I’ve been using Aardvark since they opened the doors and it is an amazing service. Not only can you get answers to your questions from multiple people (giving you the quickest and easiest way to find information when you need it) but you can also answer questions and help others. I’ve made buddies on Aardvark and I’ve also looked at questions and thought, “They should have just Google’d that one.”

Well, now Aardvark have opened another door and it’s one that makes it so much more simpler to get answers to your questions. The main tab of the app has a box for you to ask your question and it lists all the questions that you’ve asked or answered in chronological order. There’s a tab for you to view current questions to answer and to view your buddies on Aardvark.

Overall, a great, simple app that does that it should. The iPhone/iPod Touch app is out and ready to be downloaded from the App Store free of charge.

A user at Androidforums.com, tankboyben, has modded his HTC G1 phone to make it more Steampunk. It was all done by hand and looks amazing! You can view the full gallery of pics at androidforums.com.

 
PALO ALTO, Calif. – September 15, 2009 — Today Kinoma announced that its flagship product, Kinoma Play, is now available for Nokia S60, the world’s dominant smartphone platform. Nokia S60 users can now enjoy the best way to find, play and share media in a beautiful, fast, easy-to-use application.
 
Kinoma Play lets users find media fast by browsing the extensive built-in Kinoma Guide app or searching leading media sites including YouTube, Flickr and SHOUTcast. It allows them to play media in all popular formats including Windows Media, MPEG-4/H.264 and iTunes AAC. Finally, Kinoma Play users can easily share what they’re enjoying using Twitter, Facebook, Last.fm and more.
 
“Kinoma Play connects your media and your social networks with a power and simplicity unavailable in any other S60 application,” said Peter Hoddie, CEO of Kinoma. “It’s not just that Kinoma Play does more — it’s how naturally and intuitively everything works together. Nokia users have been asking us for Kinoma Play since its release on Windows Mobile, and today we’re proud to announce that their ‘killer app’ has arrived.”
 
“Nokia’s goal is to provide the best media experience possible on mobile, so we’re thrilled that Kinoma Play is now available for Nokia S60 phones,” said Purnima Kochikar, VP, Forum Nokia and Developer Communities, at Nokia. “It’s exciting and fun for consumers who want to play and share the world’s
best entertainment content, and indispensible for business users who need constant access to the latest business and financial news. Innovators like Kinoma show that the only limit to Nokia platforms is their imagination.”
 
Setting a New Standard for S60 Applications, and for Mobile Media
As a next-generation media player, Kinoma Play is peerless. It makes standalone single-media players obsolete, enabling effortless command over music, video, podcasts, audiobooks, Internet radio and photos. Whether playing media from the phone, web sites or social networks, Kinoma Play makes the experience fast, fun and easy.
 
In addition to playing personal media, Kinoma Play puts the “best of the web” in the palm of your hand with quick, easy access to content including millions of hours of on-demand and live video, more than 30,000 radio stations, tens of thousands of audio and video podcasts and millions of photo albums.
 
Connecting Content and People Like Nothing Else Can
With deep support for major social networks including Twitter and Facebook, Kinoma Play makes sharing media as natural as playing it. Share photos and links to your favorite music and YouTube videos in seconds. Use the built-in Last.fm app to “scrobble” your personal playlist and learn more about favorite artists, then use Kinoma Play’s unmatched YouTube app to watch their music videos.
 
Exclusive cross-social sharing allows users to share everything with everybody in a way that would be clumsy or impossible with other applications — for example, users can share YouTube videos on Facebook, share Facebook photos on Twitter, share podcast episodes via SMS and more.

Pricing and Availability
Kinoma Play for Nokia Symbian/S60 devices (S60 3rd Edition, Feature Pack 1 or Feature Pack 2) is available immediately at kinoma.com for $29.99 U.S. Kinoma Play supports Dutch, English, French, French Canadian, German, Greek, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Romanian and Spanish.
 
About Kinoma Play
Kinoma Play is the best way to play and share video, music, podcasts, radio, photos, panoramas and audiobooks on your phone. As the first social media browser, Kinoma Play has changed the mobile media landscape and quickly established a reputation as a must-have application for Windows Mobile.
 
About Kinoma
Kinoma makes software with a focus on design, simplicity, and fun. Its software powers the media experience on millions of devices on 14 carrier networks for customers including NTT DoCoMo, Palm, SoftBank Mobile, Sony, and more. Kinoma’s latest innovation is Kinoma Play, the world’s first social media browser.
Kinoma is a registered trademark of Kinoma, Inc. For further information, visit kinoma.com. Follow @Kinoma on Twitter (twitter.com/Kinoma) for the latest news, and subscribe Kinoma’s blog at blog.kinoma.com via email or RSS.

As I have used Android more and more my developer sense started to tingle and I wanted to create my own Android app. I looked at a couple of development books but they all just seemed to be the same: how to install the development environment and then all about how great the Android is to develop for. Nothing I could find actually moved past walking you through your first app on the code side. So when I was emailed about a new book by authors Shane Conder and Lauren Darcey all about Android Application Development I jumped at the chance to review it!

Android Wireless Application Development is a hefty book, weighing in at 573 pages with appendices and a CD, it is chock full of wonderful little tidbits of information that make Android so much fun to develop for. I was never a fan of Java in my programming classes but now that I see it in another light I’m slowly coming around to it. Of course the book starts you off by getting you to install Eclipse (Win/Mac/Linux) and all the tools necessary to create that app that’s going to make you rich in the end, then you are walked through how to write your first app, run it on the virtual Android phone, and then how to install it on a device to test. The book follows that with introductions in design, interface essentials, common Android APIs, 3D graphics, and finally how to deploy and sell your marvelous app through the Marketplace.

I found the book a marvellous teaching tool, it keeps your attention and has plenty of screenshots, images, and code snippets to satisfy even a beginner (like myself). I was so excited in the intro app when I was able to get my app to play a media file from the web with a small bit of code. The authors have the perfect balance of teaching and explaining that this is one book you will not get bored reading, you will definitely be ready to use what you’ve learned to make a new app as soon as you are done reading about it.

I’ll be looking for YOUR app in the marketplace soon!

Android Wireless Application Development was written by Shane Conder and Lauren Darcey and published by Pearson Education, Inc. It is available in paperback now on Amazon.com for $26.69, on Kindle for $23.75, and at your local bookstore.

Today, Meraki released a wireless census and found out what many in the tech sector already knew — the number of Apple wireless devices have increased in the past year. This is mainly due, of course, to the demand for the iPhone.

Another mobile charger review, these are getting to be fun! This time it’s a solar-powered charger that can be attached to pretty much anything with it’s velcro, fold-over strap. Unfortunately, because it is solar-powered, it takes a while to charge; according to the instructions that came with the SolarStrap (which you can download and read on their site), if it’s a sunny day it will take 12 hours to charge, if it’s partly cloudy you are looking at a full 24-hour charge time, or if it is completely cloudy it’s going to take 5 days of charging.

To speed up the process, though, (or if you just so happen to get it when the heavens decide to rain every day of the week) they include a handy AC charger and a USB charge cable. I let mine hang on the blinds in my office at home for a day and then plugged it up that night to top off the charge.

To show the charge status of the SolarStrap you are given two LEDs, one green and one red. The green one, when a device is plugged in, will flash according to the SolarStrap’s battery charge. Four green blinks is full, three green blinks is nearly full, and so on until you have no green blinks and only the red one blinks once, which means the battery is empty. When charging the battery with an AC adapter the red LED will continuously blink and it will cease blinking when the charge is complete.

I received a few adaptors with my review unit as well, along with a generic “charging” cable I received: USB-B, USB mini, USB mini 8-pin, USB-A female, Samsung D600/A300, Samsung G600, Nokia 2.1mm, Sony Ericsson, and iPhone/iPod adaptors. There are other target specific adaptors available as well as a cigarette lighter and AC adaptor. According to the instructions you only get the strap, the charging cable, and the user guide, so you will be able to buy adaptors to suit your needs when you get it.

The SolarStrap has kept a charge very well and is pretty flexible. It’s made of some kind of a foam exterior with the wiring, battery, and solar panel glued into place between the two pieces of foam. I was assured that this was not a production unit and it had been hand-glued, which is good because in one or two places around the solar panel the foam wasn’t glued down all the way.

As for the foam itself, I don’t know how well it will hold up, after unvelcroing and velcroing a few times I could see how it could start to break up if it was used regularly. Also, if it was left out in the sun (on your car’s dashboard or in a window sill) I’m not sure how the foam would hold up.

The only beef I have with the SolarStrap is that I don’t know what the charge amount on the battery is until I connect a device to it. I wish there were a button on the battery to show charge status of the battery, or something along those lines. But, overall, it’s a great charger if you are out and about a lot but if you are like me and stuck in a windowless office all day it may not be ideal for you.

The charger is scheduled for shipping this month (August ‘09) and currently there are only a few dealers listed on their site, with only one being in the USA. The SolarStrap is priced at 29.00€ (about USD$41), for more information visit the Suntrica website.

This is a test, this is only a test. If this were a real post and not just a test of the Wordpress->Twitter integration, you would have been told to just shut up and read!

You will now be returned to the program already in progress. You may follow our updates on Twitter at @thismobilelife.

The wonderful people over at BillShrink.com, who want to help you save money, have put together a nice infographic that compares what they consider the top 3 current smartphones.

Not only does it compare the total price you would pay (including Phone price, Unlimited Usage Plan prices, Average Usage Plan prices, and total costs for Unlimited and Average Usage plans over 2 years) but it also compares 10 other points of interest.

There’s also a good comparison of just the iPhone 3G S and the myTouch side-by-side on the site.

Ever had the desire to create your own samples, maybe DJ a nightclub for a photoshoot? Well now you can, and it can be done with your iPhone with Star6!

All in all this looks like a really cool app, I wish I had bought the iPod Touch with a speaker now so I wouldn’t have to plug in headphones to use this app. Everything works with a simple press of the triangle-shaped buttons to either use presets or your own samples. You can modify the parameters by tilting your iPhone back and forth to raise the Pitch, Speed, Gate, Sample Order, Sample Size and Randomness. Then, when you are all finished and you have the most awesome beat, press record and upload it to your PC and share it on the Star6 website.

Star6 is available now on the Apple App Store at an introductory price of $6.99.

Zenulator’s Hero build for Vogue.