Making a Buck on an Old Phone

Apple will send you a gift card when you send them your old Apple products. The company determines whether or not your equipment is reusable. If it can be reused, they’ll send you a gift card good for any purchase at an Apple Store if your phone makes the grade; if not, they’ll recycle it on the company’s dime.

A similar, private site is Gazelle, which emphasizes making money for your recycling efforts. Gazelle will pay up to $100 for the iPhone 3G models and $200 for 3GS models if the devices are in good condition. BuyMyTronics.com is a similar site, where both broken and working iPhones are bought and then either resold or used for parts. RadioShack will also pay between $100 and $200 for used iPhones.

Bartering

At TradeStuff you can trade your old phone for something else that you really need. Ditto for Freecycle, a locally based swap club where you trade your stuff for theirs.

For Greener Good

The folks at Green Recycling promise to take your phone off your hands, working or not. The company encourages fundraising through recycling cellphones. Enter your zip code into Earth 911.  A list of recyclers in your area appears.

For Charitable Donations

Don’t underestimate the power of the individual to do good things with old iPhones. Steve Glinberg, developer of educational apps like KidCalc Math Fun, runs a recycling program and collects old iPhones and iPod Touches to donate to schools. Glinberg wipes the data, restores the factory settings, installs educational apps, and ships the devices to teachers who have requested them.

Where do you stand in the norm? In a poll conducted on ZDNet, 40% of users said that they recycled their used phones; 35% said they donated them to charity. Final word of advice? Before you send your old phone to any sort of recycling program wipe it clean.

I’m not an early diver.  I wait until the first round of comments are addressed.  But, this week I dove into two of Google’s more evolved features.  Google Goggles and YouTube’s auto captioning. 

Google Goggles (try typing that one three times fast)  was first shown to the public about 6 months ago. It lets you search the web with pictures and photos.  Using your Android SmartPhone (for now) you point your camera and snap a picture of a place … let’s say the Eiffel Tower. Immediately you are brought to the web for more information on the Tower.  Take a picture of the Mona Lisa provides you with a detailed art history.  Snap photos of logos, businesses, restaurants and more.  Each brings up a search that’s just as complete as any you’d conduct using words or typing.  

Alas, my photo of IronMan (a Marvel comics rendition) came up blank, but a photo of Ray Charles took me directly to the man’s life and works. My self portrait thankfully produced no results, but I was able to scan business cards and have them entered into Google Contacts. 

About a week ago Google announced that Goggles can work with the Google translate app, making it even more useful.  Can’t read the menu while dining in Tokyo?  Point your camera, click and you’ve got the translation.  It’s expected that Google Goggles will ultimately run on various smartphone systems, at this writing it’s for the Android.  Watch the tutorial.

My second favorite – though a bit less evolved find is auto captioning of video  on YouTube (owned by Google).  Think about  closed captioning for the deaf on TV but on steroids.  For instance, when you select a video to be auto captioned the captions can be “searched” by Google, the font size changed and most important it can be translated into other languages using the Google translation tools.  For a lucid explanation that’s reasonably timely, you can watch this closed caption video.
Not every video can be captioned.  You must be the owner of the video or choose a video that has consented to be captioned by everyone. 
The auto captioning is based on the same technology that initiates Google’s Voice Search on Android phones.  The results are mixed even though the process is automated, creating captioning files is not simple.  

Playing with Google toys today is like getting a sneak peak of tomorrow.

To make sure that the apps garnered a public life, I, along with Reyne Rice from ToyTrends  gave the following presentation.

get-pr-at-app-camp

Here’s how the invite might go:

BOY:  go 2 prom w me???  <3 john

GIRL: id <3 u 2 go 2 prom w me

(The  <3 means “love” .)

Textplus, an app that has a powerful client for free, unlimited and group chatting  surveyed 500 of their users asking about their prom date experience. textPlus and found that 40% of teens 13-17 said they would consider asking their date to the prom via a text message. Sixty four % said they would accept a date to the prom if asked by text.

Initially this might seem cold and impersonal to most of us who remember the agony of the prom transaction. The flip side is that texting is a lot easier than putting yourself in rejection’s way.

Texting looms large in end of year activities in other ways, too.  Driving is one of them  In addition to the sex talk and the drugs and drinking talk it’s not a bad idea to have a texting chat with your kids before they head out in their  gowns and ill-fitting tuxes.  Lay down the “no texting while driving law”.  But, yes, it’s ok to text mom and dad a few times during the evening just to give them some peace of mind.  (For more see Ford’s Tips on Driving for Life).

]]> http://www.robinraskin.com/blog/2010/05/03/go-2-prom-w-me/feed/ http://www.robinraskin.com/blog/2010/04/14/my-phone-is-so-smart-it%e2%80%99s-become-a-full-time-job/ http://www.robinraskin.com/blog/2010/04/14/my-phone-is-so-smart-it%e2%80%99s-become-a-full-time-job/#comments Wed, 14 Apr 2010 14:23:34 +0000 admin http://www.robinraskin.com/blog/?p=818 Now that buying a mobile phone is like buying a computer, moving, adapting and configuring your phone has become a full time job.  In the last few weeks I’ve heard the newest excuse for bad phone behavior –pocketbook dialing, misdials, and phones sounding off in inappropriate places.  “I just got a new phone and I’m still figuring out a few things.”
Here’s my list of do’s and don’ts to make your learning curve less offensive to your friends, family and colleagues.

Forget apps. Start the move with your existing contacts and phone numbers.  You did buy your phone to make a call, right?  Step one is to import your contact list from wherever it lives now.  If it’s large, it may be a good time to weed  – getting rid of those contacts  where you haven’t had any contact in a decade.  Immediately learn how your phone “finds a contact” and “places the call”.

Practice your touch. The single biggest complaint most new users have is getting used to a touch screen. They can be both overly sensitive and insensitive, very dependent on your perfect touch. Like my bowling, my touch finger has a hook.  I’m always one to the left of the key I really want to press. My solution was to get an Android with a keyboard; others learn to watch the autocomplete feature which finishes your word for you as you touch.

Take your old GPS with you on the maiden voyage.  Before you grab your phone and head off with its navigation app you should take a maiden voyage with your dedicated GPS as a backup. Nothing like rushing into the car to find out that you can’t read your GPS screen and can’t seem to make it talk. Plus, the routes suggested by a Garmin and an Android are strikingly different.

Make the fonts bigger.  Mobile phones are going to be the worst villains in the history of eye strain. Head to your settings and configurations and choose a font size that you can actually read.  Just getting the gist of an important email is not  enough.  Hats off to iPhone for the pinch and pull, by far the easiest way to enlarge. The rest of you?  Head over to your Settings.

 
Learn how to shut down/silence ringer.  Don’t even think about taking your phone into a public place until you can shut it off properly.  Can’t be fumbling for the first time in a darkened theatre.
Make it Secure  Studies show that mobile phones are the highest security  threat in the workplace. .  Most service providers have decent “backend” protection against hackers and malware but there are few things you should do:
A: don’t keep your Bluetooth or WiFi turned on when you’re not using it; it gives other devices a chance to hack into your system
B: Keep the number of apps that use location based notification to a minimum. Broadcasting your coordinates to your friends doesn’t insure that it stays amongst your friends.

Save Battery Power  A dead phone isn’t much good and smart phones are hungry phones.  Leaving your GPS on; forgetting to end a call, or leaving your phone connected to Wifi even when you’re out and about are perfect battery drainers.  I download an app called Advanced Task Killer – it’s like the RAID of mobile phones. It knock anything that’s running dead.
Now, we’re ready for some App device.

. 

The handsets come in a few varieties and they’re all designed by Michael Young, a designer with a distinctly Zen sensibility. If you like what you see at Muji or MOMA you’ll love this.

The entry model looks very retro and has a great weighted feel to it. You plug it into the speaker jack on any smartphone. I used the MM02 with Skype and an iTouch to make phone calls all day. The benefit was that I could use other apps while talking… a big benefit for those of you who have ever tried looking up a number while you’re speaking into the phone.

The MM03 Curve is a familiar-looking arched handset with Bluetooth support and the MM04 is the top of the line. Its sleek silver design can be turned horizontally and used as a docking station/speakers or held in your hand for speaking. With Bluetooth, Brunner says, he’s seen people place their iPhone near a window for good reception but sit at their desks and speak on their handsets.

Reasons to like Moshi Moshi:

• It means Talk Talk in Japanese;
• It lets you keep your touch screen away from your face (and face lotions and sunscreens); and
• It protects you from the mobile phone’s radiation.

Of course, it’ll set you back anywhere from $79 to $199 depending on which model you choose, and your friends may chuckle when they see you using a handset, but let ‘em laugh. Handsets are enjoying a bit of a renaissance.

From my perch I see Blackberry’s

First Generation Smartphone Grows OOOOLLLLDD

interest waning; its major strengths are pushed email and a wide variety of phones with keyboards.  If you’d rather type than touch it’s the way to go.

Apple’s iPhone has matured as a fabulous media/entertainment device.  Apple’s own website touts iTunes, HD video capabilities, and millions of apps on its own list of accomplishments.  Yes, it also searches the Internet and well, but…

Google Android’s got search, navigation, and mail at the soul of its machine. Androids ships with strong connections to Google’s apps and services, including App Pack Gmail, Google Talk, Messaging, Voice Mail, Google Maps, Gmail, and YouTube.  Apple’s iPhone can certainly handle the same tasks, but the emphasis is on media–my photos, music, video.

With this logic, my clear choice was the Google Nexus One, but yours might be very different.  (And after Apple’s news that it would go after the Nexus One and other Android phones for violation of patents, I’m getting that cold feeling back in my feet.)

Other reasons I find Google phones appealing:

Less Is More: Apple passed the 150,000 mark for apps developed for iTunes. It could take the better part of a day to sort through crossword puzzle choices.  Android has only 20,000, Blackberry less still. Me, I’d rather have an edited list of best of breed apps than a free for all. I find iTunes offers hundreds of apps for each of my interests, but a large number of them turn out to be underwhelming.

Google Docs: As someone who knows how to get things done in Microsoft Office that even Microsoft can’t do, change does not come easy to me. I find many aspects of Google Docs inscrutable, but as sharing docs amongst devices and collaborators is becoming increasingly important, Google’s got the lead.

Though I expect Google will push its way into the content market (e-books from the Google store, for example, will be able to be read on most computers, phones, or e-book readers), I’m not going the single device route quite yet. My iPod Touch is still the best way to enjoy music, podcasts, photos, and videos.  And my Amazon Kindle is still the best screen format for e-books. But, when it comes to business, my soul is going to Google (at least this year).

My bets on some of the hottest trends at the show:

eBook Wars: You’ll have seen most of them before the opening day of CES, but you’re going to begin to see a features war over book readers. Color readers, readers with two screens, readers with backlit screens, pocket readers, multimedia readers, and so on. The good news? All this talk about reading may resuscitate the printed word. If you’re at CES, visit the eReader exhibit on the CES floor and the HigherEd Tech Summit.* Both will be discussing how ebooks will replace those high-priced printed versions.

3D: James Cameron may be getting all the 3D glory on the big screen this season, but there are plenty of folks at CES leaving their 3D mark. Look for notebooks and netbooks from the likes of Acer (3D glasses required). SONY, Mitsubishi, and Panasonic will be showing the next variant of 3D TV (glasses required on most, not all). Even the gamemakers (keep an eye on PlayStation) will be supporting 3D output. ASUS has just announced a 3D gaming notebook, the G51 J 3D. My favorite? Fujifilm has a new camera that shoots photos and videos in 3D and requires no glasses. The trick? Two sensors built into the camera.

Mobile Phones and Their Apps: There are now over 100,000 iPhone apps; that’s a pretty big business. But the iPhone is being challenged by Android, RIM Blackberry, Microsoft Windows Mobile, Palm, and Nokia’s Symbian environments. As consumers, we want to know what apps are worth paying for; as a developer, you’ll want to know what apps to create for. These topics will be visited in multiple places on the show floor, but the Mobile Apps Showdown should be a nice culmination of an app-ified world.

Mind and Body: Take a motion sensor, add some software and a cloud computing app, and you’ve got the recipe for a healthier body. Look for everything from digital pedometers with online recordkeeping to elaborate systems that measure your energy output and give you enough readout to put the Challenger’s dashboard to shame. Watch for biofeedback, relaxation, remote medical data collection, and more.

Telepresence: Yes, it’s a Trekian buzzword, but get used to it. Simply (probably too simply) put, telepresence creates the illusion that something is near you, even though it is not. Video conferencing, distance learning, remote medical diagnoses–all of these rely on telepresence. Look for Cisco to take the lead, but IBM, Microsoft, and others will express their violent interest in this topic.

Augmented Reality: A close cousin of telepresence, augmented reality was beginning to seep into our collective consciousness at the last CES. It’s back, and in general it describes a technology that adds a level of information on top of your physical reality. Point your phone at a person and it might automatically recognize them and offer the person’s vital stats for you. Point a digital camera at an object (say, a museum) and have entries about that object appear on your screen. Making augmented reality more real are manufacturers like NVIDIA. Its new Tegra chip packs the power of a PC onto a single, small chip.

* Disclosure: My company, Living in Digital Times, produces the Mobile Apps Showdown and the HigherEd Tech Summit at CES.

In my last post, we looked at Intel’s study on mobile etiquette. Now we can see what one company with a wicked sense of  humor is doing about it.

At last, perfect gift for obnoxious cellphone abusers. It’s called Cell-R-Derm.  Modelled on the transdermal patches you’d use to stop smoking, these patches (once you get the joke) will make you rethink your cellphone habits. Designed to cure the viral C-Cellutosis, the gift recipient gets a box of translucent patches to be applied somewhere around the neck area. Promising to “patch up your life” and get rid of your “cellular hangups,” the kit will either bring a laugh or a sharp object into the hands of  the loved one in question.

Cell-R-Derm folks went undercover to assess the disease.  You can view their research in THE BATHROOM and in THE BEDROOM. The gift box includes 13 semi-transparent patches and a lot of comic explanations. It’s the joke gift that packs a message.

The study polled over 2,000 people to find out what most of us know. Most online U.S. adults (80%) feel there are unspoken rules about mobile technology usage, and approximately 7 in 10 (69%) agreed that violations of these unspoken guidelines, such as checking emails, sending text messages, and making phone calls while in the company of others, are unacceptable.

More than half (52%) would be offended if they were at a holiday party and someone attempted to secretly use an Internet-enabled device such as a laptop, netbook, or cellphone at the table. Funny thing is that 75% feel it is perfectly appropriate to use Internet-enabled devices, including laptops, netbooks, and cellphones, in the bathroom (yuck!).

At the Tea Room, Intel’s own ethnographer, Dr. Genevieve Bell, and Anna Post, descendant of Emily Post and etiquette expert for the Emily Post Institute, were on hand with advice. “The social rules for new technologies are continuing to be established across cultures and geographies around the world, and etiquette will continue to change and adapt over time along with it,” said Dr. Bell. “Etiquette surrounding mobile technology is becoming increasingly relevant, particularly in social situations such as holiday gatherings and events,” said Ms. Post.

One area where anti-tech bias seems to have softened is the holiday greeting card. More than half of online adults (62%) would send an electronic greeting card or email in lieu of a traditional card and, despite what parents have always taught their children about the value of a handwritten “thank you” note, almost 9 out of 10 (88%) online adults would not be offended if they received an email or electronic thank you.

Intel’s holiday lesson: No matter how great the temptation or how much the thing is vibrating in your pocket, do not answer your email or phone calls at the holiday table. Not unless you want your mouth washed out with soap or, at minimum, your phone confiscated.

Read on and I’ll tell you about Cell-R-Derm, the perfect gift for the cell phone abuser in your family.