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T-Mobile launching its flexible 'Digits' plan on May 31st
T-Mobile has been working on a new type of multi-number, multi-device phone service. Digits, one of the company's UnCarrier moves, is now through beta testing and ready to launch at the end of the month.
The best touchscreen winter gloves
By Nick Guy This post was done in partnership with The Wirecutter, a buyer's guide to the best technology. Read the full article here. Over the past four winters, we've tested more than 30 pairs of touchscreen gloves while moving half a ton of stumps, climbing on ice, and just walking and biking around town. For the first time since we published our initial guide, we have a new pick: Moshi's Digits gloves are our favorite touchscreen gloves for most people, offering the right combination of warmth, dexterity, and grip. They aren't the absolute warmest touchscreen gloves you can buy, but they are warmer than anything that's better at handling touchscreens, and better at handling touchscreens than anything that's warmer.
Twitter is ready to replace your apps' web passwords with phone numbers
Ready to ditch old-fashioned passwords on the web? Twitter is, too. It just released a developer kit that lets mobile apps' companion websites use Digits phone number logins. While you still have to create an account on your phone to get things started, you'll have the option of using your number to sign in on the web from then on. About the only additional hassle is having to enter a confirmation code (sent to your handset) the first time you use the new method. It's going to take a while before developers add Digits to their sites and let you use it in the real world, but the framework is in place.
Twitter goes on the road (and offers prizes) to get more apps
Twitter is determined to put its frameworks into as many of your apps as it can, and it's going to great lengths (in some cases, literally) to make sure that happens. The social network has unveiled Flock, a worldwide tour that will show developers how to put tweets into their apps through Twitter's Fabric programming kits. The campaign will start in Los Angeles on January 21st, but it'll eventually spread to other US cities and major international hubs like Bangalore, London, São Paulo and Tokyo. If you're curious enough to attend, you'll get to talk to Twitter engineers and developer evangelists that might just solve your problems with everything from ads to Digits sign-ins.
Twitter trades passwords for phone numbers with Digits
At its mobile developer conference in San Francisco, Twitter just announced Digits, a brand-new way to log in to apps with just your phone number. Instead of going through the tedious process of signing up with an email and password or using one of many different social logins, all you need is to enter in your number. When you do, you'll get a confirmation code via SMS. Enter that in as well, and away you go; no need to remember passwords or go through CAPTCHAs. Digits is not based on Twitter at all; it's actually an entirely new product that developers can incorporate into their apps, be they Twitter-related or not. It's a key part of Fabric, Twitter's new mobile development kit that it's rolling out today. Digits is available for iOS, Android and the web, and it's available in 216 countries in 28 languages right now. Aside from Digits, Fabric includes several other tools that Twitter hopes developers will incorporate into their existing apps, such as Crashlytics, the crash-reporting tool that the company bought last year, and MoPub, its advertising platform. There's also something called TwitterKit, which finally brings system-level Twitter sign-on to Android, a service that's been on iOS for a while now. This means that you only need to sign on to Twitter once on an Android phone, and you'll be able to easily access all apps that require a Twitter login. Especially of note is that developers can now not only embed tweets in their apps, but also add the ability to compose and post tweets inside of them without having to launch the dedicated Twitter app.
IRL: Moshi's Digits gloves and the Nokia Lumia 620 on Telus
Welcome to IRL, an ongoing feature where we talk about the gadgets, apps and toys we're using in real life and take a second look at products that already got the formal review treatment. Spring may have sprung two weeks ago, but believe us, it's still winter somewhere. (Ed note: I'm typing this from underneath an NVIDIA Snuggie -- Dana.) In fact, Darren's had a reason to test out some touchscreen-friendly gloves, even in his southerly state of North Carolina. Up north, our own Jon Fingas has been playing with the Lumia 620 on Canada's Telus network. No complaints from him about the 40-degree temps, though.
Final app giveaway of 2010: Digits for iOS
The clock is ticking toward midnight in the US, and in fact our colleague Chris Rawson has already begun 2011 (he's in New Zealand, on the other side of the International Date Line). To count all the ways we're thankful to have spent the past 12 months with all of you would take more time than we have left in the year, but as a small token of our appreciation -- here's the last app giveaway of 2010, five promo codes for the essential iPhone and iPad calculator Digits. In the recent 2.0 release, developer Joshua Distler added multi-tape management to the capable computation app, allowing you to share, sync, email and print your calculator tapes. It's currently on sale for US$0.99, but if you'd like to win a license, just share a comment below with your New Year's resolution (keep it clean!). We'll pick five winners next week. Best wishes from all of us for a happy, healthy and safe 2011! Open to legal US residents of the 50 United States and the District of Columbia who are 18 and older. To enter leave a comment on this post telling us your New Year's resolution. The comment must be left before January 3, 2011 at 11:59 PM Eastern Time. You may enter only once. Five winners will be selected in a random drawing. Prize: one copy of Digits for iPhone/iPad. (ARV $0.99) Click Here for complete Official Rules.
Digits conductive pins won't make a fool of you in the cold
Ever tried writing a text message or an urgent work e-mail with gloves on? Chances are what you planned to type and what came out couldn't look more different...if anything came out at all. Digits are a $14 set of four conductive pins that, like the Dots iPhone gloves, were designed to make cold weather touchscreen use easy, and hopefully error free. Unlike Dots and other pre-made touchscreen products, however, Digits allow you to use your own gloves, provided they're knit (unfortunately, they're not leather-friendly). Each pin comes in two parts: one piece sticks through from inside your glove, and the other, which sports silicone caps, attaches from outside, using the same concept as this DIY set. Digits should keep your touchscreen free of scratches and your texts and e-mails free of error, even when it's freezing out. Hopefully now you won't end up firing when you should be filing.
Friday giveaway: Get your calculator back on with Digits for iPad
If you divvy up the universe of iPad hands-on coverage over the past month, there's a reasonable midline with "Here's all I was able to do with it" on one side, and "Here are the things it doesn't do, isn't that ludicrous?" on the other. Michael Gartenberg's post at Slashgear about a two-week road experiment with just his iPad falls in the first bucket, and Kate Bevan's What's Wrong With the iPad? at the Guardian's web site clearly goes in the second. Among Bevan's several pain points with her iPad, she focuses on the absence of a few core apps that helped make the iPhone experience complete: Clock, Voice Memos, Weather, and Calculator. While not all of them have full-featured third party replacements (the Apple-only backgrounding rule in OS 3.2 means that other alarm clocks don't allow you to switch apps and still get your wakeup call), there's certainly ample coverage on Calculator. In particular, Shift's Digits provides a fullscreen, history-tape enabled, email capable, snazzy calculator that should address most number-crunching needs. Digits is a whopping 99 cents in the US store, but we've got ten promo codes to give away to US readers (sorry, rest of world, promo codes are country-specific) -- just leave a comment below to enter, telling us your favorite 'replacement' app for the ones Apple forgot to put on the first-generation iPad. Open to legal US residents of the 50 United States and the District of Columbia who are 18 and older. To enter leave a comment on this post with your suggested 'replacement' app. The comment must be left before Sunday May 16 at 12:00pm noon, Eastern Daylight Time. You may enter only once. 10 winners will be selected in a random drawing. Prize: One promo code for Digits for iPad (ARV US$0.99) Complete rules here.
Touch Bionics offers ProDigits for those missing their amateur ones
Touch Bionics has been at this bionic prosthetics business for a while now, already providing i-Limb solutions to those deprived of the use of their hands or arms. The company's latest innovation is to reduce all that tech down to the level of individual fingers, with its freshly announced ProDigits being able to replace anywhere between one and all of your precious little piggies. Relying on a traditional myoelectric regime -- which reacts to muscle signals from the residual hand -- or pressure from the remnant finger for its input, this invention can even be tweaked by doctors (over Bluetooth) to adjust the finer motor functions on a per patient basis. Costing up to £40,000 ($65,000), these new prosthetics will be custom-built for each person, and there are plans to apply to have them made available through national health insurance -- in countries that are into that sort of thing. Video after the break.
Game controller Christmas tree ornaments, minus all the plastic
If you're anything like us, you've spent countless hours of your youth hollowing out old gaming controllers for use as gigantic Christmas tree ornaments. Though these might have resulted in years of lopsided tree dilemmas, our penchant for hanging something that at least resembles our favorite gaming controllers on the tree never subsided. Lucky for us that Ponoko user "digits" shares our unique affectation, making a variety of controller-themed ornaments in a handful of different colors. For $25 (plus $10 domestic shipping, more for other territories) we can have all the style we want without all the weight that drives our tree's limbs plunging downward. Talk about a Christmas miracle! [Via GeekSugar]
