Review: Sat Nav 2 iPhone App by Skobbler

Gone are the days when we needed to pack a TomTom or other SatNav device for our travels. Now, we simply bring our mobile phone.

I was always reluctant to buy a SatNav app for two reasons...

1. Price - most are over £25
2. App Size - often almost 1Gb of data is required for such apps

Then I came across Sat Nav 2 by Skobbler. It's got a tiny 40Mb file size and only cost £1.49. So surely it must be rubbish? Well actually, quite the contrary. 

The developers at Skobbler have identified a key problem with so many of the navigation apps - the amount of memory they take up is comparable to a few thousand songs - now which would you prefer? A SatNav app which gets used once a month? Or a few extra albums to diverge the musical tastes on the commute? The reason why so many apps have such a huge file size is due to their local storage of maps. This app on the other hand doesn't store the maps - it quickly downloads them as you set up a new route, storing them in temporary memory.

That "quick download" has two disadvantages;

1. If you are abroad, it will cost a fortune
2. If you don't have an unlimited data plan

Solution? Well for a few pounds extra, you can download specific maps for countries - UK, Ireland, France or many more - to be stored on your phone for offline navigation, saving you on data costs.

I've only had one car journey with it, but I must say, it is fantastic. The voice commands are non-intrusive, gently lowering the volume of your music to give directions. The visuals are lush and rounded, unlike so many of the free or budget apps available. And if travel really is that boring, you can upgrade to a Wallace & Grommet voice-over

Augmented Reality Clothes Shopping

Wow! We all know by now how much easier online shopping is. It's so easy to find the best tv, or the highest recommended beard trimmer. But what about something more objective, like clothes?

The one remaining industry that continues to flourish is the high-street clothing market. Everything from Topshop to M&S to Urban Outfitters have of course expanded to huge online stores, but it is their physical shops in your local town that draw in so many customers. And why do people love going into those shops on the high-street? You walk in, you see something you like, you try it on....

Wait. Online, you "type in", you "browse through", you "try on".

No, surely not.

Believe it or not, Augmented Reality Clothes Shopping could well be the next step in the fashion industry. Imagine if you could sit at home, or your laptop or your iPhone and see yourself wearing the clothes. Do a twirl for the mirror! Even that is no exaggeration; the beauty of augmented reality is that it adapts to the changes it sees. Does my bum look big in this? Turn round and have a look in the "virtual mirror" and see! If that top doesn't quite suit, how about just swiping and trying the next item on. No more long waits for the fitting room or wrestling to get into the jeans that are too small.

Maybe there is a downside to all this ease of shopping. If we sit at home for everything - from food shopping to buying the latest wardrobe wears - we might not be able to fit into those jeans when they arrive after all!

Xbox Kinect may just save your life

We've all heard it in the news: Superbug Hits Hospital, New Virus Kills Sick, Deadly Bug In NHS.

Viruses and bugs spread like wildfire - that's no exaggeration! You can imagine how a hospital is like a breeding ground for them, especially with all those weakened immune systems. Well imagine just how vulnerable you are lying on the operating table.

Sure, surgeons and staff "scrub in" before entering the room and it's meant to be a designated clean zone, but how clean can it be?

When a surgeon needs to look again at your chart, at the procedure or at scans, often all that is available is the digital copy. Get him a tablet pc you say! But do you really want a surgeon, who will then go on to be touching your insides (sorry!) handling a filthy tablet during each operation? Not quite ideal! In reality, what the surgeon will do is take off all the gear, go into another room, load up the data on the computer, scrub back in, before re-entering the operating room.

Of course you are still lying there, opened out for all to see - for germs to see!

What if the surgeon could call up the information on screen without having to touch anything? Step in the Xbox Kinect. Yes, that's right, the games console your kids play on will soon be used in surgery. The Kinect is a controller-less device which senses body movements to operate (excuse the pun) an on-screen command.  Doctors can use various hand gestures to rotate scans, pan through 3D images and recall important data - all without getting their hands dirty!

Any advance in medicine is great, but to see a games console help in this? It's child's play!

Spotlight: Skin Scan App

The Skin Scan app is a simple premise: point your iPhone camera at a spot and it's system will analyse the picture for likelihoods of potentially harmful skin blemishes. 

This is not the first time an app has been used for medical advice and services. We've seen doctors beginning to walk around with an iPad; images of brain scans and X-rays automatically streamed to them. We've seen the novel, but slightly amateur efforts of using the iPhone's torch and camera to act as a pulse monitor. Not to mention the copious numbers of free apps available to input an ailment and receive an instant list of possible causes, complete with full symptoms and remedies.

This is definitely a welcome step forward for medicine and health care. Waiting lists continue to grow, doctors continue to work longer and longer hours. It's not unknown to wait a week for an appointment with your doctor. So such apps can only seek to add reassurance on health issues which play on our minds.

However there is a definite negative: Would you trust an app to properly diagnose a cancer? I know I wouldn't. As we become increasingly more reliant on the wealth of knowledge on the internet, I can't help but feel we lose touch with real life somewhat. How many case studies will we hear of in the next decades of how someone had a pain or a problem, which later developed into something life threatening. They didn't go to the doctor because an iPhone diagnosis app told them it was a common problem that would go away on its own.

The underlying truth is that although these medical apps are useful, they are by no means a replacement for a qualified health professional. Men are bad enough to get to go to the doctors without adding further excuses to put off a full examination after only an iPhone app search.

Spotlight: Cube Laser Augmented Reality Iphone Keyboard

Imagine this - you are sitting in the airport trying to get a few emails sent before your 8 hour flight to New York for that monthly business meeting. You need to get those emails sent now, or else it will be 2 working days before their recipients back in the office get them, with the time difference. With all handheld computers, typing is slow, no matter how fast you are. Don't you just wish you had a full size keyboard in your bag?

Enter the Celluon Magic Cube.

It's a nifty idea, being able to type on any surface. The Cube projects a full sized keyboard onto just about anything - in our case, the slightly gritty airport coffee lounge table - or the latest copy of the Economist. It uses a laser to display all the "keys" onto the surface, then clever technology to pick up when you type a letter. And via bluetooth, your words of wisdom are transferred wireless to your phone. A little pricey at almost $170 dollars, but for something this compact and light, with a rechargeable battery giving you 150 minutes in-the-office-away-from-work, it could well be worth a look.

I've tried it myself and I must admit a few things;

• Novelty factor is fantastic - you will be writing a short novel just to be able to use this thing!
• People will be jealous - using a colleague's in the airport, I got shot quite a few wishful looks from those men in suits pounding away at blackberry keys
•  There is a learning curve - don't expect to be able to type quite as fast as you do on a physical keyboard - at least not straight away. It does require a little getting used to when you don't have that "feel" of a key. 

Overall, it's a huge step in the right direction. Maybe someday, something like this will come built into your smartphone? I certainly hope so!

Review: Starwalk iPhone Augmented Reality App

"Starwalk" is an iPhone Augmented Reality App aimed at Amateur Astronomers or those who have a general interest in the sky and stars. I use the app extensively, so am very familiar with its uses, advantages and disadvantages. On a recent stargazing trip with a professional astronomer, he was in fact incredibly impressed and later went on to buy the app himself.

The concept is simple. Launch the app, hold your iPhone up to the sky and using your phone's compass and tilt sensor, the screen displays an interactive sky map of the stars you are facing. As we have came to expect of technology these days, a simple pinch zooms in on the map. Scrolling across can be done manually using the finger, or by moving the phone itself to point toward the area of the sky under investigation.

One of the most useful points of this app is its ability to be fast forwarded in time. By this, I mean, pick a date and time in the future or the past and the app can automatically display the night sky as it will be or was. When we had planned the stargazing trip 2 months in advance, this feature proved incredibly useful for discovering some information about the stars we would see on the night. I have also rewound time back to the date I was born, for some true astrological nostalgia.

The app also comes with a handy "night mode" which changes all fonts from green to red. The reason being that the human eye adjusts to the dark night sky very slowly. Any lights or brightness will rapidly adjust the eye back to seeing in lighter conditions, to avoid damage to the eye. However of all the colours, the eye is least affected by the red part of the spectrum. Viewing the screen in red thus allows the user to maintain their dark adjusted eyes.

Overall, this app is well designed, full of useful features for both the curious stargazer and the full time astronomer. It's something which can be used again and again, the novelty rarely wearing off since the sky is such a dynamic, constantly changing beauty. I would give it a 9/10.

Review: Aurasma

Aurasma, available from the app store is the first of an intriguing number of Iphone Augmented Reality Apps that really do peak my interest. There has been an ever increasing number of such applications but this is the first to implement the type of Augmented Reality we expect to see as portrayed in Hollywood.

Users are invited to create a profile, which can then be used to create Augmented Reality relations visible to those who follow that profile. Currently, at time of writing, no major companies offer such profiles for following, but users can still create their own. For example, one early adopter launched the app and linked the headline picture from the New York Times to a related video of the event on the NYT website. Thus, any followers of that user would be able to buy their own copy of the newspaper, view it through their iPhone camera and the video would begin playing in place of the picture, still surrounded by the text of the actual newspaper.

Still in a beta stage, the technology is undeniably in development and its potential is yet to be fully realised. There is no word on when we can expect to see companies offering this service themselves, yet it can only be a matter of time. In the age of decreasing hard copy newspaper sales, any strive toward digitalising them forward to the 21st Century could only be a good thing.

Never again would you have to type web addresses seen in adverts into your browser to find out more information. Instead, simply view the advert through your iPhone to instantly access video demonstrations, reviews, video advertisements. Not bad all from a handheld mobile phone.

There are however, disadvantages to such technology. It is not inconceivable to imagine a World where everything around you will become an advert. Viewing your slightly worn Converse shoes will trigger promotions for the latest colour and cut, observing buildings will only briefly tell you about their history before launching into full detail of the current companies product range. For this to catch on, it requires user discretion and tastefulness. The only question that remains is not if this becomes popular, but when.