Voice Brief transforms your iPhone into a talking assistant of sorts. The $4 productivity app from Dong Baik reads content from your iPhone aloud, freeing you from looking at your phone to find out the day's news, weather or more. Voice Brief is an outstanding, fully featured app that truly can make you more productive. Voice Brief can read many things aloud-your email, calendar, the weather, blog posts, stock prices, and even your friends' Facebook and Twitter posts. Once you've selected what you'd like Voice Brief to read, you then select how you'd like it to read, too.
If you've ever heard your Mac talk to you in its default "Alex" voice, you already know what the voices sound like in Voice Brief. Thankfully Voice Brief gives you a choice of four different voices: two American women, an American man and a British man (English is the only supported language at this point). You can adjust the speed of each voice, too. Voice Brief uses voices in two different ways: the "announcer" voice reads headlines and gives the weather forecast, for example. The "reporter" voice actually reads the contents of emails or blog posts. Of course you can set the same voice for both readers-or disable one or the other-if you'd like.
No matter which voice you choose, you're liable to be taken by the smoothness with which Voice Brief reads your emails, favorite blogs, weather forecast and more aloud. The app even supports multitasking, meaning you can pop into another app on your iPhone or iPad as Voice Brief continues reading in the background. The result is one very slick app.Voice Brief suffers from only minor irritations.
There are times you'll wish you have more control over what Voice Brief reads. For example, although I asked Voice Brief not to read comments on posts in my Facebook news feed, I found that the app would sometimes read those comments anyway. Other times, it can be difficult to understand what Voice Brief is reading, especially during blog posts containing photos (with captions) or long bulleted lists read in rapid succession. These are relatively minor issues, however, and really don't detract from the overall polish of this app.
Flickr has introduced a new privacy feature called geofences that allows users to create geographic privacy settings for photos’ location data. With the new feature, Flickr users can draw a circle on a map to designate a geofence and then choose a geographic privacy setting for that area. Users can create up to 10 geofences, and previously uploaded photos are also updated with the new geo-privacy settings.
“You might want to create a geofence around the your ‘home’ or ‘school’ that only allows ‘Friends and Family’ to see the location of the photos you geotag in that area by default,” Flickr said in a blog post on the update. “So the next time you upload a photo with a geotag in the radius of a geofence, it will follow the geo privacy setting you’ve designated for that hotspot.”
Flickr, a Yahoo property, has been characterized as slow to innovate, especially amid the mobile photo-sharing boom. The geofences feature, however, addresses one of the primary concerns associated with geotagged images — Flickr claims to have more than 300 million geotagged photos and videos on its site — and should receive a welcome reception from the service’s users.
That’s a sharp contrast to some of the brutish 4-inch+ Android phones we’ve seen in the past couple years, and its sleek profile will no doubt be an attractive feature to potential U.S. buyers. The Medias N-04C has enjoyed a good deal of success in Japan, where it’s sold more than half a million units.It’s expected that the Medias will receive a spec bump prior to its Stateside launch. The original Japanese version featured an 800MHz processor, a 480×854 FWVGA display covered with a sturdy slab of GorillaGlass, a 5.1MP rear-facing camera with LED flash, 802.11 b/g/n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and Android 2.2.
At the very least, the processor would likely be updated to something at or above the 1GHz mark and Android 2.3 Gingerbread flashed before making its debut on Verizon — where the N-04C is expected to launch because of NEC-Casio’s previous dealings.The Japanese version also includes a TV tuner, e-wallet functionality, and an infrared port. Don’t count on those additional features making the trip — they might be staples in Asia, but they’re not commonly found on U.S. phones.
