App Review: Scout finds your traffic-free commute

CNET - 

 

The Good Scout automatically alerts you to bad traffic on your commute. It includes a points-of interest database, a history list, and syncs with a website for saved destinations. The basic app is free.

The Bad You have to pay a fee to download maps in Scout. It does not include routes using public transit or bicycles.

The Bottom Line Scout offers a better feature set, including excellent help for daily commuters, than either Google Maps or Apple Maps, with similarly good route guidance.

Read the Full Review

New Android App Finds Carrier IQ (Malicious Spyware) Fast, Free, and Easy

PCMag.Com - Whether you believe Carrier IQ or not that its software, embedded on certain smartphones, is a malicious, keylogging entity or a tool that helps operators improve the smartphone user experience, you have a choice. Namely, there are ways to eliminate this question from the equation by detecting and removing Carrier IQ from your device, if you really want.

And Lookout Mobile Security – makers of the “Lookout” security app for both IPhones and Android smartphones – have given you an easy way to do just that. Detect, we should specify, and only for Android devices.

Why Android only? Carrier IQ is no longer supported as of iOS 5 (Apple insists its customers have to opt-in before any information about their smartphones is shipped off to Apple HQ), and blocking its effects on your iOS 5-based iPhone is super-easy: Click on your Settings button, then General, About, Diagnostics & Usage, and select ” Don’t Send.”                 More

Video: Phone App For Distracted Pedestrians Detects When You’re About to Get Hit By a Car

PopSci - WalkSafe WalkSafe uses vision learning to figure 
out which direction cars are facing and establish whether 
any of them are threats to a distracted user who might 
unwittingly wander into traffic while talking on the phone.

Texting while driving can be deadly. Talking while walking? Also deadly. Or at least threatening enough that researchers at Dartmouth and the University of Bologna thought it necessary to develop a smartphone app that makes it safer. Their Android app uses machine learning and image recognition that takes place right on your phone to alert you when you’re chatting your way right into an oncoming smash-up.

The app uses the outward facing camera on a smartphone to help a pedestrian look both ways (or at least one way). Using vision algorithms built into the app, the system determines which way cars on the roadway are facing and whether or not they are moving, taking into account the tilt of the phone and varying light conditions to establish an accurate picture of the roadway. It then figures out if any approaching vehicle is a threat to the user.

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Mozilla puts mobile Firefox on the front burner

Mozilla is expanding development of Firefox for Android with new efforts to improve its performance, lower its power consumption, adapt it for tablets–and keep the browser maker relevant in the hottest area of computing.

Firefox is the second-most widely used browser on computers, but things are different in the mobile arena. There, Firefox is at a serious disadvantage compared to mobile browsers such as Apple’s Safari and Google’s unbranded Android browser that are built into the operating systems.

Mozilla, by comparison, must convince people or phone makers to install Firefox, and even then restrictions keep it off several mobile operating systems.

But Mozilla clearly has recognized that mobile computing is rapidly expanding beyond the niche of technophiles and wealthy folks who want a high-status phone. Firefox won’t have an easy time carving a place for itself on new mobile devices, but Mozilla is doing its darndest to build a browser that will attract users.

One illustration: When Mozilla programmer Dave Mandelin began an active discussion about what Firefox needs to run better on ARM processors, which dominate the phone and tablet market, a broad, active discussion took off. Mandelin wasn’t very gentle.

“If you have a powerful device, Firefox performance is in many ways pretty good. But UI [user interface] responsiveness and memory usage seem to be in pretty bad shape,” Mandelin said. “So we need to get better measurements and start improving performance in those areas, today.”

And Mozilla, barred from bringing its browser to major mobile operating systems such as Apple’s iOS and Microsoft’s Windows Phone, is moving beyond browsers, too.

“Smartphones and tablets are where the next billion people will expect their personalized experience to be available to them anytime, anywhere,” Mozilla said in its vision statement that Mozilla Vice President of Products Jay Sullivan published earlier this year. “To significantly affect Internet life in the future, we will have to deliver value on major OSes, whether we are allowed to ship our own browser engine or not.”


Getting a Fennec foothold
That operating system barrier has made it harder for Firefox for mobile, code-named Fennec, to gain a foothold.

The two initial operating systems for Fennec were Maemo from Nokia and Windows Mobile from Microsoft. Maemo became MeeGo when Nokia merged the effort with Intel’s mobile Linux project, but through a major Nokia restructuring, MeeGo has been consigned to oblivion.

Microsoft, meanwhile, overhauled Windows Mobile 6.5 to produce Windows Phone 7–and one aspect of that shift is the removal of the software interfaces necessary to run Firefox.

Another possible avenue, Research in Motion’s BlackBerry operating system, doesn’t look promising, either. Although RIM started a closed beta test of a native developer kit (NDK) last week for BlackBerry tablets, the company told CNET in a statement that won’t enable browsers such as Firefox, as it’s currently engineered, on phones.

“We do not have any plans to bring an NDK to the BlackBerry OS today,” the company said in a statement. “It would have to be written in Java to run on our platform. Opera, Bolt, and other browsers have been ported to the BlackBerry smartphone platform to date.”                   More