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Weekend of August 17th, 2012

 

Dave and his team of tech experts answer more of your questions via the Ask Dave Hotline. In case you haven't yet, call us ... toll-free 1-800-899-INTO (4686) ... with any consumer electronics question, opinion, help another listener or tell us what your favorite app is and why. You can also participate via our FREE "Into Tomorrow" App (iOS/Android/Intel AppUp). Thank you for your participation!

ITTV Video Update

Did you know that your car probably has an OBD port that could be used to help track your car, in addition to assisting mechanics diagnose and troubleshoot vehicle problems? Rob shows you a small GPS tracker (LiveViewGPS Live Trac EZ) we use and you might want to try. Also, Chris Graveline takes us back into yesterday's most outstanding tech events on "This Week In Tech History."

Listeners & Guests on the show this week:

For ALL the details ... be sure to listen to the show by downloading the MP3 or clicking the RED & WHITE "Play" button on the media player, both on the right-hand side of this page.

HOUR 1:

Tech News & Commentary

 

Vicky in Escanaba, Michigan listening on 600 WCHT asked: "What's better for a child for a very first computer? He's 12 years old. We'd like to know which is better, the Apple iPad or the Google Nexus. Which is good to do games, email and schoolwork?"

 

Either one will do email just fine, the iPad has a larger library of games, and better ones, too. Now, as for school work....neither?

Neither tablet will be super easy to type on compared to a computer, neither one will multitask as well as a computer, you can open a browser windows and research a topic right next to an open word processor on a tablet, neither one will accept regular software installations, just custom made apps.

It all depends on what kind of school work your talking about, and whether he has access to a regular computer as well. The iPad does have an edge on schoolwork in the form of the school ebooks that Apple introduced with their latest iPad launch, but still, for schoolwork it won’t beat a computer yet.

One last suggestion: Try asking your child’s teacher which system would work better. The school, may even be able help you out with discounts on apps or ebooks as well. It never hurts to ask.

 

For more information, tune in to Hour 1 of our podcast. Just click the red arrow in the upper right column on this page.

 

 

 

The "Into Tomorrow" team discussed the latest apps that they have been playing with recently.

For Android:




 

• Dave recommends: Speaking Clock - EQ STime, $0.99


 

" The Android software speaks the current time.  It will speak by pressing the headset button, it features automatic speaking of current time each hour, 30 min, 15 min (can be configured), even if device is in standby mode. You can set night hours and night volume: selected hours will be announced with configured night volume. It comes with English and Russian voices They plan to add new languages and voice packs. It’s a free demo on Android. 99 cents if you like it and want to keep it." -- Dave

 

For iOS:

 

• Andrew recommends: Dice with Buddies, FREE


 

"is the next big thing in the trend of popular mobile games such as: Words with friends, Hanging with friends... and so on. The game is simple and easy just roll the imaginary dice to make pairs or straights. The higher the combo, the bigger the score. This game is turn base like all the other games and is sure to hold my attention, or cause some distraction at work, for at least a few weeks. (we’ll see) Dice with Buddies is free on iOS and Android" -- Rob



• Chris recommends: History Here, FREE


 

"HISTORY Here, from the History Channel, is an interactive guide to thousands of historic locations across the US. The interface, photos, video and dynamic maps bring history to life wherever you are in the country. Whether you're on vacation or just running errands around your hometown, the app actually makes it simple and fun to get the facts on the history hidden all around you, including amazing architecture, museums, battlefields, monuments, famous homes and much more! History Here is free in the iTunes App Store. ." -- Chris



• Mandee recommends: MapMyRUN, FREE or $2.99


 

"This iPhone app allows you to track your daily exercises and keep a personal food log. This app, unlike others I have tried in the past, allows you to put foods from the grocery store and restaurants into your food log. Also, you can record various workout activities, and it is the ONLY app i have found that includes cheerleading! If you are listening to music or using other apps while you exercise, it will speak over your music for every mile you run and also tell you how fast you completed that mile. This app also lets you know how many calories you consumed/burned when you enter food and exercise into your log. There is a version for free, or a paid version for $2.99 with no ads, and photo capture." -- Mandee


For more information, tune in to Hour 1 of our podcast. Just click the red arrow in the upper right column on this page.

Brian in Baton Rouge, Louisiana listens on 107.3 WBRP and asked: "I have a question about the Pro versions of things and the regular version of things. Why don’t these companies just make the best version they can and make that available for everyone at the same price?"

 

Frankly, if companies only made one version of their software, they wouldn't make any money. For one, having different versions of certain programs allows them to open up to a wider customer base.

Another reason, is... Maybe you wouldn't spend, let's say $500 on a piece of software that you won't use all the features of, but maybe you'd spend $100 for a scaled back version of that same piece of software that didn't have those features that you wouldn't be using anyway.

It’s also not just software companies that put out “pro” and “lite” versions, have you ever bought a car without leather seats, or buy a TV that doesn’t stream Netflix these days, or get the vacuum cleaner that doesn’t have the most power of all of the ones the brand makes, or if you buy a memory card with less storage than the biggest one available for your camera or phone, or if you buy the type of paint that requires more coats as opposed to the thicker kind that requires fewer, those are all “lite” versions of products even if the manufacturers don’t stick that label to their products.

Some people are fine with paying a little less for a product that is a little more basic, especially if it still fits their needs.

For more information, tune in to Hour 1 of our podcast. Just click the red arrow in the upper right column on this page.

 

Susan in Porterville, California listens on KTIP 1450 and asked: "What are the differences between an e-reader and an audio reader and if there are some of them that have capability for both."

 

An e-reader is basically a little tablet that will let you load books onto it and read them as you would read any other book, the words appear on the screen, when you’re done reading you push a button or touch or swipe the screen … and the next page appears.

An audio reader is not a term we’ve heard for a standalone device, but some devices have audio readers built in so that they can read the text that’s on the screen to the user. Similar to an audio book, only instead of having a professional human narrator they just use a computer voice to read the text.

Many e-book readers do have an audio reader function, Kindles have had it since day one they call it “text-to-speech”, Nooks do not allow it. Many can download audiobooks and play them back for you as well, again Kindles allow this, Nooks do not.

Tablets often allow both text-to-speech and audiobook downloads. Either as self contained audiobooks or as mp3s, and they generally have access to several ebook reading apps. So depending on whether you just want a dedicated reading gadget or one that does more, you may want to consider a tablet too.

 

For more information, tune in to Hour 1 of our podcast. Just click the red arrow in the upper right column on this page.

 

HOUR 2:

Tech News & Commentary

Joe in Nashville, Tennessee listening on WTN 99.7 FM asked: "The iPhone 4sS or the Galaxy S3? Which one's better all around?"

 

Hard to say, it’s mostly a matter of personal preference more than anything else. Both phones are good, the Galaxy S3 has a much larger screen, which you might enjoy, that also makes the phone bigger, which you might not enjoy.

Both phones come with 8MP main cameras, both capable of recording 1080p video, and both have bright displays to show the results. Whether the iPhone’s retina display or the S3’s super AMOLED plus display is better seems to be a matter of personal opinion, but everyone would agree that they’re both quite bright and clear.

The operating system is also a matter of personal opinion, you may like the S3’s Ice Cream Sandwich with it’s face unlock, and more customizable nature, or you may prefer iOS with it’s iCloud integration and a more uniform look across all apps.

The S3 is a 4G LTE phone, while the iPhone is 3G (unless you’re on AT&T, of course, in which case, IT’S STILL THE SAME 3G!), we have to give the S3 the edge in that category, and odds are that any carrier that plans to roll out an LTE network will cover Nashville sooner rather than later.

The iPhone will often, typically, do better than most Android phones in terms of battery life, but the S3 is one of the few that actually has a decent battery life, so that won’t necessarily sway you one way or another either.

So to be honest, it may come down to this: Do you want a big screen? and do you have an OS preference? Your decision is likely to be more influenced by those to things than by anything else.

 

For more information, tune in to Hour 2 of our podcast. Just click the red arrow in the upper right column on this page.

 

 

Laura in Troy, Michigan listens on CKLW 800 AM and asked: "I am going to be getting a Computer as a gift. My children bought me one years ago that I didn't use. Now, I'm wondering if I can get use out of a laptop. They're buying me a regular computer but I don’t think that's necessary. I'm wondering if a laptop would suffice."

 

Either a laptop or desktop computer will be enough for a novice user, if you don’t use a computer much, there’s really not much that you’d need the extra power of the desktop for.

In fact, if you don’t find you have much use for a computer, you may even be a good candidate for a tablet, that way you’d have access to email, a web browser, video conferencing, some light games, videos, music and you wouldn’t have to deal with a full fledged operating system or a bulkier form factor.

If you don’t want to consider a tablet and want to stick to a computer, then yes, a laptop will likely be just as useful to you as a desktop unless you suddenly want to get into some hardcore gaming or some kind of other processor intensive task.

 

For more information, tune in to Hour 2 of our podcast. Just click the red arrow in the upper right column on this page.

 

Bryan in San Antonio, Texas listens to the podcast asked: "I’m looking for a set of hearing protection earmuffs that I would use while operating lawn equipment. However, I want them Bluetooth stereo A2DP-enabled, so I can listen to music from an Android phone or iPhone. I would appreciate your help, as the ones I found seemed to be only for phone calls and not A2DP-enabled."

 

There are several protective headsets that you can use that have Bluetooth built-in, none of them are really cheap, and the only one we found that is totally geared towards music is the Sennheiser PXC 360 BT, those will cost you around $300 online, but we'd expect Sennheiser headphones to sound good.

Like you found out, there are several other headphones that are bluetooth enabled, like the 3M Peltor Bluetooth Headset line, but they seem to be geared towards communication first and foremost, so they may not provide the most flawless music quality, if they allow it at all.

If you just want the sound to be muffled and you don't need to worry about construction site level noise, you can try regular Bluetooth noise canceling headphones, you can find those from companies from Philips to Sennheiser and they're usually a couple of hundred dollars and up.

 

For more information, tune in to Hour 2 of our podcast. Just click the red arrow in the upper right column on this page.

 

Chris in Columbia, Missouri listens via the iPhone App and asked: "My mom, who is 70, has an older Dell laptop that just has USB ports. She was wondering how she can connect that for video and audio to use with their television. It is not a brand new set, it doesn't have HDMI. Just the yellow red and white cables. Could you recommend a specific cable that has those hookups on one end and a USB on the other?"

 

Unfortunately it won’t be that simple, those cables you may have seen with a USB port on one end and the red, white and yellow plugs on the other end are usually for capturing video onto your laptop using software that can decode the signals from that cable, transmitting video over to a TV via USB is a different story.

USB ports aren’t directly connected to the video card, so transferring video using them requires that some software translates what’s going on in the screen first and the transmit it, which create a lot of lag. There are a few external USB video cards, but for the most part they are unpopular because they produce less than stellar images with slower frame rates, so for example, typing a document may be doable, but watching a video would be unbearable.

Technically it may be possible for you to find a USB video card that will mirror her screen onto a TV, but we probably wouldn’t recommend it, you won’t necessarily have a very good experience.

 

For more information, tune in to Hour 2 of our podcast. Just click the red arrow in the upper right column on this page.

 

 

 

Will in Bernardsville, New Jersey listening on 103.1 WRSC asked: "What do you think of the Raspberry Pi credit card size computer?"

 

The Raspberry Pi is very cool, but it’s not by any means a full fledged computer. It’s more of a teaching project that evolved into something a little more commercial.

Obviously something as tiny and underpowered won’t give you the kind of computing power you’re accustomed to, but it’s been a very cool tool for people that want to build small electronics for specific uses, for example, to control small robots, or stream audio or video.

People with some solid understanding of electronics can buy a brain for their projects for $25 or $30 and make something cool happen, and that’s great, but it is mostly a tool for people who know how to use it and not for the average consumer.

Raspberry Pis are interesting for people who want to build things themselves, and for people who are involved in low costs products, but it won’t make too much of a difference for consumers because big time manufacturers already have small computers to operate their electronics.

Whatever product you buy, be it an iPad or an internet radio will have a tiny computer inside of them to process whatever data needs to be processed, so you’re not likely to find a Samsung streaming box powered by a Raspberry Pi, but you may find an indie streaming box, trying to compete with bigger names being powered by one.

For more information, tune in to Hour 2 of our podcast. Just click the red arrow in the upper right column on this page.

 

HOUR 3:

Tech News & Commentary

Tess in San Francisco, California listening online asked: "All these wonderful little SD memory chips - Is it smarter to format them on your home computer, or format them directly on whichever gadget - cell phone, camera, etc. that you are using it on?"

 

It doesn’t matter, both a computer or a different device will read and write to the card in the same way.

Computers are bigger and they have more power, but the way they interact with the card is the same. SD Cards require a specific amount of power to to write to, and all devices that use them adhere to the same standard. So, whether it’s a computer or a smaller mobile device formatting the card, the end result will be the same.

There is one difference, a computer will let you format the card in ways other devices won’t, some of those formats will let the card handle bigger files, but they won’t be compatible with devices other than computers.

So what device you use doesn’t matter, just either use a computer set to FAT32 or format from the device you plan to use the card with.

For more information, tune in to Hour 3 of our podcast. Just click the red arrow in the upper right column on this page.

 

Michael in Pembroke Pines, Florida listens to the Podcast and asked: "I heard that Google is coming out with a Siri-like program that is going to be attached to its Google web search for the iOS. I wanted to find out when it's going to be available since many people don't have the 4s."

 

Google’s voice search is available now for iOS. It’s basically a lightweight version of Jelly Bean’s Google Now, it features a natural language voice search but no cards and in it’s current version of spoken feedback either, though that is coming soon, according to Google.

Google presented it’s “cards” as a central a cool part of Google Now, there has been no announcement of porting cards to iOS, but the search feature has been greatly improved from the old version that used to just yield text results on the browser.

For more information, tune in to Hour 3 of our podcast. Just click the red arrow in the upper right column on this page.

 

Vince in Chicago, Illinois listens to the podcast and asked: "I have a BlackBerry Bold 9650. I download podcasts to the podtrapper on that phone. Is there a way to copy the podcasts from the phone onto my Windows 7 PC?"

 

Podtrapper, by default, will save the files it downloads to your memory card, to the folder “Blackberry/podtrapper”.

To access that folder, plug in your Blackberry to your computer and when it asks, select USB Drive, that should give you access to your phone’s memory card.

Find the memory card in Windows Explorer, it should show up as a drive called Blackberry, and inside of it navigate to the “Blackberry” folder and then the “podtrapper” folder and you should find your file there. Just drag the files from there to any Windows folder an you should be set. Your files will be on your computer.

For more information, tune in to Hour 3 of our podcast. Just click the red arrow in the upper right column on this page.

 

 

 

 

Joe in New Martinsville, West Virginia listens to the Podcast asked: "I'm a big Blackberry guy. I love Blackberry and have for the last 10 years. What are the options for Blackberry going forward with their new 10?"

 

It’s a little unclear what Blackberry will do with it’s Blackberry 10 platform and I don’t think it’s just unclear to us ... it’s unclear to them too.

They’re showcasing an iPhone-looking skeleton of a phone, with a touchscreen and no physical keyboard while say that they may choose to include a physical keyboard on some of the models they’ll manufacture, but then again they may not manufacture any phones...

It turns out they’re also talking about the possibility of licensing Blackberry 10 to other manufacturers, so that you may buy a Samsung phone that runs Blackberry OS, that’s the same idea that Palm pursued for 10 minutes before giving up on it.

What they’ve shown of the platform, showcases a new touch keyboard with a new kind of auto-complete, an email client that’s far closer to what you’d see today on an iPhone or Android that the old Blackberry email client, some kind of ability to stream video to a TV, but what if any of that will make it onto the final version, and when that version will be out is still a mystery.

The latest estimate we’ve heard is that it should be out January 2013, but they didn’t know which or how many countries would get the release... some people expected the company to fold before the end of 2012, so... "we’re release it in 2013 in some countries that we haven’t yet picked, unless we just license the platform to headset manufacturers" doesn’t sound like their future is too certain at the moment.

For more information, tune in to Hour 3 of our podcast. Just click the red arrow in the upper right column on this page.

 

Carl in Lillington, North Carolina listens on 680 WPTF asked: "I was wondering is there anything I can do to speed up the Internet speed when watching videos, especially in HD, other than upgrading the Internet speed? I have a wireless G router."

 

Not really. You can stop using your connection for other things, but unless you’re downloading something, odds are that the bulk of your connection is not being taken up by anything else.

You probably just need a bigger and better pipe to get your information across, video demands speed, if it’s the only thing that is not quite working, then you probably just need a faster connection so that you can get enough data quickly enough for videos to play smoothly.

For more information, tune in to Hour 3 of our podcast. Just click the red arrow in the upper right column on this page.

 

If you have any questions about any of this week's show info, please email us here.

This Week’s Prizes for Our Listeners

C.Crane: Senta Forty Premium Wooden Headphones

Microsoft: Copies of Microsoft Streets & Trips 2013 Software

NQ Mobile: Activation codes for NQ Mobile Vault (Premium Version) – An Android app that keeps your text messages, pictures, and videos safely hidden from prying eyes.

 

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