Yes it’s actually called “The Wireless Smartphone Photo Printer”! Not what I would call and original or interesting name but at least it’s honest. Jim was talking yesterday about printing from your WP phone and sadly this one can’t do that, but you can print from your iPhone, iPad or even iPod running iOS 3 and it can print from any Android device running 2 and up. Price is a bit ridiculous I think, according to the PR you get one print cartridge for only 10 prints and it will run you $220 for the printer. For that much money I’d expect to be able to print a bit more. Replacement cartridges will run you $25 each and you’ll get 36 prints from it. The cost would be about 69 cents per print, that is of course not including that shipping cost either so it will even be more expensive overall. Anway, read the PR if you’re interested..

Continuing its 164-year history of offering the Best, the Only and the Unexpected, Hammacher Schlemmer introduces The Wireless Smartphone Photo Printer, a device that connects wirelessly to an iPhone or Android-powered smartphone and prints vibrant color photographs.

An iPhone running a free app transmits pictures over a home Wi-Fi network to the printer; in less than a minute and without ink cartridges, it prints 4″ x 6″ borderless photographs at 300 dpi resolution in up to 256 gradations and 16.7 million colors.

“The Wireless Smartphone Photo Printer allows users to print photos taken with a smartphone from anywhere in their home, eliminating the hassle of connecting the phone to a printer,” explained Hammacher Schlemmer’s General Manager Fred Berns.

The pictures are printed on patented paper embedded with yellow, magenta, and cyan dye crystals, producing rich, vibrant photographs that are waterproof and resist fingerprints, dust, and scratches.

The Wireless Smartphone Photo Printer includes paper cartridge for 10 prints and is compatible with all iPhone (including iPhone 5), iPad, and iPod Touch models running iOS 3 and up and Android-powered devices running OS 2 and up.

The Wireless Smartphone Photo Printer is available from Hammacher Schlemmer for $219.95. For more information about this product, please visit http://www.hammacher.com/82590

These days when you think of Otterbox you think of phone cases, and that’s all well and good but that’s not where they really started. Otterbox started as a company that makes Dryboxes, which are basically boxes to keep your stuff dry. I still have a couple from years ago and they’re still just as good as when new. These boxes can be used for anything, MP3 players, phones, or whatever that you might want to keep dry. They’re much more generalized, which can be a good thing.

Starting with something as simple as a box, OtterBox was created in 1998 with a line of indestructible dryboxes. Today, the Colorado-based company is known for the custom cases it designs and manufactures for the world’s top-selling handheld technology. OtterBox has quickly become the number one-selling smartphone case but has not forgotten its roots. Available now from OtterBox.com and select outdoor retailers, OtterBox announces the Pursuit Series, a refreshing redesign of the original waterproof box that accommodates any pursuit.

Built to last a lifetime, the industry favorite now shows off sleek styling and refined materials that confidently protect against water, crush, drop and dust. A seamless compound latch keeps vital technology, tools and valuables safe, dry and secure while allowing for easy opening and a reliable seal. Lockable carabineer loops make the box easy to tether and internal cushioning acts as a barrier to impact.

The OtterBox Pursuit Series offers two different sizes designed to protect from the harshest elements:

• Pursuits/20 provides 10 cubic inches for storage of keys, cash or a slim mobile device, such as the Apple iPhone 4/4S. Valuables are safe and secure in this classic case. Available in black, blue and clear.
• Pursuits/40 has 20 cubic inches of internal capacity — enough room for sunglasses, a wallet and a smartphone such as a larger Android to stay connected and prepared. Available in black, blue and clear.

Whatever the pursuit, the new OtterBox Pursuit Series is the only option for protection. Visit www.otterbox.com for more information.

There are some really cool new accessories hitting the market in the wake of the iPhone 5 release. And even though there has been a lot of bad press about various issues revolving around the iPhone 5, you can count on a lot of these devices being sold. The first and most popular accessory of course is a case. You got to protect your investment right? Well, there are a lot of options but there are also some cases that include some pretty cool features. One of course being a battery extender. Now however, there is a new concept from Kickstarter called iExpander. The iExpander by Corr-Tech “has selected the CAP-XX supercapacitor-enabled BriteFlash architecture to power the high-performance LED flash in its new iExpander accessories for the iPhone 4/4S and iPhone 5.”

At the heart of the iExpander is an ultra-thin CAP-XX HS206 supercapacitor and a powerful LED flash module. The supercapacitor overcomes the limitations of the battery to deliver more power to the LEDs, extend the length of the flash pulse, and increase the total light energy emitted by the flash. The result is crisp photographs and clear videos, even in low light.

The iExpander also includes a microSD card slot and a second battery, increasing the memory capacity and battery life of the iPhone, and is packaged in a sleek, graphite-reinforced nylon case which adds just 6.3mm to the thickness of the phone. The iPhone 5 version of the iExpander also includes the original 30-pin connector in addition to a Lightning port, so users can charge from and dock to previous-generation iPhone/iPod accessories.

Corr-Tech is raising capital at Kickstarter.com (http://kck.st/QbDnEF) to help bring the iExpander to fruition. Production is to start in November 2012, with the first units shipping to customers before year-end.

Check out CAP-XX BriteFlash for more on the iExpander: http://www.cap-xx.com/news/photogallery.php#iExpander

The KickStarter page is located here: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/108290897/iexpander-an-expansion-device-for-your-iphone-4-an

In June, I posted about Samsung’s TecTiles for Android devices.

A few years ago, I was introduced to Moo MiniCards. They’re really nice, half-sized business cards. I’ve bought cards from both Moo and VistaPrint at this point, and I prefer the Moo cards: the paper stock is heavier, the pictures are crisper and I like the glossy cards over the matte cards; they really pop.

Now, Moo is announcing NFC-embedded business cards. At the moment, this is just a “give use your email address if you’re interested” deal. I’m really hoping that they don’t make this platform-specific.  I really love this idea for business cards: you can program the cards to do different and unique actions, and you can even change those actions to match up with what you and/or your business is doing at that moment.

Ah! I found their blog write-up about it, and there’s a little more information.  They’re going to be giving away 1 preview card to the next 150,000 orders they get on the site.  (This is the US blog, so I’m going to assume this is for US orders, not UK orders.) While I assume (and you know what happens when you do that…) that this would work on any NFC-enabled device, they will be creating an Android up for owners to easily update and reprogram the card.

The blog has elicited comments about how people would use them, and there are some great ideas there. 

How would YOU use NFC-enabled business cards? (Remember: they don’t hold enough information to actually hold files of any truly useable size, so would you use a card-sized CD instead?  Which, by the way, I haven’t seen many of.  A shame, really…)

You hear that? It’s candy corn in a mother effen Oreo! Apparently coming Monday to Target stores. I’m oddly intrigued…

And yeah, it’s a Friday night and RZA is in charge so Imma do what I want to

via MSN Now

Certain special events only come once a year (or even less) such as the Olympics, LeapYear, January 1st, taxes, and Christmas. Today’s writings will be focusing on something a little different, but equally exciting and definitely of great interest to the entire mobile community.

This is just a global bulletin announcement to make sure that you all remember to wish DOUG a Happy Birthday! Many years ago on August 1st, DOUG was born. This proves that Windows Messenger/Hotmail are good for something, because I might’ve forgot about his birthday if it hadn’t been for that. Be sure to stop in on the StaffNotify email list (or contact Doug if you’re interested in signing up) and leave an “hb” in there as well as the comments section and any of those annoying social network sites you may frequent. Be sure to stay tuned as well for an interview with Doug that we’ll hopefully be able to do over Windows Messenger, and leave any suggestions for good interview questions in the StaffNotify email threads.

If you’re looking for gift ideas, I recently did a “5 Minute Post About Something Cool” on a soon to be banned Mobility product, so be sure to remember him in your August birthday gift shopping and make this birthday his best yet.

Here’s to another great year of Mobility Digest with DOUG.

.:Albert Bunn

Guess it’s that time again for yet another 5 Minute post about something cool. Today we’ve got a bit of super oldschool mobility news coming to us from the “Sad News regarding the WalMart Toys department” department for your reading pleasure (or rather disappointment) after the break.

As we’ve seen countless times before, it only takes a small amount of people to ruin a good thing for everyone. Even something as simple as the privilege of magnets can be revoked because little kids can’t figure out how to use them without killing themselves. In today’s fast paced industry, sometimes it’s easy to forget the mobility gadgets of the past, BuckyBalls. For those of you not familiar, “BuckyBalls” is basically a boxed set of magnetic marbles that can be made into interesting shapes (such as a square). Like everything else in the world that is small and made of magnets, inexperienced kids have found a way to ingest several of them and cause problems in their innards.

Thanks again to these little kids, the “CPSC” is trying to permanently ban the sales of the classic toy that was extremely popular before the cellphone era (and still continues to sell to this day). Some online retailers have already quit selling them, but for those of you who want to get your piece of the action before another American masterpiece is ruined by lobbyists, eBay sellers still have several sets available.

.:Albert Bunn

Well, it is that time again to take another five minutes to write about cool things that have happened recently. Today’s issue was brought to my attention by an email from Change.org regarding a petition I almost forgot I had signed…

Many of you may remember back in June when this article on TorrentFreak grabbed the attention of the connected world. It should come as no surprise to all of us that as long as we have corrupt lobbyists, we will have oppressive laws and pressure on companies like YouTube; and as long as we have oppressive laws and pressure on companies like YouTube, the functionality of these sites, their capabilities, and sites around them will continue to be reduced (the sluggish nightmare that is HTML5 is just one of many other examples of this).

YouTube-mp3.org has always been one of the world’s best services for quickly converting any YouTube video into a high quality downloadable .mp3 file. They did the job quickly, without downloading flaky software, and for free. When “GoogleTube” saw that this was not only helpful, but also being used by a lot of people, they knew they had to shut it down according to their new common policy of making the internet a slower and more annoying place. As can be expected by netizens who dislike Google’s new policy, a petition was started on Change.org to allow third party recording tools to be used with YouTube.

Now even though Change.org has some rather sketchy content on their homepage, it can still be a useful tool to both stop pointless petitions and bring to light this very important issue of Google breaking YouTube-mp3.org. On the 19th of this month, I received this encouraging email from Phil, the guy who started it all:

Even beyond that, great progress has been made and on this. According to the official petition page, they reached their initial goal of 1 Million signatures on July 21st. There’s been no word from Phil on if he’s gone to visit Google yet to deliver the signatures, but we do look forward to any more updates that he may have to add. If you’re interested in keeping YouTube MP3 alive (and even if you’re not), be sure to head on over to Change.org and sign in to be part of one of the largest Change.org petitions ever against YouTube.

.:Albert Bunn

Every once in a while, a device will come along that people can’t help but continue to develop for, even after some owners have moved on to other hardware. Come see for yourself why the HD2 continues to be one of these “renaissance devices” after the break.

A couple weeks ago, I did a “throwback” episode of our “5 Minute Posts About Something Cool” section where I covered some recent development on the aging (but still full of life) HTC Blue Angel. In a recent episode of XDA TV, the host covered a similar piece of news that I found very interesting in this department on the timeless HTC HD2, which has practically been the “unofficial phone of the year” since its release and received a lot of support in the way of custom ROMs and ports of Android (and even WM7). This time, they’ve done it again with a port of Android “Jellybean”. “Smokin901” has a thread over on the XDA DEVELOPERS forums with more information, but from the XDA DEVELOPERS blogpost, it looks pretty complete with many features already working correctly:

Mobile Data 3G/2G
Voice Calls
WiFi
Bluetooth
SMS
Sound check download page for fix
Video Playback
USB Mass Storage

This is more then can be said for some early attempts at Jellybean on even some newer devices, and one of the only things still broken on it is the camera feature. It’s great to see development on older devices like this and even though I don’t own an HD2, I continue to look forward to progress made on this as this will extend the useful life of the device for people looking to move on and upgrade from Windows Mobile.

.:Albert Bunn

Since I haven’t wrote anything here in a while, I thought I might say a few words about one of Android’s worst shortcomings: synchronization. We’ll take a look at the problem and what’s involved to fix it after the break.

Like many other people like me upgrading from Microsoft’s dead end series of mobile OSes to Google’s shiny new “sequel” Android, I was left scratching my head trying to figure out how to sync the device with my computer. We’ve been syncing our cellphones and handhelds with our computers pretty much for as long as computers and handhelds have been around, so it came as a shock to me when I dove into android how it lacks the simple ability to sync contacts, calendar items, notes, and tasks out of the box. Even stranger is the lack of third party software to do this, since you’d think that someone would be smart enough to invent a software to do so. Perhaps the most alarming thing of all is that there are around 50 pieces of software that claim to be able to do this while surprisingly few of them function at all, and only a small subset of that which can get the job done right.

How could something so simple get so screwed up? Let’s take a trip back in time to 1996, when Palm released Palm OS. In my eyes, Palm was the foundation for the modern mobile OS, and they did do a lot of things right (citing the fact that it was released with phones up until a few years ago), but that’s a writing for another day. From personal experience, Palm was very easy to sync; the devices all came with a dock or cable to connect it to the computer, and then you pressed a button in the software or on the dock, and everything would be synced up between the handheld and the computer. Very simple, yet effective at the same time.

Windows Mobile even had synchronization working right out of the box with their “ActiveSync” and “Windows Mobile Device Center” software. All you had to do was connect to the computer and all your information was updated in both places. Even today, most of us continue to use Microsoft’s proprietary “Outlook” software to manage our calendar, contacts, and tasks. It makes sense that Google might not want you to be able to sync your stuff with Microsoft Windows, and as such they do include some limited sync capabilities (of the contacts and calendar only) with their Google web based counterparts, which are about as useless as they sound.

In the wake of this overlook, developers took it upon themselves to build their own software to solve this. Someone even put together a website called SyncDroid.net  to compare all the programs available to try to do this one task. Using their “filter” chart, we can start narrowing down and bypassing the useless stuff; for example, by selecting software that will actually sync all four of the needed categories narrows 50 items down to 10, and selecting only options that actually let you use your own USB cable narrows it down even further. From here, we’re given an acceptable amount of software to try now that we’ve filtered out the junk, some free, some paid. But what’s the most interesting is that not one of them work right. Every one of them has some kind of “dealbreaker” problem that prevents it from being useful including broken setups, the inability to do their job, tricky/impossible setup on the device, incompatibility with various desktop and mobile operating systems, and other problems.

From the ashes of mediocre software, one acceptable choice rises. Ironically, the free software “MyPhoneExplorer”, considering it appears to be translated into english from another language, works remarkably well. In its early days, it had a host of problems that prevented it from working right, but today the only things wrong with it are the fact that it can’t do Outlook categories and that it can’t handle recurrences and some of the English translations in the software are a little funny. It does everything very well where the other softwares (and even earlier versions of MPE) failed and even has a few unique perks, such as the ability to read and reply text messages right from the computer as they come in without having to touch the phone at all. The software is free, but you can donate from the FJSoft website if you choose, which uses responsive flash scripts instead of sluggish HTML5, making this process a breeze.

Like everything on that 50 item software list, MyPhoneExplorer has its drawbacks, but after hours of experimentation, I believe it is the best possible option for people looking to sync their Android devices with their computers. Is it complete? Not quite. But it is very close to being as good as “pocket outlook” and “Palm” ever were, and it is because of this software that Android finally stands to be the perfect and only sequel to Windows Mobile 6.

.:AB