Posted by Kevin Huffman
Tech
Saturday, March 27th, 2010
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Wakey wakey, eggs and a culturally accepted meat or vegetable product that can be diminutized to rhyme with “wakey!” Have we got a surprise for you. This weekend we’re giving away an HTC HD2 GSM phone for T-Mobile . If you recall, the HD2 is a glorious Windows Mobile 6.5 phone with lots of great things built-in including a huge, beautiful screen, Wi-Fi, and it even comes with two Transformers movies right on the handset. Seriously good stuff. I haven’t been a fan of Windows Mobile since 2000 and even I like it. How do you win? I need you to comment below with a reason why you, dear sir, deserve this phone. Maybe your current phone is garbage. Maybe you need it for a great uncle who is also a Duke and if you give it to him you will get his hereditary title when he dies. Either way, you need to convince us of this. Extra points go to folks who email contest@crunchgear.com with a picture of themselves with their old, busted phone and a sad, sad face. We’ll pick the best sob story and send them this phone.
Posted by Kevin Huffman
Tech
Thursday, March 25th, 2010
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Here’s a quick look at the first US version of the HTC HD2 , a really nice Windows Mobile 6.5 phone. We’ve have plenty of coverage of this phone over the past few months but now it’s available on T-Mobile for $200 with contract. It’s a really beautiful phone – and I don’t say that much – but will it take off with WinPho waiting in the wings?
Posted by Kevin Huffman
Tech
Tuesday, March 23rd, 2010
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Now here’s a ray of sunshine on a cloudy day. LookTel is an object identifier – you point it at something and it tells you what it is. You can teach it to recognize new objects and by aiming it at a product, the program can tell what it is using real speech and when you need to ID something on the fly, you can stick on an image sticker and read that sticker. It’s more or less a barcode and QR scanner with some image recognition thrown in, but it really could be a boon to those with failing – or failed – eyesight. The system needs a little more computing power than is available in the average smartphone so you need a local PC to help ID some things. The machine learning works like this: Users running the LookTel Mobile software, which runs on compatible Windows Mobile Smartphones, use the cell phone’s touch-screen interface to navigate and the cell phone’s camera to recognize objects. The LookTel Mobile software transmits the live images from the cell phone to a PC running LookTel BaseStation, our sophisticated recognition software. When the PC receives a request to look up an image, it sorts through the image library to find the matching image stored in the database. It then sends back the information that permits the Smartphone to speak the description of the item to you. LookTel “learns” to recognize new items by storing an image of the item, captured by the Smartphone, and matching it with a tag. The tag can be your own voice or a text tag that is read by the text-to-speech engine, similar to what your home PC can do. There is also a live-assistant portion that lets human beings tell you what’s going on around you as you point your phone’s camera at the scene. It works with Windows smartphones and MIDs. There is no current pricing – I have an email into the company – but I looks like a great idea. Considering my eyes will probably eventually go from all this monitor usage, I may need this sooner than later.
Posted by 010081
Tech
Friday, March 19th, 2010
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Here it is, folks! Its been a few long months for Sprint fans toting Touch Pro2’s, given that the same device on all of the other carriers saw upgrades to Windows Mobile 6.5 months ago while their own Pro2s stayed back at WinMo 6.1. We knew the update was coming sometime in March , and then we pinned the date down to some more specific : today.
Posted by 010081
Tech
Thursday, March 11th, 2010
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While a lot of people are pretty pumped about Windows Phone 7 , there’s are some people who definitely are not : everyone stuck on a now antiquated Windows Mobile 6.5 handset. Microsoft has already confirmed that if your phones running 6.5, it’s not going to be running 7 any time soon. If you can’t join’em, beat’em, right? There’s a new project in the works which aims to breath new life into old Windows Mobile 6.5 phones.. by replacing the whole OS with Android. Read the rest at MobileCrunch > >