occasion, but they are a gigantic corporation. When they have screwed up they have typically handled it properly, or at least reasonably.
To date, I have little problem with the info that Google has on me. I am selective about some of their products because I don't like them reading all my mail and sending me ads based on it. But I do use Gmail and Talk and Maps and Sky and Docs and Picasa.... I also try to keep a vigilant eye to be sure I continue to be happy with the trade I'm consciously making between convenience and privacy. But we are all making that same trade (Bill knows your IP and a lot of people here could find it with trivial effort, it's also pretty trivial for almost anyone to scour your posts and come up w/ a surprising amount of information about you personally).
I worry much more about who gets my cell number. I use a bunch of different e-mails when I sign up for services so I can see who sells/trades that information and stop using those vendors (I'm looking at you buy.com - bastids). The genie is out of the bottle, control and limiting the damage is the order of the day. And frankly I think the Google genie has delivered pretty well on our wishes so far - just remember that we asked for it.
I'm not super-paranoid about privacy, beyond the norm nor am I a criminal, so this doesn't bother me too much. This is the trade off for the internet and connectivity. I know our internet provider in TN tracked our usage (we got a big no-no letter when BDKid1 downloaded illegally ). He had BDH all paranoid about it, but I don't see it as much different from filling out surveys, etc. I'm on the DNC Registry and such. Let them market all they want. I have a finely tuned advertisement filter. Even when I'm trying to look for an ad, my eye is trained to ignore them. I'm lucky that way.
I guess my only question is what do they do with the content of our emails and calls? That's a tad on the creeptastic side.
I keep four email addresses.... one for friends, family and personal business like my docs and temp agencies; one for business accounts like RP, my bank, Amazon, Paypal, ebay, etc; one for everyone else - retail stores, petitions, CL and FB; and the fourth is a "throw-away" which I use if I'm not sure about a company. If they pass my test, I can always change them over to another account and if not I just unsubscribe. Gmail has a great spam filter and I'm pretty vigilant about unsubscribing.
Most people think having four addys is insanity but once I started doing it this way, my life actually got a lot easier. The only real inconvenience is logging in and out of four accounts, but my main account notifies on my phone and the others only really merit checking once or twice a week unless I have an active listing on CL or ebay or are waiting on something from one of my vendors.
The CIA, FBI and National Security Agency have all reportedly banded together to create an internal government intranet - sharing data on a system called Intellipedia.
"Each analyst, for lack of a better term, has a shoe box with their knowledge," Sean Dennehy, chief of Intellipedia development for the CIA, told the San Francisco Chronicle Sunday. "They maintained it in a shared drive or a Word document, but we're encouraging them to move those platforms so that everyone can benefit."
There are three levels of information available to users: Top secret, secret and sensitive but unclassified. According to numbers provided by the CIA, 37,000 accounts have been established providing access to 200,000 pages of information.
Google supplies the software, hardware and tech support. The software and browsing giant is also licensing its mapping data to government agencies.
"We are a very small group, and even a lot of people in the federal government don't know that we exist," said Mike Bradshaw, who leads Google's federal government sales team and its 18 employees, yesterday to the Chronicle.
Federal agencies are not the only government groups lining up for the Google's know how. The U.S. Coast Guard, The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, National Highway Safety Administration and the states of Washington and Alabama have also signed up for similar Google systems.
Google's transactions with the intelligence community have raised privacy concerns.
Questioned by CNET earlier this year, both Google and Microsoft declined to say if they have provided their users private data to federal authorities under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act — President Bush's warrantless wiretapping program. In general email and Internet data are not subject to the same privacy rules that wire, telephone and radio transmissions are.
Google told CNET: "As our privacy policy states, we comply with law enforcement requests made with proper service. We do not discuss specific law enforcement requests and generally do not share aggregate information about them. There are also some legal restrictions on what information we can share about law enforcement requests."
Nothing surprising here. And if the .gov wanted it and Google didn't help, they would get someone else, or staff up and do it themselves. How do you think they got all those separate systems built over the last 40 years? It's not like this is all that new, Google is just a really good integrator. As I said in the other post - the telcos have been in bed w/ the .gov forever. The .gov has colocated sites where they collect information. They fund telco projects and get hooks into those systems early, and yes, they listen to your phone calls. As for mapping, google maps has a public API, anyone can use it. And if you want conspiracy: Lucent technologies (phone/communication gear company) was doing mapping technology in the early 90s... http://www.allbusiness.com/health-care/health-care-overview/7058911-1.html why would a telecom company do that?
How does that google/government thing work exactly?
There are some legitimate concerns. Google gets a lot of data from you - location, things you are searching for, things you buy, what people send you in e-mail. They also conceivably have access to what you write/save in google docs, and content of your calls and voicemails from google talk, and could theoretically even be tracking which planets you are looking at w/ google sky.
But Google is a commercial company. They use this information for marketing purposes. Even if they are not 100% up front with it, they do typically give you the ability or at least the choice to decide if you don't want them using the info that way (sometimes the choice is just not using that service). Sometimes them having this information can actually be beneficial as well - what local lunch spot is having a special?.
And yes, they cooperate with all requests from legal authorities. Every company does this btw - your utilities, your credit card companies, your ISP, your bank..... if you are under investigation by the feds, an FBI agent will contact some one w/ a warrant and get information on you and you will know nothing about it - this happens all the time.
The question is do they actively share data with the feds for non-investigative purposes? I don't think so. I do know that certain telcos have done this in the past and probably still do. But I think that was more from the legacy position they found themselves in after being subsidized by the .gov to build the telecom infrastructure in a different world (cold war and all). And the .gov has a lot of other resources they can deploy if they want more info on you. They don't need Google, and as I said if they do want something google has and have a legitimate reason they will show up w/ a warrant just like they do anywhere else.
So far, Google has a pretty good track record of mostly being good w/ our collected data. They have screwed up on occasion, but they are a gigantic corporation. When they have screwed up they have typically handled it properly, or at least reasonably.
To date, I have little problem with the info that Google has on me. I am selective about some of their products because I don't like them reading all my mail and sending me ads based on it. But I do use Gmail and Talk and Maps and Sky and Docs and Picasa.... I also try to keep a vigilant eye to be sure I continue to be happy with the trade I'm consciously making between convenience and privacy. But we are all making that same trade (Bill knows your IP and a lot of people here could find it with trivial effort, it's also pretty trivial for almost anyone to scour your posts and come up w/ a surprising amount of information about you personally).
I worry much more about who gets my cell number. I use a bunch of different e-mails when I sign up for services so I can see who sells/trades that information and stop using those vendors (I'm looking at you buy.com - bastids). The genie is out of the bottle, control and limiting the damage is the order of the day. And frankly I think the Google genie has delivered pretty well on our wishes so far - just remember that we asked for it.
The CIA, FBI and National Security Agency have all reportedly banded together to create an internal government intranet - sharing data on a system called Intellipedia.
"Each analyst, for lack of a better term, has a shoe box with their knowledge," Sean Dennehy, chief of Intellipedia development for the CIA, told the San Francisco Chronicle Sunday. "They maintained it in a shared drive or a Word document, but we're encouraging them to move those platforms so that everyone can benefit."
There are three levels of information available to users: Top secret, secret and sensitive but unclassified. According to numbers provided by the CIA, 37,000 accounts have been established providing access to 200,000 pages of information.
Google supplies the software, hardware and tech support. The software and browsing giant is also licensing its mapping data to government agencies.
"We are a very small group, and even a lot of people in the federal government don't know that we exist," said Mike Bradshaw, who leads Google's federal government sales team and its 18 employees, yesterday to the Chronicle.
Federal agencies are not the only government groups lining up for the Google's know how. The U.S. Coast Guard, The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, National Highway Safety Administration and the states of Washington and Alabama have also signed up for similar Google systems.
Google's transactions with the intelligence community have raised privacy concerns.
Questioned by CNET earlier this year, both Google and Microsoft declined to say if they have provided their users private data to federal authorities under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act — President Bush's warrantless wiretapping program. In general email and Internet data are not subject to the same privacy rules that wire, telephone and radio transmissions are.
Google told CNET: "As our privacy policy states, we comply with law enforcement requests made with proper service. We do not discuss specific law enforcement requests and generally do not share aggregate information about them. There are also some legal restrictions on what information we can share about law enforcement requests."
MAybe I'm not awake yet, but I'm not seeing in here where they track our usage and give it to the government. Or maybe I misread yesterday's conversation. Halp!
The CIA, FBI and National Security Agency have all reportedly banded together to create an internal government intranet - sharing data on a system called Intellipedia.
"Each analyst, for lack of a better term, has a shoe box with their knowledge," Sean Dennehy, chief of Intellipedia development for the CIA, told the San Francisco Chronicle Sunday. "They maintained it in a shared drive or a Word document, but we're encouraging them to move those platforms so that everyone can benefit."
There are three levels of information available to users: Top secret, secret and sensitive but unclassified. According to numbers provided by the CIA, 37,000 accounts have been established providing access to 200,000 pages of information.
Google supplies the software, hardware and tech support. The software and browsing giant is also licensing its mapping data to government agencies.
"We are a very small group, and even a lot of people in the federal government don't know that we exist," said Mike Bradshaw, who leads Google's federal government sales team and its 18 employees, yesterday to the Chronicle.
Federal agencies are not the only government groups lining up for the Google's know how. The U.S. Coast Guard, The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, National Highway Safety Administration and the states of Washington and Alabama have also signed up for similar Google systems.
Google's transactions with the intelligence community have raised privacy concerns.
Questioned by CNET earlier this year, both Google and Microsoft declined to say if they have provided their users private data to federal authorities under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act — President Bush's warrantless wiretapping program. In general email and Internet data are not subject to the same privacy rules that wire, telephone and radio transmissions are.
Google told CNET: "As our privacy policy states, we comply with law enforcement requests made with proper service. We do not discuss specific law enforcement requests and generally do not share aggregate information about them. There are also some legal restrictions on what information we can share about law enforcement requests."
And I'm sure I've only scratched the surface with it. I don't dig the FB app, but I didn't like it on Palm either. I prefer having more control that it offers - its still pretty nice. But other than that, everything I've downloaded works great and everything is super fast. The synching is almost instant and awesome (unlike the one way mess that was the Palm OS synch).
). He had BDH all paranoid about it, but I don't see it as much different from filling out surveys, etc. I'm on the DNC Registry and such. Let them market all they want. I have a finely tuned advertisement filter. Even when I'm trying to look for an ad, my eye is trained to ignore them. I'm lucky that way.