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.
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.
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?
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
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]
