Mobile

If you are tired of using the same old smiley and frowning text emoticons in email you type on an iPhone or iPad, hardware accessory company Griffin Technology shared a fun tip.
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The Daily provides an unverified report that Microsoft is planning to develop a version of its Office business app for the iPad. Microsoft Office is, of course, not a single application. It is a collection of office components that includes various combinations of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Access, OneNote and other software.
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Foursquare teamed with mobile deals specialist Scoutmob to add 500 new deals across 13 cities in the U.S. The deals do not require a credit card or up-front purchase. Foursquare says deals are often 50 to 100% off. That’s quite a deal.
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Google Maps 6.0 for Android adds a feature that people bewildered by navigation in unfamiliar large indoor places like airports and shopping malls: Indoor maps.
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While Twitter does not have a minimum age requirement, Facebook sets it at 13 and Google+ is 18. In general the minimum age of entry for social networks is 13 or older. Yet, anti-virus firm AVG surveyed 4000 parents (in USA, Canada, Germany, France, UK, Italy, Spain, Australia, New Zealand and Japan) with children between 10 and 13 years old and learned some surprising things.
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We can’t do much to about the weather but most of us like to talk about it anyway. So, why not organize this weather information sharing? I took a look at the free Weddar for iPhone and Android earlier this year and came away unimpressed because, as I wrote earlier, While a crowd sourced social weather app seems like a good idea, its dependence on the crowd instead of conventional weather sensors means that its usefulness is greater or lesser depending on how many people participate. From what I can see, there are now fewer U.S. data points available compared to this past April when I tried the iPhone version.
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Relatively small tech company acquisitions are usually only interesting to people who follow the tech industry. And, that’s how Twitter’s purchase of the security and privacy specialist firm Whispter Systems was perceived when most of us read news items like this one on Forbes: Twitter Acquires Moxie Marlinspike’s Encryption Startup Whisper Systems
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If you don’t want to buy a new smartphone for yourself, AT&T has a viral marketing campaign that lets you use a Facebook app on your desktop or smartphone that lets you build a case (as in a mock “legal case”) to convince someone you designate to buy a phone for you.
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I have found a way to access my Google Calendar information on the Kindle Fire other than by using the web browser. Unfortunately, the solution does require you to spend $9.99 to buy a key to use Exchange By Touchdown beyond 30 days, but you can try out the app for a month free first to see whether you like it.
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Today the Google Catalogs app was released for Android tablets. The free Catalogs app makes 125 different catalogs available for browsing on an iPad and Android tablet, and in some instances links are available to order the product online and find the product in a local store.
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