Free Phone Calls With Fring

Video Shows How To Make Free Calls Using Fring Client

The nice thing about Fring is that it bridges the gaps in the phone system and makes free calling and messaging more practical and easier than ever.

The video below shows how Fring can operate with NO SIM in your phone or PPC phone PDA. A lot of phones and PDAs are now supported and the company is constantly beefing up the software and service.

Recently, the staff at Fring have released a new version for S60 devices and UIQ fairly close to each other. Both versions sport the same new features, which include:

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• File transfers from your handset (only with MSN users, though)
• Chat that's much closer to a PC-like experience
• Additional languages (French, Spanish, German, Chinese, Italian, Russian)
• More privacy settings
• Fringtones and vibrate

Of course, Fring still does what it was originally designed for: making VoIP calls from your mobile handset.

Technorati Tags: fring,free phone calls,VoIP,Skype

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Faster Search for Nokia Smartphones

Google Speeds Up Searches for Nokia N and E Series Smartphones

Google just began offering a new free app that greatly speeds up searches for smartphones running on Nokia's S60 3rd Edition platform.

By running through software running natively on the phone instead of through a web browser, your searches will speed up by an average of 40 percent, which they show in Google's video demonstration. Once it's installed, the software places a Google search box directly on your smartphone's home screen.

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The point of the shortcut is to allow users to perform a search without having to launch their smartphone's web browser to start the process and, by an extension, speed things up considerably.

Type a query into the box and press search to launch your smartphone's browser, which should quickly provide the results of your query, as long as a wireless connection is present, of course.

Unfortunately, Google's search box is only available to Nokia smartphones with a 'Ctrl' or 'pencil/edit' key—otherwise you must access the applet through the regular S60 application launcher. 

Google's search box for S60 smartphones is based on a new, more localized mobile search engine Google introduced a few weeks ago. The overall interface's been revamped as well.

Nokia plans to bundle this new software with its latest smartphones: the N96, N78, 6210 Navigator, and 6220 classic.

Judging from the research, there is as much as a 40 percent reduction in the average time to complete an initial search. You can see just how much faster it is in this video:

Technorati Tags: Nokia,Phones,Google,Faster Search

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SkyDrive Storage Increased to 5GB

Access Files and Data From Anywhere for Free

SkyDrive provides free, password-protected online file storage and sharing. It's a convenient way to make sure your files are available to you from any computer, without having to carry them around on a flash drive. For many people such as computer consultants and other mobile professionals, this makes a lot of sense. If you need to access software, documents or photos from anywhere this may be a real solution for you.

New in this release:

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• Free online storage is increasing from 1GB to 5 GB
• Now available in many more places around the world (see if it's available where you live)
• Faster and more reliable service
• Not in beta anymore--this time it's official!

It's very easy to use, so go ahead and try it out.

Microsoft has been beefing up its online resources lately and SkyDrive takes its place in the ever-growing collection of Windows Live offerings (Hotmail, Mail, Photo Gallery, Calendar, Spaces, Writer, Messenger, Events, Toolbar, and OneCare Family Safety). With file storage and sharing on SkyDrive, you have one more tool to help you manage your online world.

Technorati Tags: skydrive,windows live,storage,share files

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3D Graphics From New Camera Chip

3D Pictures Will Open Up New Graphics Opportunities

If you've ever wanted to remove an unwanted background from a digital picture or create 3D artwork, you may soon be able to do so using images shot with your new 3D camera.

Researchers at Stanford University have come up with a chip which can record pictures in 3D. Unlike normal camera sensors, the three megapixel chip array uses overlapping 16x16 arrays of pixels. Known as "sub-arrays", each has its own lens.

Because these arrays get their images from slightly different angles, 3D information can be recorded by examining the differences between the images, very similar to the way the human brain captures depth information from comparing the stereoscopic images from our two eyes.

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Adobe has shown a similar setup, but it uses a large number of lenses grouped together in an arrangement similar to a fly's eye. The Stanford chip would be smaller and thus easier to mount in a camera lens housing . The 3D information is currently stored simply as metadata in the image, so software could easily be designed to, for instance, eliminate busy backgrounds from photographs.

When images taken by the multi-aperture device are processed by specialized software, differences in location are measured from each mini-lens, and then combined into a photograph containing a depth map. This procedure allows the same image to appear at different angles, provided the subject has depth to begin with (for example, it's not a flat surface).

Let's hope that the product development cycle is short for this exciting new technology.

Technorati Tags: 3d graphics,camera,new chip

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Soyntec Wiffinder Bag

Wi-Fi Gadget Finds Access Points and Totes Your Laptop

Searching for a Wi-Fi signal has become an everyday ritual for many of the ‘always connected’ mobile crowd. For those in need of a solution to searching for signals, check out the newly launched Wiffinder bags from Soyntec.

The Wiffinder 400 Executive Case fits laptops up to 15.4-inches and features an integrated Wi-Fi finder with a signal strength indicator.

The integrated WiFi signal detector works with 2.4 G, 802.11b/802.11g networks and also features a clock. Press a button and the detector will look around for a signal that will allow you to get online.

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Sony Mylo Com-2

Second Generation Wi-Fi gadget

If you just want an affordable way to chat and keep in touch with your contacts using cheaply available wireless access, this Wi-Fi device may be just the ticket. Half way between a PDA and a laptop, it has a lot of the features that many people are using these days.

Like the first-generation Mylo, the COM-2 ($299) is a Wi-Fi gadget that lets users surf the Internet, send instant messages and play MP3 music files. With an 800-by-480-pixel touch screen, it looks and feels a lot like Sony's PSP handheld gaming system and is significantly better than the original model that debuted back in 2006.

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The COM-2 does double-duty as a 1.3 megapixel camera, and the slide-out QWERTY keyboard now features backlighting, allowing users to chat or surf in the dark (though the shortcut buttons on the touch screen's sides don't illuminate). It supports the 802.11b and 802.11g wireless protocols and uses 1 gigabyte of internal memory, that can be upgraded to 8 GB through a Memory Stick Duo/PRO Duo expansion slot.

The device adds AOL's messaging software and still supports Yahoo Inc's Yahoo Messenger, Google Inc's Google Talk and Skype, which is eBay Inc's Voice-over-Internet-Protocol service. And you can also watch YouTube videos with the Adobe Flash Lite 3 player and employ desktop widgets to run Google searches and track who's online.

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iPhone Contest and Survey

StreamingMedia.com CDN Survey and Contest

If you, or your company are creating video content and then distributing this content through enterprise-level Content Delivery Networks (NOT YouTube) then you might want to know of a contest StreamingMedia.com is running until March 1st, 2008.

You just complete an online questionnaire of 24 questions which takes about 2 minutes. Upon completion, you’re eligible to win a free iPhone. Survey results will also be made available to all who participate and are interested.

While the contest doesn’t seem to present any exclusions, a quick read of some of the questions strongly implies that the promotion is being offered in large part to learn more about the site’s subscriber base.

So, unless you are in or around CDN for video, you might want to not think so much about entering.

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