Mobile & Wireless

No braille? No problem! This FingerReader by the Fluid Interfaces Group at the MIT Media Lab is a high-tech way to help visually impaired people read; it actually scans printed text and narrates it aloud. This short vid shows how it works from a few different angles, but basically: as a fingertip follows along in Continue Reading →

Google Fiber is ready to expand, as Google has identified nine sites scattered around the country as possible sites of deployment, the company said. “We’ve invited 34 cities in nine metro areas across the US to work with us to explore what it would take to build a new fiber-optic network in their community,” Google Continue Reading →

Visa and MasterCard are introducing Internet-based technologies to make it easier for shoppers to buy things at retail stores without pulling out a credit card. The two technologies, announced separately on Wednesday, will give merchants and banks more options for incorporating so-called contact-less payment systems into their mobile apps. The customer uses the app to Continue Reading →

If you want to run emulators on your iPhone (or iPad), you’ve basically got two options: Use this crazy workaround which involves rolling the date of your device back to 2012 and installing old, previously signed emulators. Alternatively, you can just bite the bullet and jailbreak and install any number of emulators that people are Continue Reading →

Our Glass Explorer community, which consists of people from all walks of life, actively participates in shaping the future of Glass. With new technology comes new questions, and our Explorers help to answer those questions. The first Explorers were developers from Google I/O 2012 and people who told us what they would do #ifihadglass. Since Continue Reading →

In one of the earliest pieces of evidence pointing to Apple’s push into the fitness and health monitoring field, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office on Tuesday granted the company a patent for a biometric headphone system that can sense a variety of metrics including temperature, heart rate and perspiration levels. Claiming priority over a Continue Reading →

HTC clearly doesn’t think that promising two years of Android updates is enough to win over American smartphone buyers. It’s launching HTC Advantage, an upgrade to its US support policy that goes beyond the usual warranty limits. In addition to delivering on earlier promises of OS upgrades and extra cloud storage, the Advantage program replaces Continue Reading →

Customers who sued Apple over the disappointing performance of their iPhone’s personal assistant, Siri, are out of luck after a federal judge concluded they didn’t show fraud or breach or warranty. In a decision issued Friday in Oakland, U.S. District Judge Claudia Wilken said Apple’s marketing descriptions of Siri as “the coolest feature,” a “breakthrough” Continue Reading →

Adrian Perica is a very busy man. Over the past 18 months, the mergers and acquisitions chief at Apple has been scouring the globe looking for deals, snatching up everything from search engines and data analytics to mapping software and motion tracking chips. Such a buying spree has ignited fierce speculation in tech circles and Continue Reading →

Ever spent ages wandering the grocery store while looking for a hard-to-find ingredient? If Philips brings its new connected retail lighting to your local supermarket, you may always know where to go. The technology uses light-based communication to create a positioning grid for your smartphone, telling you just what route you’ll need to take to Continue Reading →