For nearly a decade now i’ve been telling my friends and family while we’re watching TV, “I don’t care who does it, I just want a small box I can connect to the TV that will replace these annoying loud commercials.” And who, none other than Apple has answered my prayers; at least they have begun to anyway.

Apple on Tuesday has been granted Patent No. 8,249,497 for “Seamless switching between radio and local media.” The system will switch between broadcast commercials and your personal media, allowing you to interject their content with content you have stored on a cloud or storage device of some type.

For example, you are listening to a radio station or watching TV, the system can skip sections that you are not interested in and fill that time with family photos, music, a video, in other words, something a little more relevant and personal.

A user, however, may not be interested in every media item provided as part of a broadcast stream. For example, a user may not like a particular song broadcast by a radio station, or may not like a particular segment of a talk radio station (e.g., the user does not like the topic or guest of the segment). As another example, a user may not be interested in content originally generated by sources other than the media source (e.g., advertisement content). Because the user has no control over the media broadcast, the user can typically only tune to a different media broadcast, or listen to or consume the broadcast content that is not of interest.

This technology would be an obvious enhancement to the Apple TV experience, or even an actual iTV we have been hearing so much about. It would give Apple a revolutionary edge, combining traditional broadcasting technology with new streaming on-demand content. The future of Television is in Apple’s hands.

[ via Apple Insider ]

The post Apple Patent will Destroy Annoying TV Commercials with your own content appeared first on Mobile Magazine.

The next time you walk in to a department store you may not be greeted by a human, in fact, if Verizon Wireless has anything to do with it, you’ll be looking at a VGo. Presented at CES 2012, Verizon is aiming to enable 4G LTE devices beyond what we would expect with a typical smartphone or tablet. We saw the Golden-i headset display earlier that would allow remote data to be sent to the wearer, now, they’ve brought on a state-of-the-art robotic telepresence with embedded 4G LTE to man their booth.  The VGo is a 4-foot robot that can be controlled by up to 1 user at a time, lasting 6-12 hours depending on the battery pack. What the VGo does is remotely replicates a person’s presence directly from Verizon’s LTE Innovation Center. The bot was free to move anywhere around the booth and communicate via a video camera, microphones, and LCD with attendees. What would you do if you walked in to a store having an issue and all that you could talk to was a VGo?

[ VGo ]

The post CES: First Hands-On With Verizon’s VGo Robotic Telepresence appeared first on Mobile Magazine.

We’re giving away a PowerSkin for your iPhone 4.  It’s really a great addon to double your battery life.  All you have to do is Facebook Like our page at the bottom of this post.  If you already have cool, then just post on our wall saying you want a powerskin!

This retails for $70 online.
 

The post Win the iPhone 4 PowerSkin appeared first on Mobile Magazine.

Save you’re jailbreak searching fingers, the iPad 2 Jailbreak that was recently leaked by a “beta tester” is just a buggy version that may even give you more trouble than its worth. The leak was done to push Comex to release something soon, as said @Comex “Congratulations, some moron used a dictionary attack(?) to leak a buggy version and put me on a useless time limit.”

@MuscleNerd even tweeted “bizarre…the leakers seem confused why they’re not being cheered for “releasing” @comex’s not-even-ready jailbreak.” They’re not being cheered because 1) the leaked version is nearly impossible to find, and 2) it’s buggy as hell. One thing is certain, Comex is now on it and we should see a jailbreak for the iPad 2 via Dev-Team or at least Jailbreakme.com very soon.

The post iPad 2 Jailbreak leaked: Buggy and broken appeared first on Mobile Magazine.

Up until now the latest innovation in portable document scanning was the single USB cable, powered by and transmitted through just one cable. Wowee. Visioneer now takes us further along to a world without wires – and hopefully paper too –  with their $200 compact scanning package.  Visioneer released the first truly portable wireless scanning solution, the Visioneer Mobility. What makes this so portable is the built-in 3.7V 1700mAh lithium-ion battery tucked inside and its ability to scan documents and images directly to an SD card, USB flash drive or mobile phone with no computer near by.

Hardware
The design is pleasing, a glossy white finish with just two buttons; power, and one to select between photographs, black and white or color document scanning. The power light gives you indication of your battery status, blue is good red is dead. On the back side you will find a mini-usb port, standard USB for USB flash drives, and the SD card slot. Much like typical scanners the Visioneer Mobility is adequately sized at about 1.75-inches high and 2.5-inches deep. You cannot open this up to remove a paper jam as most scanners allow you to, but there is a release switch on the back corner that will lift up the rollers incase a page does get jammed up.

You can scan items as small as 2 x 2 inches and as large as 8.5 x 11.7 inches. The downside is that there is no document feeder, so its a single page at a time with the Mobility. Just one small sacrifice for ultra-mobility I guess. This also leaves you with single sided scanning, duplex was not offered on this unit.

Battery life is excellent. I never needed to charge it once since I got for my tests. Visioneer rates the life to 300 full page scans per charge.

Specifications

Software
The software is for PC-only, but if you do use a PC you will get NewSoft BizCard SE to manage scanned business cards, Nuance OmniPage to convert your scanned documents into editable PDFs, and Nuance’s PaperPort to organize and share the scanned documents. I’m not a big fan of these software utilities, but I could see how they would benefit PC users for managing their workflow. With this type of scenario I would find myself just inserting an SD card or USB flash drive that contains the scanned images and copying them directly to my Mac, but that’s just me.

Performance
Pages come through easily, I never ran into serious problems with alignment unless I obviously fed the page in on an angle. In my tests it took roughly 7.5 seconds to scan a full page document and 9 seconds to scan a full page color photograph. Business cards are quicker at about 5 seconds. This is right in line with not-so-portable single USB-powered Fujtsu ScanSnap S1100 we looked at earlier this year. Image quality on photographs is a bit off, but nothing too serious. Text is crisp and easy to OCR afterwards.

Bottom Line
For the first truly portable scanner to hit the market, Visioneer did a fantastic job. Speed and accuracy are what you would expect from a portable scanner. The only downfall is its single-sidedness and lack of document feed. Other than that, you can scan directly to your mobile phone, SD Card and USB port with accuracy and speed. The included carry case and 2GB SD Card is a nice touch too.

If this isn’t portable enough, stay tuned for Visioneer’s CONNECT service where you can scan directly to cloud based services like Google Docs, Evernote, FilesAnywhere, OfficeDrop and DropBox.

[Visioneer Mobility]

The post Visioneer Mobility Wireless Scanner Review appeared first on Mobile Magazine.

That Chrome OS CR-48 netbook Google has sent out to developers and some lucky beta testers has just received an update to R10 release 0.10.156.46. I have been using one off and on for the last few weeks and noticed lag and inconsistency with the trackpad. Last night I did an update and found it was much more responsive. The up and down arrows seemed to be disabled, but they fixed themselves automatically. Google is listening, so if you have a problem let them know. The CR-48 is a testbed and Google is not slacking off when it comes to addressing customer needs. I personally like to mess around in console but have yet to figure out a way to get a package manager installed, anyone have any tips?

These are the most recent updates:

• 3G modem activation fixes
• 3G connection to the carrier fixes
• Wi-Fi connectivity/Out of the Box fixes
• New trackpad and sensitivity setting adjusted
• Auto update engine and debugging improvements
• Power optimizations
• GTalk video/chat optimizations
• Audio CPU utilization improvements
• Improved on screen indicators: brightness, network status, update icon

[via Google Chrome Blog]

The post Google Fixes Chrome OS CR-48 Netbook Trackpad Issues appeared first on Mobile Magazine.

Well, they say it’s because of the change in design. First-generation LTE chips require certain design compromises and the Cupertino crew didn’t want to do that for their first foray into the CDMA world. This isn’t to say that LTE won’t come to a version of the iPhone eventually, but they are “not commenting on unannounced products.”

Realistically, this strategy follows Apple’s typical modus operandi. When the original iPhone first appeared on AT&T, people asked why it only did EDGE and not 3G. Apple has always taken a more cautious approach to new technology and, given its experience with 3G on AT&T, it makes sense that they’d be just as cautious about LTE on Verizon. Wait for the network infrastructure to expand and mature, then release an iPhone 4G.

In the same Q&A session, some other interesting tidbits arose. First, the CDMA iPhone is not exclusive to Verizon. In this way, it’s very possible that a Sprint version is in the works. Second, the CDMA iPhone works like “all other CDMA devices,” meaning you won’t get simultaneous voice and data multi-tasking. They’re not discussing price, but the “personal hotspot” for tethering is mentioned.

The post Q&A: Why there’s no LTE 4G with the CDMA Verizon iPhone 4 appeared first on Mobile Magazine.

Winner of the Wowee One is Jerry Brown
Winner of the Novothink has yet to respond

The post Contest Winners Announced appeared first on Mobile Magazine.

We’re giving away a brand new bass pounding portable speakers that you might have seen in our review earlier this week.  The WOWee One has a built-in lithium-ion rechargable battery pack, allowing you to turn any flat surface into a bass pounding loud speaker.  They retail for $70, but all you have to do is head on over to the review page and tell us where you would stick it! The contest is open to the USA and Canada only, a winner will be announced Friday, August 13 so you have until then to enter.

[Enter Contest Link]

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Mobile Magazine home page for the iPad

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