Remember Steve Jobs, Nexux Prime Specs leaked,
and a look at Wolfram Alpha’s latest update
for iPad today on App Judgment.
This episode of App Judgment is brought to
you by Go Daddy.
Welcome to App Judgment, your source for mobile
application news and reviews, I’m David
Prager and I’m Jackie Talbott and by now
you’ve already all heard the sad news about
Steve Job’s passing. Yeah, very, very, very
few times in my life have I ever been around
when someone of that iconoclasm has died and
it seems likr it was a moment and everyone
stops what they are doing and reminiscent
and thinks about the impact he had on their
lives. And it’s amazing that he had an impact
on pretty much all of our lives. Android,
iPhone, PC, Mac users alike. Users and content
creators like, it’s been a huge impact.
We were talking about our first Mac products
or Apple products so to say. What were you?
I was a PC user for the longest time. I was
too, I grew up on PC. I switched, probably
not even until 2006, a little bit after OS10
came out and I remember also switching my
parents over to it because it was such a enhancement
to the way that they lived their life from
a computer perspective and my dad still remembers
the dad that I switched him over and in a
way, teaching an old dog new tricks is something
you can really do because of the incredible
usability of all the products Apple has put
out. Yeah, me too, I had the first one, you
said you had the black Mac book, I got mine
in ’05, I got the white one. But that was
pretty much the first. I think a lot of us
have been in, even in awe of the fact that
we can say we were living at the same time
of a person like Steve Jobs. We asked several
of our viewers to tell us a little bit about
what they thought of Steve Jobs. This first
one here is from Peter Schlosser who says,
‘I make a living using his products, he
was an incredible creative and visionary force.’
Yeah, actually Peter, hi Peter, he was one
of the creators of Gears of War music so he
had absolutely vote for that.
Peter Visima writes ‘I first sat in front
of an Apple Mac 2 in 1988 and it changed my
life forever. I was able to build a business
upon that and yes, I have been an Apple fan
boy ever since.’
And finally, we’ve got CJ Payne who wrote
in ‘I literally just became an Apple employee
six days ago, this man redesigned how we used
technology on a daily basis, I’m not looking
forward to work today, such a sad time.’
There is no easy way to segue from sad news
like this to relatively trivial hardware news,
but, Apple did just announce the iPhone 4S
a couple of days ago and next week Samsung
is expected to announce the new Nexus Prime
in San Diego and it looks like we have a sneak
peek at the specs. That is very true, we saw
that it is going to be including a bunch exciting
things like Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich
of course, it’s going to be only 9 millimeters
thin, the display is something we are actually
excited about. It has the active matrix 0LEG
HD display which is supposed to be insane.
I’m interested to see it because the, on
the iPhone the retina display has been so
amazing, so much so that they didn’t even
update the display, so I’m excited to see
the new display of that and of course, it’s
a 1.2 gigahertz A9 processor, it’s got a
gig of ram, 32 gigabytes of built in storage,
a 5 megapixel versus an 8 megapixel camera.
And only 1.3 megapixels for the front camera,
but it still shoots 1080p HD video and of
course the network is LTEHSPA, depending on
the carrier so it will be interesting to see
the speed comparison between it and some of
its notable competitors and on the Wi-Fi side
it has A, B, G, N I think like any major phone
is going to be able to support those, it will
be interesting to see what they look and feel
really is when people can get these in their
hands.
So next Tuesday they should be announcing
it and hopefully we’ll be announcing that
as well.
So, quickly running down some of this week’s
top app news. Microsoft releases an official
hotmail app in the Android market. And enhanced
Google docs experience on Android tablets.
The addicting Flick Golf is now in the Android
market and Facebook for Android update fixes
the refresh bug.
So, say goodbye to punch cards. Perka is your
new IOS and Android merchant loyalty system
that is, if it catches on. Socialcam 3.0 for
iPhone adds live filters for that insta-gram
feel. And, IndieCade is the winner of a auteur
award, Eliss, is now free in the app store
as a thank you to Steve Jobs. Infinity Blade
II demo’d at the Apple iPhone 4S announcement
comes to IOS December 1 and finally Plus One,
a book while reading in the new Google Books
update.
Coming up next, I’ll be taking a look at
Wolfram Alpha latest iPad update. But first,
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Today we’re going to take a look at Wolfram
Alpha’s latest update for the iPad. The
two major updates are when you search and
find results you can now share them easily
on Facebook and there is a new landscape keyboard
that allows you to input a larger amount of
search queries without having to open up new
keyboards on the side. So, if you don’t
already know what Wolfram Alpha is, in a way
it is kind of a cross between Wikipedia and
Google but with a lot of scientific, factual
data and what it is, some huge database that
allows you to crunch out answers to questions
based on, then it put together, based on the
queries you put in. For example, if I want
to search for the word ‘mole’ it’s going
to tell me that a mole is a mammalian creature
and it will tell me the exact taxonomy, what
it is and how long it has been in existence
and even what it might have evolved from.
But it is also smart to know that maybe I
don’t care about the animal, maybe I was
talking about a unit of measurement. So I
can click on that across the top and immediately
know that the number of moles, molecules that
is in a mole is 6.02 x 10 to the 23. Another
example search you can do, maybe you want
to know what the speed of sound is, well,
it will tell you the speed of sound that is
based on variables that you can continually
change, it will say that based on your atmospheric
pressure, this is how fast it is and I can
immediately have it tell me what it is in
context to feet per second, meters per second
or any other manner of types of measures I
can compare and contrast it with. In addition
to that, it lets you do all kinds of mathematic
calculations and word definitions. I can see
this as a very robotic type of system but
I can also ask this robot what is the word
love, and will come back and tell me, with
a very emotional response, what the feelings
and nature and history of the word love is
and all the different context, some of theme
x-rated that it might go into. With that said,
let’s go on to our pros and cons.
First here, it is extremely fast at parsing
a very, very, very large database and coming
up with the answers you want to find based
on all of that data. Next, you’ll see there
is example bar on the side that makes the
learning curve of using the application very
small because it shows you all the different
sub-sets, type of topics you can ask and gives
you examples of searches within them as well
as showing popular searching for different
types of answers you might get. Thirdly, I
think it is really notable to see that a computer,
you know, knows what love is.
So, next let’s move onto our cons. First,
although it is a huge database, it would be
nice to have a certain amount of that stuff,
so for some simple math problems and simple
conversions available to do off-line. But
you can’t, you can’t use the app at all
unless you are actually online. The next con,
and I was struggling to find cons because
quite frankly this is an amazing app, that
second con is that all the information and
all the types of queries search results that
you can get are available for free online
which makes you think, why would I get this
app if all the information is for free. That
said, I still say this is an absolute definite
download because the application, and the
way it is used is actually extremely enhanced
using the iPad or the iPhone app. I think
it is definite download for $1.99 I’d be
willing to pay substantially more for it and
I think this is going to get a lot bigger.
Thanks for watching, I’m David Prager, don’t
forget that you can find us on Twitter, you
can find us on Facebook, you can find us on
You Tube, you can even send us email at appjudgment@revision3.com.
Thanks for watching and we’ll see you next
week.
