This April Fool's joke is from Google proper.  While it's intended as humor...I could see self-cleaning glass in our future!

Another of my favorite April Fool's fake announcements from this year's crop of April Fool's Jokes, the persistent, real life, owl notification that keeps pestering you to practice your language skills on Duolingo ;-)

LOL, I am not sure why I am writing about the mobile companion app...but I am (so...deal with it? :p).  Anyway, yesterday the final side-mission of the companion app cleared and I got all my little lovely check marks across the map of Paris.   In this companion app you recruit Assassins from across Paris, and as you send them away on missions to control different locations in Paris

As is customary for me, when I travel abroad for an extended period of time I tend to get a local SIM card to put into my phone, so I can have a local number, some local SMS, and more importantly data!  It makes it easier to communicate with the locals and verify AirBnB information.  Luckily, in recent years, T-Mobile allows for free 2G (GPRS) data roaming, which made things a little less

As much as I liked the Nokia N8, I needed to get back to using a more modern smartphone for my day to day work.  I decided that waiting some more time for motorola (or Google) to release new flagship products would take a long time, and the few merits of the N8 wouldn't warrant waiting that long for the next android device.Symbian Belle Refresh OSSo,  what did I like about the N8 and Symbian

After 3 years of playing Ingress on my phone (on and off), I've made it to level 9.  Technically speaking I had already earned enough points to be promoted to level 9 several months ago, but since my achievements weren't keeping up with my XP I only now got a silver badge (in distance traversed I think) that allowed me to level up.  I guess I'll need to go out and do some event days.  I

Την περασμένη εβδομάδα η Nintendo ανακοίνωσε πως έχει μια καινούργια εφαρμογή για Android και iOS που λέγετε miitomo. Απ όσο γνωρίζω είναι η πρώτη εφαρμογή της εταιρίας για πλατφόρμες εκτός των δικών της. Έτσι λοιπόν την κατέβασα και

I came across this concept mobile phone from Samsung.  Not sure if this is an actual thing, or just something that someone dreamed up (who doesn't work for Samsung).   The concept reminds me a little bit of the "global" which was used in the TV series Earth: Final Conflict, and the defunct idea by Microsoft (remember that tablet they were supposedly developing?)   I like this

Every now and again I come across a piece of clickbait that I just can't help but to click on.  This past week I saw this piece on TechCrunch the other day, supposedly proclaiming that tablets are dead.  The main thesis of the article is that  since there wasn't a lot of brand new, innovative, product in the tablet lines at MWC (mobile world congress) that the tablets are now a commodity

Last week in the news there was a lot of news around the government trying to strong-arm Apple into breaking into the iPhone of a terrorist shooter (the San Bernadino shooter), a device they have in evidence but it encrypted.  It seems that the government IT folks created this mess for themselves and now the government is looking for an excuse to have backdoors into our computing devices. 

I wasn't quite sure if I should write this post in English or in Greek.  I've been focusing my #metanastis posts in Greek as I have been recalling my experiences as a reverse immigrant back to the US.  Most things deal with acculturation, school, things that were different, new, or peculiar to me at the time.  One of the things that I really liked was gadgets...however I tend to write

I came across this video introducing Star Trek Timelines.  This seems like a pretty interesting game, which is also developed locally in Massachusetts. This seems to be a mobile game (and from the graphics it looks pretty great!).  Wonder if my aging iPad 2 will run it ;-)

When I was younger I used to inhale Apple Keynotes.  I think part of it was Steve Job's presentation style that really drew me in.  I was also a big Apple fan (well, I still am), so I really wanted to know what products came out and get all the related specs and dirt as soon as possible  Early on this meant buying MacAddict, and heading to the Boston Public library to read the most

Well.  As if running MacOS 6 in vMac on your smartwatch wasn't enough, if you are craving some classic operating systems check out PCE.js which allows you to run MacOS 6 in a web browser, as well as Windows and DOS.  I wonder what my younger self would think of this if I had seen this 20 years ago... Now it's time to start emulating Amigas, IIgs, and OS/2. If you feel nostalgic for Windows

I guess it was only a matter of time before some ported emulators  on Android Wear.  This one is a port of vMac, the Mac Classic emulator which I think runs System 6 and System 7. On a touch-screen, with touch screen controls, it's not all that great. However, if someone could figure out a way to pair a bluetooth keyboard and mouse to it... that could be something. Of course the utility

Smartwatch 3Over the past year I've been eyeballing and oogling over the Android Wear smartwatches.  A friend, and word-colleague, of mine has had an original Pebble for a while (I think he may have been a kickstart backer) but I have to admit that the Pebble didn't really appeal to me - at least the original one didn't. One of the things I didn't like was the square display.  I do like

Well, another one bites the dust, or as would be more apt to say: another one gets bought out!  This weekend I got a note that Yahoo has acquired the SMS replacement called MessageMe and the service will be shutting down to focus on some yahoo specific projects (are they going to reinvigorate Yahoo Messenger?)This closure brings back to the forefront something I've said in the past (maybe here,

myWind IT AppBefore I go ahead and talk a bit about mobile access while abroad, I thought I would start off with the technology fails of the trip.  Some were completely avoidable, and some, not so much. I guess first I will tackle the issue of power.The last time I vacationed I only vacationed with one device: my smartphone.  It was also a non-connected phone so the battery lasted a long

I was listening to MacBreak Weekly today, when they were discussing this ad.Personally I am not interested in switching to the Lumia just yet (like the device, but Windows Phone isn't quite there yet for me), but I found this ad hilarious :-)

Well, this one crept up on me. OpenFeint, a cross-platform social network for gaming is closing its doors in a few weeks.  It started life on iOS, as far as I know, and later on got onto Android and Windows Phone.  Initially the pitch was global leaderboards for games, something that I really didn't care for much in my iPod touch days...but then came the achievement badges for games and that

I don't think I've ever laughed so hard during a technology show :-)  

In today's interesting-find-pile we have a Nokia N900 (A maemo device) dual booting into Android. It's just a stock android ROM, no extrast like Sense UI or Moto BLUR, but I am sure the ROM cooking community will have all those available for download and installation.I am wondering if Symbian S60 were ported to the N900, would you want to do a triboot? Depending on the day you could have Symbian,

I have to say, the Google Nexus is very impressive! So much so that I would not mind giving up my iPhone for it (mmmm...OK, maybe not - but I would use both ;-) ) There is only one small problem - no 3G coverage on the 850 and 1900 frequencies, namely the frequencies that at&t uses.Of course you could buy it unlocked for $500 and use it on GSM/EDGE on at&t but that's so 2000! Why would I spend $500

I was a bit skeptical of the whole "keyboard on the back side" of the motorola backflip - but having seen this video (even in mute) does make the device intriguing. The one thing that is a bit of a concern is that the specs look to be the same as the CLIQ that is presently available for T-Mobile. Interesting form factor, but could we do something about the specs?

This past week we've had many, many sites do exposes on Motorola's Droid. The ad campaign that Verizon is using is kind of weird in that it reminds me of the Sega campaigns "Genesis does what nintendon't"The other thing that is weird about this ad campaign is that it's not geared toward the average joe. What does the average joe know (or want to know) about open development? or widgets? or running

Well, I've had a whole weekend to go through Motorola CLIQ related blogs and see what I (really) think about it.When I first saw coverage of the device (was it through Engadget? I don't remember), I was really excited, and much to my surpise I still am! I was never a big fan of motorola phones. I never like their iDEN (Nextel) stuff, their startacks and passport phones were aesthetically displeasing,

To be honest, I really wasn't impressed by the first Xperia device. Blame it later to market with the hardware, or blame it on running Windows Mobile (or both!) - it just didn't appeal to me.Looking at this demo of the Xperia UI running android - well that's pretty cool! Would I buy one? Probably not because it doesn't sync with iSync (yet) and Google haven't done such a great job with providing

I've always been interested in android in a Geek sort of way. Never has this OS appealed to me in the iPhone-like "ZOMG! Can I haz Android?" type of way.This changed today when I saw a promo video of the HTV Hero.OK, promo videos are made to induce such an irrational "I want it!" behavior, but the interface is really cool (good job HTC) and it really leaves Windows Mobile in the dust. It's making