You may think of TripAdvisor as a handy app and online service for checking reviews on hotels for your next trip. I certainly use TripAdvisor in combination with Yelp to research hotels, restaurants and grocery stores and more on trips I take for business and leisure.
TripAdvisor just released an air travel survey that included more than 1,000 American respondents. The survey yielded some interesting results on frequency of flying and tech habits while hitting the road (or air).
Survey says:
In a sign that the economy is finally strong enough for Americans to fly more and take trips, 91% of respondents say they plan on flying domestically in 2012, compared to 84% for the year prior. International flights should be fuller too, as 65% of respondents said they will fly out of the country.
The more interesting aspect of the study, for me, is how travelers utilize technology while threy travel. Here are some interesting bits:
Half of all flyers use their smartphone to check flight status, up from 30% the year prior.
We also love using our mobile to check in while on the go – with 30% saying they use their mobile to check-in to their flight.
1 in 4 travelers say iPads and other tablets are a must-have item while traveling.
We like to remain anti-social once on the plane: with 76% saying they prefer to keep to themselves while in-flight.
My observations
These stats are hard to verify with quality, but I’ve been traveling a lot for work in the last 5 months and I take note of mobile technology and how it influences travelers. In my experience, I notice a lot of iPads and even more Kindle devices while in flight.
For those who don’t have tablets, I see people young and old playing Angry Birds on their phones along with Soduku and other games to pass the time.
The process of either maintaining our fitness or losing weight fit is a game of numbers. We all have been told this – burn more calories than you take in and eventually, you’ll lose weight. In particular, we Americans need to pay attention to our waistlines because we’re getting larger and larger.
Look around and you’ll easily see why. With sugary drinks and processed foods, we’re not eating as well. Also, we’re not moving – we take escalators and skip the steps and each day we’re consuming more and more calories.
However, the point of this post is to give you a tool to help keep track of what you’re putting in to your body and how you’re doing – fitness wise. I profiled the BodyMedia Fit on the Rudy Maxa Show a year ago and now it’s time to look at another option, the Fitbit Ultra Activity Tracker.
First Looks
As you can see, the Fitbit is a little clip-on pedometer and activity that attaches to your pants pocket or to your belt with an included tip. The model I’m trying is the Fitbit Ultra, which counts steps and has an altimeter to help you track how many flights of stairs you’ve climbed too.
The Fitbit comes in primarily black with a highlighted trim color and customers have two options available: pink and blue.
Getting Started
After you remove the Fitbit and its accessories from the packaging, you need to install the Fitbit application for your PC or Mac and set up your Fitbit.com account. Then, you dock the Fitbit onto it’s included dongle and plug it in to for computer’s USB port. After a simple set up process, you are ready to go.
In the set up process, you get a fitbit.com username and password and are ready to start tracking physical activity, calories burned and diet, if you choose to do so.
I found the set up process to be straightforward and easy. One tip: Be sure to let the Fitbit get a good charge before you start using it.
Using the device
My first event with the Fitbit on my side was the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. I was excited to trial the Fitbit at the show because as with any conference, I do a lot of walking. The Fitbit sits simply on your pocket and is slightly noticeable, but isn’t overly conspicuous.
I like that the Fitbit has a button on the it to give you stats along the way. Clicking the button shows an OLED display that can show your steps, stairs climbed, miles traveled, all numbers visible are for that particular day. The BodyMedia Fit, for comparison, had no display on it, making it hard to track your numbers throughout the day as on the Fitbit.
It was fun to track my steps throughout the day, In fact, on days where I noticed my step count was rather low, knowing the figures encouraged me to take an extra walk during my daily work breaks.
For me, the Fitbit lasts between 3-4 days. On day 4 the battery seemed pretty low so I didn’t let it go more than 3 days without a charge because having the Fitbit go dead would defeat the point of wearing it in first place.
The Fitbit website and apps
The Fitbit website is superb from a usability perspective. In the personalized site (once you log in), you can see a dashboard showing your steps on the current day along with stairs climbed, miles traveled, calories burned.
You can also log other activity such as biking, rowing or weight lifting, which aren’t adept to being picked up by the Fitbit by itself. Logging the activity in Fitbit.com makes the service accurately reflect your calories burned.
One enjoyable factor on FitbIt, it gives you badges and little reminders along the way to urge you to be more active. Also a plus for Fitbit is the fact that it integrates with other services such as RunKeeper and Microsoft HealthVault.
This integration is nice because if you utilize services such as RunKeeper, your stats will be automatically updated just by simply using your Fitbit as you normally would without extra work to update Runkeeper too.
Fitbit’s fantastic iPhone application allows you to view your stats for previous days too, but the real value-add to the app is the ability to log your diet while on-the-go. If you’re at, say Chipotle having a burrito, you can search for that burrito in the Fitbit app and it will pull in the calories and other nutrition information you care about.
Android owners will love that there’s an app now for Android devices too.
Conclusion
The FitBit Ultra is a perfect companion for those wanting stats and tools for becoming aware of your true physical activity level. Also, with the nutrition tools and apps, Fitbit can be of more useful in helping you battle the bulge.
With Summer approaching, consider getting a Fitbit Ultra. The device is on sale from Amazon for $97 in both black and blue.
I’m a Mac user, much like many of my digital native friends. There are a lot of stories swirling around online about the Flashback Trojan. There are many Macs that are infected, as many as 600,000 by some estimates.
Let’s take a second to make sure your Mac isn’t one of the more than half a million affected. Ars Technica has a great resource to help.
The Flashback trojan has been around since last year, and it attacks a Java vulnerability within Mac OSX, and if left unpatched, can make your Mac into a part of a botnet. According to Ars, 57% of the affected Macs are in the US and another 20% are in Canada.
So, check out the linked F-Secure instructions to see if you’re Mac is infected. Basically, you need to run some terminal commands. If you’d rather use Applescript, see out the resources in the Mashable article.
Rowi is releasing their new version today – bringing 2.0 to Windows Phone handsets. There are a lot of new features since the last revision many months ago and Rowi fans should be excited.
Setting the Stage
I have an affinity for Twitter applications. In fact, on my Nokia Lumia 800 (and on my Mac too), I have about 4-6 Twitter apps installed depending on the week.
Back in February, I wrote that Carbon “Stole The Show” with regards to Windows Phone Witter clients. Well, since Carbon has come out, I’ve been paying attention to the competition.
I really liked Rowi for Windows Phone, but the scrolling was just too slow in the application. It lagged my finger by just enough to be really annoying. However, some changes are afoot in Rowi.
Enter Rowi 2.0
Since a few weeks ago, I’ve been running a new 2.0 release candidate version of Rowi and I’m really impressed. The scrolling speeds are much faster, the application seems much zippier, and a few new features set this app apart amongst the competition.
First of all, the new context menu that pops up when you tap a Tweet unlocks key actions with one easy action. The screenshot to the right shows this functionality.
Additionally, I really like the photo previews in the timeline and the preference to load entire conversations when you load a tweet that is an @ reply to someone else. (yes, I admit, these might be small things, but to me, they are huge little awesome bits.)
Web pages load quickly and look fantastic with the Readability functionality when you load a link.
Special Pricing Announcement
One really cool move that Hidden Pineapple (the company behind Rowi) is doing to kick off the 2.0 version launch party is to reduce the price of Rowi to a rock bottom price of 99 cents for a limited time.
So – go check out Rowi and consider this a fantastic contender when it comes to Windows Phone twitter apps.
Full Change List
Now to the good stuff! Here’s a list of some of the biggest new changes/features:
Readability integration for viewing web pages and saving bookmarks for later reading (added to Rowi’s save for later functionality)
Support for RTL (Right to Left) languages display for tweets/messages
New context menu for quick and easy access to common actions for tweets/messages (tap to open the menu, double-tap to select the tweet/message/item)
You can now pin any home timeline, new tweet, new tweet #nowplaying, new message and search to your Windows Phone start screen
Fast app switching support and now using the OS’ progress indicator (yes, Rowi is finally updated to take advantage of the latest major Windows Phone OS a.k.a. Mango)
Here is the full list:
home
New reading experience for read/unread tweets/messages on the home timelines
New reading style marks tweets as read as you scroll up (default/configurable behavior)
Scroll to top automatically marks all tweets as read (by default)
New column types (including but not limited to: retweets, favorites, etc.)
Retweets are now included in list timelines
Photo previews for tweets in timelines
tweet
Tweet details page expands all t.co shortented URLs to show the originally tweeted URL
Tweet details now show who retweeted it
Conversation view on tweet details page
Tweet details page now uses the same (new) RT popup as context menu
Added a save for later button on tweet details page
message conversation
Updated the message conversation style to better match the OS messaging conversation UI
new tweet
Now playing added to new tweet screen to let you tweet about what you’re listening to
New (remaining) character counter UI when composing new tweets or messages
Bitly URL shortening removed since twitter will shorten all URLs to t.co anyway
Replying to a retweet now includes the retweeter
user profiles
New “is following me” text on profiles to better understand mutual follow relationships
Mentions pivot added to user profiles
settings
New settings UI (tweaked for simplicity)
New setting to specify preferred reading direction (newest, down or oldest, up). This affects where Rowi positions the timeline when new tweets are loaded
New setting to skip the new tweets indicator and just auto-loading new tweets with an info message box across the top of the screen
New setting to make all tweet calls to Twitter return the max amount of tweets (200)
New setting to automatically load conversations on tweet details
New setting to open the context menu on tap and hold instead of on tap (and select item on tap instead of double-tap)
New setting to manually set tweets as read (instead of automatically when scrolled into view)
notifications
Toast notifications now display inside of Rowi and take you to see the new tweets when tapped
Added Rowi to the share menu
moar awesomeness
Toasts for Mentions and Messages now take you to the correct mentions and messages pivots respectively in Rowi when tapped on. Yay! We know, it’s the little things.
Better error message on invalid login
Made info message box bigger so it’s easier to swipe away
More accurate message for bad gateway errors from Twitter
Changed placement of followers/following on user profiles to match Twitter.com
When finished writing a new tweet from the new tweet tile, tapping the back button exits Rowi
…plus a whole lot of refinement and bug fixes along the way
There are two loves I have in life – craft beer and my friends. Also, since many of my friends also happen to be on Twitter, we arrange to have beers via the social networking service. Well now, I can not only arrange to meet them for beer, but buy them their favorite pint all with my phone and a Tweet.
Tweet-a-Beer is an online service that connects your Twitter account and your Paypal account in order to make a mobile payment solution for buying your friends, buddies and acquaintances.
The Tweet-a-Beer service uses Chirpify as the conduit between Twitter and Paypal and makes the service easy for you and your buddies. For those unaware, Chirpify is an online service that users can register their Twitter and Paypal accounts to enable them to make payments via tweets. In essence, Chirpify is a Twiter commerce platform
To use Tweet-a-Beer, you go to the site and say who you want to share a beer with and where you want to do so. The Tweet-a-beer sends $5 from your Paypal account to your buddies’ Paypal account.
Here’s the actual flow, as described by the Tweet-a-Beer website:
Follow the steps to authenticate your Twitter account with Tweet-a-Beer and Chirpify. Then “pre-approve” Chirpify to send PayPal payments on your behalf. After this you can use the app to choose the @recipient (on Twitter), send them a beer ($5), and add a reason, meeting place, or requests for the juke box. Once submitted, the recipient will receive a tweet mention from you with a link leading them to details on how to claim the beer money.
This awesome web service was brewed up tenfour and Waggener Edstrom, both Portland companies, which are an amazing creative agency and amazing PR agency, respectively.
I imagine I’ll be using this app quite a bit with the upcoming South by Southwest festival, that occurs this coming weekend!
Using the web app
One facet to Tweet-a-Beer that I really enjoy is that the service is a really amazing mobile web experience. Rather than releasing an iPhone or Android application, tenfour decided conduct the functionality in a mobile web app experience. As I use Windows Phone, Meego and a mix of Mobile OSs, I’m glad I can Tweet-a-Beer no matter what device I’m using.
Kudos to the Tweet-a-Beer team for going mobile web!
February 29th, 2012 / No Comments » / by Jason Harris
I have had an AT&T Elevate 4G mobile hotspot for a few weeks now. I’ve used it in and around Portland, Oregon and have had good speeds – typical for HSPA.
However, I just returned from a trip to Indianapolis, IN where AT&T has built out a 4G LTE network. I connected to the Elevate from my MacBook Air. With the Elevate, you can hook up to 5 devices to one Elevate.
So, how did the Elevate perform? In a word, stunningly! See the speedtest below:
So, I’m getting about 15Mb/s down and 13 up. I kept doing speedtests over the course of 4 hours and got similar numbers each and every time.
For comparison, my Sprint 4G/3G MiFi unit gets about 4Mb/s down and 1.4 Mb/s up on a good day. Typically the numbers are half that.
Before I had the Elevate, I wasn’t a believer in 4G LTE technology but now, I’m sold.
How about you – have you experienced a 4G LTE network? What are your thoughts?
On Monday, a new version of Carbon was released that gave us, amongst other features, inline video previews.
The developer has been hard at work and here are the other features that are now a reality that 1.2 has been released:
Read It Later bug that failed to save links to Read It Later service
Timeline context menu bug
Camera share bug that did not select pictures from Pictures hub
Broken image upload
List Timelines on Quickline Bug where it didn’t load older Tweets when tapping on “More”
Minor changes & bug fixes with Live Tiles
Default Image service changed to Twitpic instead of Twitter(to be reverted back soon)
Quickline bug that did not load all of the lists
General cache, and storage fixes/enhancements
Smoother Timeline scrolling experience and faster image fetching
To me, Carbon for WP is still the best Twitter client on Windows Phone. In fact, it’s the best $2.00 you’ll spend in the Windows Marketplace.
I’m anxious for future versions whereby the developer has promised Push Notifications of @ messages and direct messages. I’m anxious to check out this soon-to-be released functionality.
February 27th, 2012 / No Comments » / by Jason Harris
A bunch of Nokia news hit today as it’s Mobile World Congress time. In fact, if you’re interested in the new phones and product announcements, be sure to head over to Nokia Conversations.
My eyes went to another announcement today as Skype has announced the availability of Skype for Windows Phone. The beta application allows for both voice and video calling and will work over WiFi, 3G or 4G connections. You can use Skype’s low, low international calling rates to make quality calls worldwide.
Skype has been out on other mobile platforms, of course, for years. However we Windows Phone users were waiting with patience for the Microsoft-acquired Skype group to put out an installer for Windows Phone. The day is finally here!
Skype on Windows Phone uses the beautiful Metro UI and is just beautiful so far. I’ve loaded Skype on my Lumia 800 so I’ll be report how it goes the more I use it. As of now, the beta release supports these devices:
Nokia Lumia 710
Nokia Lumia 800
HTC Titan
HTC Radar
Samsung Focus S
Samsung Focus Flash
It’s said that the gold version will be unveiled in April.
Jason Harris is a technology writer, community manager and mobile enthusiast. I am also a tech radio reporter, appearing on a nationally syndicated radio program.
I focus on the fields of mobile hardware and apps, consumer electronics, and hardware/software.
