Most phones have a plastic or aluminum casing. The purpose of the casing is to protect the sensitive inner components by creating a barrier that absorbs any damage. It is also an opportunity for users to personalize their phone by purchasing a special color or by adding a patterned case from another company.
Learning a new musical instrument is never easy. But, following the demise of Guitar Hero, there is – as one might suspect – an app for that! Now, those who want to learn to play the guitar need only a guitar, an iPad, and Wild Chords to get started on a road to musical proficiency!
Wild Chords is an application, currently exclusively available for the Apple iPad, that helps teach you how to play the guitar. In order to use Wild Chords, all you need is a guitar and an iPad; you do not need speakers or an amplifier if you are using an electric guitar. In fact, if you are using an electric guitar, you have to unplug it from other equipment – like an amp – because the distortion from other equipment affects the program. Even if you have never picked up a guitar before, Ovelin – the app’s publisher – is confident that Wild Chords can teach you.
If asked what they first think of when putting cars and smartphones together, most people would answer with something about not texting while driving or about touch screens in their car. No one would answer with “an iPhone case.”
That may be about to change, however, because Nissan is getting ready to release a new iPhone case. Yes, Nissan the car manufacturer is making an iPhone case, yet why they are is very interesting. The Nissan Scratch Shield iPhone case will heal itself from any kind of scratches that occur.
Like so many industries, the consumer electronics sector has a vibrant secondary market. Thanks in no small part to Alpha Consumers frequently upgrading and the consumer culture that fosters the mindset that this year’s new products will be obsolete or uncool by next year, the used electronics market has grown in recent years. Buyers who are more interested in substance than style or who are simply thriftier than their peers can enjoy significant benefits from buying their electronics in gently used condition. One of the biggest sectors in the electronics secondary market is in cell phones and smartphones.
However, just like when you are considering purchasing a used car, there are some good rules to live by when purchasing a used cell phone or used smartphone. Both as a buyer and a seller, you should consider the following:
Apple Computers, employs an elegantly simple strategy to dominate the mobile computing marketplace. Apple’s strategy is built largely on a hope that you will buy their entire product line, not just one or two of their devices. That is to say, products from Apple, more than any other company in the technology sector, are designed to interact easily with one another. For example, Apple makes it very easy to connect an iPad to an iTV or a MacBook Pro. But, as many people have discovered, there are more affordable high definition televisions with more options than the iTV. But why should you be inconvenienced for wanting a great HDTV and an iPhone and wanting them to interact? Scosche does not think you should be inconvenienced! That is why Scosche made the sneakPEAK HD Cable!
Scosche’s sneakPEAK High Definition Audio/Video Cable for iPad, iPhone & iPod is a fairly simple cable that allows you to connect virtually any Apple i-product that has a screen on it to a high definition television. By connecting your Apple products’ output port to the HDTV’s input ports, you are transforming your Apple product into a media player, like a DVD or Blu-Ray player. This will allow you to play media from your iPod Touch, iPhone or iPad on your high definition television, even if you are streaming it from the Cloud!
With all of the rapidly-changing aspects of computer technology, it can be very hard to keep up. Indeed, for those who are casual computer users without real investment in the computer hardware industry, it was not so long ago that the USB port became the dominant interface port. Suddenly, when you upgraded your computer and wanted to use your favorite old keyboard or mouse, you discovered there were no ports in the back of your new computer for it! Like compact discs to records, the USB port has pretty much eliminated most specialized ports on computers. In the world of USB ports, USB 3.0 is slowly creeping up in popularity.
But, you might be wondering, just what is USB 3.0?
Have you had enough with portable technology devices? If you said ”yes,” it can hardly be considered a surprise. More than any other time in history, the consumer electronics market is overflowing with options . . . so many that it is easy to fail to see what the point of it all is. Media players alone have become a market where the options seem to be designed more for competition between products than actually filing a niche that is desperately yearning to be filled.
For small-screen devices, you have your smartphones. While many of the smartphones have screens that are less than 2” for the diagonal screen measurement, the iPod Touch changed the nature of such devices when Apple released it with a 3.5” screen. This created a niche of handheld devices that could surf the Internet and perform all sorts of media functions, including playing movies and music. The Apple iPhone added telephone communication to that and with that, Apple firmly entered the smartphone wars.
As the publishing industry changes with technology, it is no surprise that digital comics are becoming an important part of the lives of comic book readers everywhere. Comic book fans have often been maligned as either being oddly illiterate (requiring pictures to actually read books) or obsessive compulsive collectors who do not even read their mint-condition books. Digital comics confound those prejudices by giving the collectors a virtual product that allows them to enjoy the stories they love and illustrating that most comic readers are not only literate but tech savvy. While digital comic book programs like the one from Comixology have their benefits, for readers of Marvel Comics comic books, there is no substitute for Marvel Digital Comics Unlimited.
Marvel Digital Comics Unlimited is a comprehensive premium subscription digital comic reader that has been around longer than any other mainstream digital comics program. The Marvel Digital Comics Unlimited service is both a first-run digital publication service and the most incredible archive a Marvel Comics fan could hope for. For $9.99/month or $59.88/year, you have access to the incredible Marvel Comics vault as well as all new comics in a digital form.
When you subscribe to the Marvel Digital Comics Unlimited, you get unrestricted access to the Marvel Comics vault. Every day, Marvel adds many vintage comics to the Marvel Digital Comics Unlimited collection and the stated goal from Marvel is to have every single issue of every single book Marvel Comics ever published available in a digital form in the vault. Already, there are tens of thousands of Marvel Comics available from the service. Each comic book in the collection is rendered as a Flash program. As a subscriber, you may open any available comic book on your computer, smartphone or tablet computer to access read the book. The Marvel Digital Comics Unlimited format guides you from panel to panel of each book, so you read at your own pace, but in the order the author intended you to read the book. This format is especially helpful when reading comic books where the illustrators awkwardly arranged the panels of the book on the page; the Marvel Digital Comics Unlimited format eliminates that issue!
Marvel releases new comics in the same format, so there is consistency between old and new comic books. Marvel publishes each new comic to the Marvel Digital Comics Unlimited program a few months after their initial print publication. This, they argue, keeps the print medium relevant while still encouraging subscribers to the Marvel Digital Comics Unlimited program.
With the rising costs of graphic novels and comic books, a subscription to Marvel Digital Comics Unlimited may be the most cost-effective way to keep reading comic books old and new!
About RESCUECOM:
RESCUECOM provides computer repair and computer support, 24/7: Meeting every tech support need including data recovery, virus removal, networking, wireless services, and computer support for all brands of hardware and software. For computer support or information on products, services, or computer repair, visit https://www.rescuecom.com or call 1-800-RESCUE-PC.
For More Information, Contact:
David Milman, CEO
315-882-1100
david@rescuecom.com
As the new year blossoms and you consider your New Year’s resolution, you may find that you have, metaphorically, bit off more than you can chew. Two of the most popular New Year’s resolutions are to lose weight and to quit smoking. While technology can be used to help you lose weight, what you might not know is that there are now ways to use technology to help you quit smoking. Livestrong, the marketing and merchandising arm of the Lance Armstrong Foundation, helped to develop the MyQuit Coach application for the Apple iPhone and it may help you to quit smoking!
MyQuit Coach is available through iTunes for all variations of the Apple iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch running iOS 4.0 or above. The application runs as a blend of a motivational program and journal function designed to help you rid your body of nicotine! The MyQuit Coach app will help you quit smoking if you do not want to use medicines or other smoking cessation methods and no data yet exists on how effective the program is. However, for those who believe in the power of mind over matter – but just need a partner in the process – the MyQuit Coach application may be just the ticket you need to quit smoking this year.
The motivational aspect of the MyQuit Coach application comes in the form of screenshots and slogans. Each time you access the MyQuit Coach application, you are greeted with a statement, like “Smoking affects me and my loved ones,” to help keep you aware of the consequences of your actions. The application also includes videos that help detail the consequences of smoking. The MyQuit Coach acts as a “good-cop, bad-cop” routine on your iPhone encouraging you and warning you of the consequences of slipping from your plan.
Perhaps the more useful function of the MyQuit Coach is the journal function. Using the MyQuit Coach, you may program your iPhone to detail specific benchmarks in your goal to quit smoking. If you have tried and failed in the past as quitting smoking cold turkey, you may use MyQuit Coach to wean you from cigarettes incrementally. Under such a plan, you use MyQuit Coach to keep track of how many cigarettes you have had in a day and the application warns you when you are about to pass the goal number you have set for yourself.
The MyQuit Coach application is actually a very smart use of smartphone technology. Because one of the common complaints smokers have when the relapse and smoke again is that they did not know what to do with their hands when they were not smoking, the MyQuit Coach comes up with an elegant solution. By keeping the smoker’s fingers busy on an iPhone, the application helps break the physiological connection to smoking that seasoned smokers might have. That is a clever idea and makes the MyQuit Coach application a very cool app!
About RESCUECOM:
RESCUECOM provides computer repair and computer support, 24/7: Meeting every tech support need including data recovery, virus removal, networking, wireless services, and computer support for all brands of hardware and software. For computer support or information on products, services, or computer repair, visit https://www.rescuecom.com or call 1-800-RESCUE-PC.
For More Information, Contact:
David Milman, CEO
315-882-1100
david@rescuecom.com
Virtually anyone can manipulate statistics in so many different ways that it is sometimes funny what passes for news using statistics. As the annual Consumer Electronics Show launched in Las Vegas this year, the NPD Group (formerly National Purchase Diary Group) came out with what appeared to be ominous financial statistics for the technology sector. This was treated as potentially devastating news among many members of the technology press, most of whom were off covering the Consumer Electronics Show.
Is it possible the technology reporters and bloggers did not actually read the NPD report? Is it possible that the mainstream media that picked up the story did not understand it? Either way, the tech sector ought not to be reeling from the NPD Group’s assertion that holiday consumer electronics spending dropped six percent during the holiday shopping season in 2011.
This would actually be news . . . if it were true.
The NPD Group’s methodology in determining that consumer electronics sales dropped is a flawed one. In fact, they use methodology so flawed as to make the results meaningless. The NPD report states that total consumer technology sales “excluding cell phones, tablets, e-readers, and video games” dropped. What?! Why is anyone taking the report seriously when it excludes some of the biggest consumer spending items of the holiday season?! Every major poll in every single respectable publication put the Amazon Kindle Fire at the top of both “most wanted” and “most purchased” gift lists. The Apple iPad was also a highly sought-after and delivered gift.
Saying that consumer electronic spending is down without including tablets, e-readers and video games, is like saying that cars are being pulled over less by police . . . when red and black cars are excluded. Given that red and black cars comprise the greatest number of cars on the road in the United States, any statistic correlating cars and car color is worthless without including them. So, too, is a statistic about holiday spending on consumer electronics that omits the most popular consumer electronics of the holiday season!
Why did the NPD release such a worthless statistic? To be fair, the data is virtually impossible to come by. Amazon is notoriously tight-lipped about how many of its e-readers have sold, and, with the Kindle Fire, they have been characteristically opaque. Apple is also less eager to release its sales figures on tablet computers, though it is widely predicted that when you consider tablets a personal computers, Apple is now the largest PC manufacturer on Earth.
Regardless of what the NPD wants consumers to think, ten days in the 2011 holiday shopping season saw billion dollar sales, which is more than any other holiday season ever before. To think that consumer electronics like tablets, e-readers and video games did not contribute tremendously to that is naïve.
About RESCUECOM:
RESCUECOM provides computer repair and computer support, 24/7: Meeting every tech support need including data recovery, virus removal, networking, wireless services, and computer support for all brands of hardware and software. For computer support or information on products, services, or computer repair, visit https://www.rescuecom.com or call 1-800-RESCUE-PC.
For More Information, Contact:
David Milman, CEO
315-882-1100
david@rescuecom.com