apps
Nokia introduces Bubbles to Symbian phones
Tired of having to unlock your phone each time you want to check a message or return a missed call? Nokia’s beta labs have come up with an app called Bubbles that lets you perform simple operations while your device is locked. All you have to do is select which task you want to do, represented by the bubble onscreen, and drag it to a drop point to initiate the command. The bubbles are constantly bouncing about your screen so you know that you won’t be making any accidental calls while the phone is in your pocket. All you have to do is to download the app onto your Symbian^3 phone, and lock it. To activate the bubbles, hit the Apps key and the bubbles will appear on screen. Hit the break for more details on what you can do with the app, and watch a video demonstration of Bubbles.
Functions you can do with Bubbles:
- Unlock the phone
- View new messages
- View/Respond to missed calls
- Control the music player
- Control the FM radio
- Change profile (profile timing also supported)
- Call/Message your three best friends
- Activate the backlight to use as a flashlight
- Show your current location using Ovi Maps
- Change the background of the Bubbles screen
- Display when battery needs charging
- Display statistics about bubble speed and distance (just for fun)
Apple is well known to be a company that continues to push the envelope when it comes to technological advancements and firsts. This time around, Cupertino has introduced the first ever automated security update for Mac computers in order to assist them in preventing attacks from recently identified bugs, which are also the very same bugs that that security researchers have pinpointed and warned against, as those could be the gateway for hackers to actually gain remote control of machines.
Over in New Jersey, District Judge William Martini has come up with a ruling that the police are not required to actually pick up a warrant before opening a fake Instagram account. This is because the bogus account could actually be used to receive pictures shared by a suspect, and some folks wonder whether this would require a search warrant to be issued beforehand. Not so, according to Judge Martini in his ruling that stated whenever Instagram users post photos on the site, they happen to be practicing “consensual sharing.”
In other words, users who put up photos on Instagram are more or less in the know that should they “follow” or “friend” others, they will also end up sharing their pictures with them. All in all, one should always be extra careful with whatever one shares with others online, as you can never quite tell how something might end up to bit you in the rear some day down the road.
Both iOS and Android number close to a million apps each on their respective app stores, which is one of the reasons why smartphone users flock to either operating system. Of course there are other factors, such as hardware, pricing, availability and so on, but it is safe to say that app availability plays a big role as well. Well Blackberry seems to think so as well as they have revealed that the Blackberry World app store currently sits at about 120,000 apps, which while still pretty small compared to iOS and Android, is a pretty huge deal considering that the platform and its accompanying devices were only launched earlier this year! Blackberry’s CEO Thorsten Heins praised the thriving ecosystem, which we guess was boosted by Blackberry’s efforts where they held events to encourage developers to submit as many apps as they can, and even offering monetary rewards on top of earnings for every app successfully submitted to Blackberry World. We can see that Blackberry is going for quantity at the moment, and we suppose there are quality apps within those 120,000, but for now it looks like as far as apps are concerned, they may very well be edging Windows Phone out of the picture!