Fire-Wired Blog

This article was first published by  dmcityview.com Life is full of add-ons. You make a purchase, and if it’s big enough, some retailers toss in extras. Everything from a side of fries to a new set of tires could be considered an add-on. This same principle exists with tech purchases, but those extras are anything but delicious or useful like fries and tires. No, tech add-ons are generally horrible and come with an equally awful name: bloatware. It seems bizarre for this to be case, but one of the celebrated bits of news in the Android smartphone world is that the new Samsung Galaxy S6 line will come with only two bloatware applications. I love Android devices and their customization, the widgets and the ease of designing your own custom applications and modifications. However, the major downside is they generally come loaded with unwanted software. If you pick up Samsung’s Galaxy s5 this weekend, there will be scads of applications you don’t care about and can’t remove. Sam...

This article was first published by  dmcityview.com For all of its hip commercials and excellent word-of-mouth buzz, Apple’s iPhone is still second-best. Market analysis from this past quarter revealed four-fifths of the world’s smartphone users are Android users, Google’s mobile operating system. As dominant as 80 percent sounds, why does it feel like Google’s stronghold is an outright lie? Android’s quiet climb to the top of the smartphone world wasn’t about marketing or innovation but pure and simple undercutting the competition and providing the alternative. While the iPhone was undoubtedly the best smartphone for four or five years after its release, it was expensive at first and only available to AT&T customers. Since it first hit the market, Android has been available on practically every carrier, offered extremely similar functionality, and it practically reset the scale for what smartphones should cost. One of the major differences between Android phones and iPho...

This article was first published by dmcityview.com No longer relegated to the fictional worlds of Iron Man, James Bond and Star Trek, sometime within the next two years your friends and family will start sporting computerized watches, glasses, rings and potentially more. You may have heard of Google’s much buzzed-about “Project Glass,” a.k.a. “Google Glasses,” a computer-powered set of glasses that allows its user to record video, take pictures, search the Internet, make and take phone calls and analyze real-time data through heads-up displays (think the “Terminator 2” scene where Arnold is scanning body types in the biker bar). What you probably haven’t heard about are the watches and rings. Apple’s long-rumored, next industry-melting innovation is said to be the iTV, a television that marries the power of smartphones with the content of the entertainment industry. Now comes word that the iTV could possibly sport an innovation on top of an innovation; replacing the classic remot...

This article was first published by dmcityview.com Just when it seems all smartphones are starting to feel the same, one developer has completely thrown the market for a loop. Two words: X-ray photography. Through a light-capturing advancement known as hyper light-refraction, the application “PERView” is able to amplify the ultra-violet light that bounces off cloth fibers, rendering them invisible to certain smartphone cameras. While this technology isn’t truly “X-ray vision” and doesn’t provide skeletal imagery, it does allow the user to see through the cloth materials of its photographed subjects. PERView’s developer, Timothy Saddman, unveiled the application last week explaining that his initial idea was to create a tool to help security agents check for weapons. It wasn’t until Saddman tested his innovation at a shopping mall that he discovered his “jaw-dropping” achievement. Privacy rights groups are labeling the application as “depravity of the crudest order” and “invasiv...