Gearfuse

Yesterday, around 9:50am, I received a text message on my iPhone 3G. I opened it up and lo and behold, what do I see?

A fish, a soccer ball and a traffic light.

What the fuck could this be? After asking my friend how he sent images like that via SMS, he soon explained to me that these were Emoji, Japanese emoticons that are a huge overseas. Apple included support for these with the iPhone 2.2 update. The problem is, you can’t use them outside of Japan. Until now.

All you need is a buck. Head over to the App Store and purchase a Japanese RSS app called “Frostyplace.” Like I said, it’s a buck and once you buy it, open it up and click around for about three minutes. After that, exit out and repeat. After you’ve played with it for awhile, open up your keyboard preferences on the iPhone and you’ll find an Emoji option under Japanese options. Turn the Emoji on and you can now send these to anyone with an iPhone and they’ll be able to receive them. Quite good fun, considering you can send someone a pile of poop with eyes on it.

If you need more detailed instructions on how to do this, I highly recommend Justine’s blog. She seems to be the one who discovered this neat little hack.

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If someone ever stole my car, I’d wish for a feature that would allow me to cause my car to blow up via text message. That’s kind of the idea behind Lenovo’s latest notebook feature: Lenovo Constant Secure Remote Disable Feature.

Important data on your computer that you can’t have falling into the wrong hands? A porn library you can’t possibly have your wife stumbling upon? This new service will prevent any such scenarios by allowing the laptop’s owner to shut the computer down over a WWAN connection and lock it. All it takes is a simple text message from a cell phone to cripple your notebook’s capabilities. That will teach them to mess with your stuff! Look for this new feature around Q1 2009 on Lenovo notebooks at no additional charge.

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An incredibly useful feature is coming to Gmail. Starting today (if all goes well), you’ll be able to send your friends and contacts text messages via the integrated Gmail chat. You’ll be able to save phone numbers to contacts and Google will give you the option of sending them a text should they go offline. It sounds very beta right now though, with Google using 406 area code numbers to push the texts out.

The first time you send a text message, it will appear on the person’s phone as coming from a number in the 406 area code. Google has made several thousands of these numbers available for Gmail users, and once a number is associated with your account, all of the text messages you send through Gmail will come from that number.

The 406 number works both ways, so your friend can reply to you via text message. Also, your friend can save that number in their phone as belonging to you, and they can even use it to initiate new chats with you.

Google never ceases to amaze.

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Verizon is digging deep in to the pockets of its corporate users by charging an additional three cents per text message sent to its customers. This won’t affect you when you’re texting your friends, however it will affect standard-rate and premium programs of mobile terminated messages.

That includes text alerts, interactive voting notifications, SMS search responses and pretty much anything else that would’ve charged you anyway. Those Jamster commercials on late night television? Yup, those will cost them $0.03 every time they send you a message about Ne-Yo. Now, you’ll just have to add 3 cents on to your EZ Flirt bill, thanks to Verizon. Geez, can’t a guy get a lucky break?

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Just a quick heads up to anyone reading who uses PHP. If you’re looking for some text-to-speech on the quick, Jason Striegel has a great little piece on just that over at Hacks. I highly recommend you check it out and try messing around with it. The demo is pretty impressive and Jason touches on some other examples out there, including a primer on the Festival Speech Synthesis System. Check it out if you’re guided by (robotic) voices.

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Discovered on someone’s Tumblr yesterday, I found this link to Wonkette that explains how you can send a fake VP announcement to your friends. Why is this a riot? If you follow politics, you’d know that Barack Obama is announcing his vice president via SMS. Text message. Phone rants. So with a little Verizon Wireless trickery, you too can tell your friends that Obama has picked Ryan Ash as his VP, a choice sure to please the nation. Now go fuck with your friends and don’t rat me out.

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The folks over at Google have released a new version of Google Talk designed specifically for the iPhone and iPod Touch browsers in the US. No need to text message here because you can now chat on the go. No install or download required either, just go to google.com/talk, sign in and you’ll be on your way chatting it up with all your frienemies.

Now that the iPhone is becoming more and more like a computer everyday, who says you have to miss out on all the internet goodness when you’re away from your PC?

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I still love reading books. No matter how much is available for me to peruse online, there is something about reading off of a binded volume that never gets old. The only problem is that sometimes I find myself trying to copy and paste certain words and phrases, only to discover that my fingers don’t come with that feature (yet.)

Dixau allows you to scan text from print and transfer the said print to your computer, automatically linked with relevant information using Google and Wikipedia references. You can grab your own for $90 for some really simple Wikipedia entry editions. — Andrew Dobrow

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One of the models that deserve attention in the Winter line-up of AU KDDI would be Sanyo’s W42SA. This phone supports a new kind of handwriting recognition that does not require a stylus, instead you would be using your thumb to “stroke” over the number keys. Of course you can still use the usual T9 predictive text system, but just face it, there are a lot of words that even the Japanese don’t know how to pronounce properly, names and places with difficult Kanji for example (Chinese characters); and when you don’t know how to pronounce them, there’s no way you can type using Kana or romanization.

Of course this function is not needed if you use a fully alphabet-based language, but apart from being able to recognize thumbwriting, the Smooth-touch keypad (literally) can also be used for scrolling, similar but not as smooth as the Multi-Touch on iPhone obviously. The NikkeiBP team finds the Smooth-touch works pretty well, the built in 2 megapixel autofocus camera worked reasonably given that the overall thickness is only 19.4mm (49×99x19.4mm 117g), the smooth hinge design and huge buttons are also praised.

The 2.4″ QVGA screen, full HTML browser, music player and GPS all do their job as promised. The only nudge here is that Sanyo has not been maximizing their technology as you cannot use the Smooth-touch pad to control the cursor in the browser, and surprisingly there are no games that abuse such technology. Also, the battery doesn’t last too long when playing music. Ah well there’s no perfect phone after all. — Sam Chan

Sanyo W42SA review [NikkeiBP]
Thumbwriting video [NikkeiBP]
Smooth-touch scrolling video [NikkeiBP]