If you’re still trying to figure out which Android smartphone you should pick up this holiday season, let us help out by laying out a few of the great options available. We’ll give you a few choices for the various carriers and possible deals hosted by sites such as Amazon Wireless and Wirefly.
As the largest social network in the world, Facebook has a crap-load of data on everything from nightlife, restaurants, shopping, and much more based on Likes and checkins. Facebook is ready to start using that information to help users find cool stuff with their revamped Nearby feature.
Nearby is basically Facebook’s answer to Yelp and Foursquare, except it’s got a lot more users ready to jump on board, a whole lot more information, and is going to be better at recommending places to you.
There’s a problem I often run into with my mobile devices, and that’s not enough storage space. I insist on purchasing devices with just 16GB of memory, and then I have to find ways to manage that storage the best I can. Some devices will take microSD cards that will allow you to bump their storage as and when you need it, but others — like Apple’s iOS devices — don’t come with that luxury.
Vantec’s new NexStar WiFi hard drive dock lets you bump your smartphone, tablet, and even PC storage over Wi-Fi. You can use it to store your audio and video collections on your home network, then use Vantec’s dedicated apps to access them wirelessly when you need to.
If anyone can continually compliment our cans with tantalizing toilet treats, it’s the Japanese. Introducing the Satis: a smartphone controlled toilet that does everything from power washing your bum to playing “I like big butts” on its built-in speaker system.
Towards the end of each year, IBM Research publishes a list of five things it predicts our gadgets will be capable of within the next five years. While some of its predictions seem a little too outlandish and farfetched, others — such as its 2006 prediction for realtime speech translation — become a reality.
IBM’s 2012 list is all about the five senses. It predicts that by 2018, our gadgets will help us touch, see, hear, taste, and even smell. Your smartphone, IBM believes, will use new technologies to simulate the physical sensation of touching something, while your tablet will be able to taste your food.
