Taxis don't care that you're texting

Now, whether it’s on the streets of New York City or down the aisle of a local Walmart, its commonplace to see someone paying more attention to the tiny screen of their phone than to to the sights and sounds around them.

There has been, finally, a lot of forward progress in the world of augmented reality, and more importantly, the futuristic hardware that will drive it. Up to this point, virtual reality has required goofy looking eye-gear to perform its duties. Usually the viewer would be given an image made from small LCD screens that would “project” an image of 45-90 inches in front of them. Nothing behind these images were visible and because of the close actual proximity of the screens a eyestrain-induced headache was sure to follow.

Few people would be caught dead wearing such a contraption. In a society where bluetooth headsets have a certain amount of douchiness associated with them (at least according to The Daily Show), a Geordi LaForge piece of eyewear would be sure to cause one’s chase from town from an angry torch-wielding mob. The thing about those bluetooth headsets though is that there weren’t really necessary. In fact, they were often more trouble than convenience. The batteries on them had to be charged, they had to be readily accessible (or permanently attached to your ear), and you had to have already figured out how to pair it with your phone – usually not an obvious task. It’s was just easier to hold the phone up to your head when the phone rang, phone radiation be damned.

Google Project Glass headset

Bluetooth headsets will have its place though, but not exactly as we know them now. In the movie Minority Report, two of the main characters use cell phones that are not much more than earbuds. If I’m not mistaken the props used in that movie were actually Bang & Olufsen earphones that had the cords cut off. The technology to implement phone like this is right around the corner. Hardware has become smaller, and the idea of real voice recognition technology has become more mainstream thanks to Apple’s Siri technology. Who wants to bet that Apple has a screenless cell phone using Siri technology sitting in its prototype lab right now? It depends on the task, but a visual interface isn’t always the most efficient way to go.

But back to the screens. When you look down at the screen of your smartphone, are you truly aware of anything else around you? Do an experiment: pick a pedestrian-heavy street or a shopping mall on a Saturday afternoon. Walk towards your destination while sending a long text message to a friend. When you send the message, stop for a second and see if you can remember what you passed while you were doing that. Did you almost walk into anybody? Did you see that two-for-one sale at that store along the way? Probably not.

The distraction of cell phones, especially smart phones is well documented, especially in driving situations. Driving a car requires a lot of multi-tasking even though its second nature to most people. When you look away from the road though, a lot of those multiple tasks fall by the wayside. Why? In order to interact with something you need to pay attention to it.

A fighter jet HUD

Fighter jet pilots have this problem as well. It’s information overload. We drive a car and have to worry about our speed and whether the light up ahead is red or green. A fighter pilot has an insane number of decisions to make in a combat situation. It’s all important, but looking down at an altimeter in the heat of a mission could be the difference between life and death.

To counteract this information overload, fighter jets have HUDs (heads up displays) installed. They are basically small pieces of glass tilted at a 45 degree angle that will have primary information projected on such as speed, altitude, pitch and targeting information. The key factor in the HUD is the glass – the pilot can see this projected information while still seeing the terrain directly in front of them. Instead of having to look down to gather technical information, the pilot can process it concurrently with the environment around him.

Heads up technology has made its way into a few cars over recent years. Okay, so perhaps driving a car isn’t quite the same challenge as delivering a smart bomb through an open window, bit its no doubt safer to keep the driver’s eyes focused on the road. Along with the basic information that can be given to a driver, a HUD can also supply secondary information such as navigation, radio preferences or even additional safety features such as obstacle avoidance. Pretty neat.

Uber sexy!

What would happen if we applied the same idea to our smartphones? Set aside the geeky look of the gear for a second. If you could process secondary information about the world around you as you traverse through it, how much of an advantage could you potentially gain? In addition to navigational items and location-based information, your entire daily information stream could be presented without you having to take your complete focus off of your environment. Wow, imagine being able to see that cute puppy being walked by the even cuter girl down the street as you are reading the latest tweet from your friend. I mean really – if you saw both, which one would you want to pay attention to?

A few years from now we’re going to look back at these smartphones and realize how dumb they were. Certainly portable small devices with screens will always have a place, at least for the foreseeable future. As the technology to reduce the size of projected-screen devices continues to improve you’ll see more and more people using them as their primary device. Information is a huge part of our society, and those willing to embrace and utilize it will lead the way. Hey, they laughed at the concept of a television too. And a microwave. And a – oh, you get the point!

If you don’t know what LastPass is, well, you should. It’s a hugely helpful password manager that has all sorts of plug-ins for different web browsers and mobile platforms. If you still use “PASSWORD123” for every login you have then you should probably consider getting this plug-in and making your life a little less hackable. I’ve used competing products and I have found LastPass to be the most feature-complete and easiest solution.

Image via CrunchBase

Twelve of the world’s biggest phone networks – including AT&T, Orange and Telefonica – will announce their rival technology tomorrow to Apple’s App Store. The combined audience for the app platform will be 2 billion customers. Phone manufacturers Samsung, LG and Sony Ericsson are also part of the alliance.

The announcement is expected to take place at tomorrow’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, writes the Times, and will be good news for consumers. With the fragmentation of app stores from Apple, Android and others, many handsets and operators will now support a single standard of apps that work across multiple devices.

There’s no word if there will be a single app store, but a single standard for apps on devices from multiple networks is expected. It’s also unclear if the technology itself will be unveiled tomorrow — we may simply see a statement of intent.

Think about your cellphone and cellular service five years ago. Both were likely horrible. But you were content in your misery, because you didn’t know any better. Then came the iPhone. It was a mobile device that was so good, people were willing to ditch their existing service providers en masse (I did) to go to the only one that had it: AT&T. And while you might think that would be a big plus for AT&T, it actually shifted a massive amount of industry power to Apple. They had the device that everyone wanted. And they used that leverage to renegotiate their exclusive deal with AT&T to pay out a huge amount of money for each device sold.

Sure, there were hot selling mobile devices before it — the Motorola RAZR, for example, was the best selling phone for many years in a row — but the iPhone had two advantages: 1) Thanks to Apple’s complete control over the device, including, maybe most importantly, its software, they created a user experience that the RAZR never could.  2) Thanks to the App Store, there is some amount of lock-in to the device because users are spending a ton of money on apps and if they switch phones, those all go away.

With the iPhone, Apple has created a device that all the other U.S. carriers lust after. And that, in turn, has allowed Google to come along with Android. When the G1 launched a little over a year ago, it was the first of many devices to be heralded as a “iPhone killer.” It wasn’t. But Google didn’t care about that. All that mattered to them at the time was getting their foot in the door of an industry that they, like Apple, had not at all been a part of leading up to that first device. It worked. The carriers were so desperate for an “iPhone killer” that they seemed willing and ready to negotiate with Google to get as many devices out there as possible to ride the Internet-enabled smartphone tsunami that the iPhone earthquake started.

As time went on, and Apple’s exclusivity with AT&T remained intact, Google honed their skills, and improved their software. Their manufacturing partners got better too, culminating in Motorola’s Droid, released late last year. Also not an “iPhone killer,” as I wrote that the time, that device too, was never about that from Google’s perspective (though it was from Verizon’s). It was about continuing to inundate the market with their devices and gain partnerships. With some 20 Android devices now out there, the time was right for what Google did today, which is launch their own agenda to blow up mobile industry as we know it in the U.S.

Now, that may sound a bit extreme, but just look at what Google did today. They launched an unlocked phone that you can buy directly from them. Now, this first device may not have much of an impact because it’s too expensive ($529.00) for its limitations (it will only fully work on T-Mobile in the U.S.), but it’s a first step. More importantly, look at the page pictured below. Is there any question what Google is doing here? They’re taking the traditional mobile model in this country, where you first choose your carrier, and then choose your phone, and turning it upside down. It’s what Apple started with the iPhone. But Google goes farther, because they already have multiple carriers (in this case, T-Mobile and Verizon, coming this Spring).

So why on Earth are the carriers playing ball with this? Well, they really don’t have a choice. Every carrier not named AT&T does not have the iPhone, but wants it. Since they can’t have it (not yet, anyways), they’ll settle for the next best thing, which are now more clearly than ever these Android devices. Google, of course, controls those — and increasingly so, now that they’re dictating hardware specs and features to manufacturers.

And who did Google have on stage today at the event? Two CEOs of two manufacturers: HTC and Motorola. Google has these guys in their pockets because it’s not like they’re going to team up with Apple to make a device (Motorola tried, and failed). And other partners, like Microsoft, are proving to be less than ideal in an iPhone world. So with the manufacturers on its side, Google has all the leverage it needs over the carriers. And that’s why we’re seeing them fall in line with the new mobile world order. So far, it is just T-Mobile and Verizon in the U.S., but Google alluded to the fact that they’re talking to the other ones as well. That means Sprint and likely even AT&T, for the inevitable day that they do lose the iPhone exclusivity.

It’s not hard to imagine going to a website for a phone one day in the near future and seeing a list of all the carriers. And it will be even less of an issue when CDMA and GSM are replaced by LTE, which will allow for more universal devices. Google set this in motion today. And it’s a model Apple is likely to follow when the iPhone gets to more U.S. carriers. Undoubtedly, the other big players, BlackBerry and maybe even Palm would like to do this too, but they haven’t had either the leverage, or the gall, to stand up to the carriers in this country the way Apple and Google have. Maybe they will in the future. But to the victors go the spoils.

Read the entire article at TechCrunch.

The Strictly Come Dancing-style show will feature a range of entertainment and sport figures and former competitors from the show.

The roster includes singers Jewel and Belinda Carlisle, rapper Lil’ Kim, and 17-year-old Olympic gold medal-winning gymnast Shawn Johnson.

The new season will start 9 March.  [ed]Oh no! Please, please don’t let him incorporate any kind of technology into a dance routine![/ed]

See the full article at BBC News.