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Vertu rings in the Year of the Dragon by welcoming a trio of Signature luxury phones
The Year of the Dragon is quickly approaching, and Vertu is in a celebrating mood. So much so, in fact, that it's added three new luxury Dragon handsets to its Signature collection. You can choose between stainless steel with emeralds, yellow gold with diamonds or ruby with black stainless steel. Each is, appropriately, adorned with a four-claw dragon on the battery cover, and the engraving process is rather lengthy: it involves 20 stages and takes four highly-skilled master craftsmen 36 hours, eight of which are dedicated just to the dragon's scales. But that's not all, folks -- each one gets shipped to Switzerland, where it's given the official stamp of authenticity, and returned to the workshop where precious stones are added for the final touch. That may sound like a steal at a mere $20,800, but Vertu even adds a charging cradle, a leather case and one year of free concierge service to the package. Tech specs? We haven't heard much about them, but they're rumored to run Symbian OS. We're sure you're now looking down at your new Samsung Galaxy Nexus with disdain, but we bet you could hire a few master craftsmen to make your own hand-engraved dragon for around the same price to help alleviate the regret.
Adobe releases EchoSign app for iOS, enables legally binding contracts to be signed with a 'click'
We're not going to twist your arm, but if you're sitting on some beachfront property that you're willing to deed over to your favorite Engadget writers, the folks at Adobe are making the process all too easy. The company is delivering a free app for iOS that enables EchoSign subscribers to attach legally binding signatures to virtually any document, all from the comfort of their preferred fruit-filled device. What's more, the software also allows users to send documents to others for a one-click stroke of the pen and track the status of said agreements with real-time updates. Now, please excuse us. We've got some aboveboard contracts to draft.
Square app update lets iOS users buy cookies on credit, sans signature
Heads up, card swipers, because Square has just issued an update to its iOS credit card app. Version 2.1 brings enhanced transaction speeds and a streamlined tipping interface to iPhone and iPad users, along with added support for $0.00 price points. Plus, any purchases below $25 will no longer require a signature, meaning you can safely buy that latte while keeping human interaction to a bare minimum. If you're interested in making the jump, hit up the source link below. [Thanks, Chris]
Mac 101: Capture your signature using OS X Lion's Preview app
OS X Lion has made signing PDFs easier than ever before. It's been possible to scan in your handwritten signature and sign documents in earlier versions of Mac OS X, but it was a complex process and one most people probably never trifled with. More often than not, I found it easier to simply print out the document, sign it the normal way, and scan the whole document back into Preview using my flatbed scanner. Lion's version of Preview comes with a built-in signature scanner that makes signing documents far simpler. In the Annotations toolbar you now have an option to create a signature from your Mac's built-in iSight camera. All you need to do is use black ink to sign a piece of white paper, align your signature toward the camera using the onscreen guides, and take a snapshot of the signature. (I haven't used my real signature here, obviously.) Preview can store multiple signatures, so if you need to both sign and initial documents, you're able to do so easily using Preview's annotation functions. It's a great feature, and one that ensures my printer will be gathering even more dust than it already has. [Just to be clear, this process only applies a graphical representation of your signature; it does not cryptographically 'sign' the PDF document to ensure that it has remained unmodified. Adobe's Acrobat application can sign PDFs with both a graphic and a digital signature; NitroPDF also has this feature, as does the DocQ web service. The DocuSign web service provides 'electronic signatures,' which are not exactly the same thing either. –Ed.] One step closer to a truly paperless office
SignMyPad Android / iPhone app enables digital signatures, form completion (app review)
If you've found yourself caught up in the rat race, you know all too well the process: receive PDF, print PDF, collect PDF, reprint PDF from a printer with ink in it, recollect PDF, fill out PDF, scan PDF, resize PDF, take a restroom break, and finally -- struggle with your company's lackluster internet connection in a bid to send the dreaded thing back. It's hard enough to do in ideal circumstances, but try filling out an emailed document and returning it whilst on the road or during vacation. We're told that some businesspeople rank the whole ordeal up there with root canals and meeting the in-laws, but thanks to the wonders of mobile telephony (and more specifically, mobile computing), the tried-and-failed process can be one of the past. Or, so says Autriv Software Development. The NYC-based app startup has just introduced the most notable rival yet to EasySign, and while SignMyPad is hardly the only one of its kind, it's one of the few that's compatible with both iOS and Android, and offers more than just a signature stamp. Care to hear more? Head on past the break. %Gallery-129962%
OOP Tetris cartridge begs you to buy it now for $1 million
It may shock you to know that you're a simple lottery win away from picking up a Like New copy of Tetris for the Sega Mega Drive (that's the Genesis to us Yanks). That's right, for the low price of $1 million American, you can pick up an original Japanese Mega Drive cartridge signed by the game's creator, Alekséi Pázhitnov on eBay. No word on whether the Russian game designer will actually hand deliver the red-boxed piece of gaming history if you're the lucky winner.
Vertu Signature Precious is awash in sea of sapphire...and regret (video)
It may not feature GPS, an accelerometer, or even a camera, but if you've run out of disposable items to encrust with jewels, then Vertu's Precious -- the latest revision to its aging Signature lineup -- may be the mobile phone for you. While its basic array of quadband GSM, 2100 / 850 MHz 3G, Bluetooth and WiFi may seem a touch modest, varieties come slathered in platinum, three types of gold (yellow, white and red), leather, ceramic, and enough jewels to make Her Majesty blush. Its face, known as the "sea of sapphire," is mostly obscured (save for the OLED display), but you high rollers can take comfort knowing it spent more than two weeks in a 2000°C oven to appease your discerning taste. Also hidden are 4.75 carats of ruby bearings, which are said to give the keys a frictionless, satisfying click. The ring tones are exclusive compositions by Dario Marianelli and performed by the London Symphony Orchestra -- though we were bigger fans before they sold out. For a quick glimpse of how the Precious comes together gem by gem, just follow the break. There's no word on pricing or availability, but if you're considering putting up your first born as collateral, you might want to reconsider this cringe-worthy creation. [Thanks, Radi]
EasySign iPhone app halts the print / sign / email cycle, trees everywhere celebrate
All together now: "flippin' finally!" For anyone in the business world who has been blocked from receiving information due to the inability to locate a printer, ink pen, scanner, publicly available PC, a working printer driver and a fifth of Jack, say hello to your savior. EasySign is a delightfully simple new iOS app (yeah, we're already begging for an Android port) that solves a painful problem, and it should make signing documents on the go a whole heck of a lot easier for those who tote iPhones. The concept is simple: you download the document you're supposed to sign right onto your iPhone, and then you use your finger to enter your John Hancock. It'll stamp whatever date you want onto the form, and with a simple button press, it's converted to a PDF and shot back to the sender. We'd probably recommend using the stock black ink, but it seems that a few color options are available for those who prefer to roll a bit more casually. Head on past the break for a demo, and then hit that iTunes link for a free trial. Once you send three documents, you'll need to pony up $4.99 for another 20 docs (a $9.99 unlimited version is coming soon). But hey, given that petrol looks like a steal compared to your average inkjet cartridge, you'll probably still come out ahead.
President Obama signs another iPad
At the NATO summit in Lisbon, Portugal, an iPad-toting attendee approached President Obama and asked him to sign his 21st century autograph pad. The President replied, "I've done this once before." Back in October, President Obama signed an iPad at a rally at the University of Washington. As Dave Caolo noted at the time, this was the first presidential autograph captured with an iPad that we know of. Click Read More to watch a video of the autograph. [Comments on this post are closed.]
5 productivity tips for Mail.app
Like Kelly Taylor from Beverly Hills 90210 and her flings with Dylan, Brandon and Colin, I've been around the block with mail clients, both on the Mac and PC side.That said, I prefer Mail.app. While Mail.app is simple enough for less advanced users, it also contains some niceties for power users. Here are five tips to help enhance your experience in Mail.app. Threaded/Grouping Messages Making sense of who said what and when they said it in relation to who in an email string can be mind numbing. Thankfully, Mail.app has the ability to organize emails by thread, lumping them together by subject. To enable this feature, select on the mail box or folder that you'd like to view messages in threaded form and then click on "Organize by Thread" from the "View" menu. Messages will then be viewed as threads on an individual folder level basis. For instance, when applied to Folder 1, in which subfolders A, B and C reside, only messages residing in Folder 1 will be threaded.
President Obama signs an iPad at Seattle rally, seems pretty down with 'autograph change'
The first presidential iPad signing? Probably. One Sylvester Cann attended a recent rally in Seattle at the University of Washington, and was somehow fortunate enough to get within eyeshot of Barack Obama. According to Cann, the secret service wasn't exactly sure about the Prez handing over his John Hancock on a tablet, but eventually they cut loose and let him autograph the tablet with his finger using the Adobe Ideas app. There's a video just below for those who are still in disbelief, and we have to say -- that autograph ain't half bad for using one's digit to create it. [Thanks, Sylvester]
Mac 101: Making a fancy signature in Mail.app
I was leafing through some emails this afternoon and came upon one with an extremely attractive signature block. So attractive, in fact, that I promptly stopped doing the writing I was working on and decided to create my own new signature to replace the ugly one I had been using. I wanted to have three major components to the signature: my name in color so that it stood out, links to the websites that describe my work (TUAW being one of those sites), and the ever-popular links to my Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn pages. The final product looks like this: It's nothing too fancy, but it provides links to the locations that are important to me and also to the social networking sites I use. So what's the secret to doing this? Easy - use a blank new message as your canvas for creating the signature you want, and then copy and paste it into a new signature block in Mail preferences. Follow along as I create this signature block.
Massively talks with Raptr's Dennis Fong
Raptr is a pretty ambitious project, even if you think about what has been accomplished so far. Essentially, the service is connecting all of your gaming-related services under one profile, one messenger, and one new iPhone app. Think of it as your Trillian messenger for gamers. I have a short history with Raptr but never really warmed up to it until recently. I wanted a service that would allow all of my friends, across all of the different networks that I visit, to see what and how much I am playing. Now that I have made a newer profile and have really started adding a few friends, I am sort of shocked at it's usefullness. Not only does it let me sign in to most of the major messaging services, game networks and social services like Facebook, but it allows me to see what my friends are doing as well, in some very specific ways. I was excited to get a chance to talk to Raptr CEO Dennis Fong and was impressed by how such an ambitious idea has now turned into a real, working application.
NEC tech detects illegal video uploads in seconds, MPAA swoons
Surely by now you've come across something on YouTube that was flagged for copyright infringement, a process that's surely powered by massive teams of elves and other mystical creatures who watch each and every video uploaded to the site. NEC is looking to put them all out of work with a system that, with just 60 frames worth of video (about two seconds, typically) can identify copyrighted video with 96 percent accuracy and a false alarm rate of one in 200,000 -- even if it was copied from digital to analog or had captions added. This process is now part of the MPEG-7 Video signature tool, apparently the international standard, and works by creating signatures for copyrighted video that are just 76 bytes per frame. That's small enough for a desktop with a single core, 3GHz processor to churn through 1,000 hours of questionable video in one second, looking for matches all the while. Unless you freelance for the MPAA this isn't software you'll be running, but if you're a fan of the torrents there's a good chance that someone you know very indirectly will be.
First Look: Breaking the print / sign / fax cycle with Zosh for iPhone
Does this scenario sound familiar? You're out of town or away from your office, and you get a call from a client. They need for you to fill out and sign a contract, and then return it to them as quickly as possible. Right now, you'd probably pull out your laptop, pull up the email with the contract, print it out, fill out the information and signature by hand, and then find a fax machine to send the document off to the client; or, if your client is savvy enough, you could electronically sign a PDF version of the contract. What if you could do all of that from your iPhone? Zosh [$2.99, iTunes Link] provides a way to do just that. It's an iPhone-based tool for marking up and signing PDF documents with text, dates, and signatures. The company says that Microsoft Word document support will be available soon. Zosh works in concert with a secure file server to make the documents available to your iPhone. When you receive a document as an attachment to an email message, you just forward it from your Zosh account email address to a special zosh.com address. Zosh recognizes your email address and then stores the document folder; the contents of that folder are visible on your iPhone on a Documents screen. For training purposes, Zosh has created a "Getting Started with Zosh" PDF that you can read for step-by-step instructions and hands-on demonstrations. To view the document, you simply tap on its name. When you find a place that you need to annotate with a date, text, or signature, you simply tap on the Insert button and you're given a choice of what to insert. If you choose date, a date picker with several different date formats appears. Selecting text brings up a text edit field into which you type the text you want to annotate the PDF with. To add a signature, an automatically scrolling window appears into which you write your name on the touchsc. I found that using a stylus like the Pogo Stylus helped me to create a more accurate signature than my finger. Any of the annotations can be in a choice of four colors -- blue, black, gray, and red -- and can be moved around the page, rotated 360°, resized (bigger or smaller), or deleted. For text annotations, you can choose from a variety of fonts, although none of them really stood out as being unique. Of course, if you're annotating a contract or other legal document, I'm not sure you want to put text in some sort of oddball font. Once you're done signing the document, you "transmit" it back to your email address or that of another recipient. There's no need to print the original, find a pen to sign the document, then scan and or fax the document before sending it on. Zosh does exactly what it sets out to do, breaking the cycle of wasteful printing and faxing, and it does it on the iPhone alone. While testing the app on a business trip, I had the opportunity to use Zosh to annotate and sign a couple of documents, and I found it to be a lifesaver. While Zosh isn't for everybody, if you are the type of person who needs to receive, annotate, and sign documents, and then return them to another person, the app is worth much more than the $2.99 price tag.
Paradigm SUB 1 and SUB 2 subwoofers -- six drivers on three sides for buzz-free bass
Paradigm doesn't move models in and out of its Reference Signature lineup very often, and the SUB 25 was introduced less than a year ago. Progress never stops, though, and the SUB 25 has been displaced as top dog by the SUB 2 and its "little" brother SUB 1. These new designs feature six drivers (10-inches in the SUB 2, 8-inches for the SUB 1) arranged in three radially symmetric stacked pairs -- the end result being a lot of effective radiating area with in-cabinet forces that balance each other out. In the real world, that means more boom and less buzz, especially with the kilowatt range Class D amps Paradigm includes in these subs. Yeah, we want one too, but even with just six drivers this isn't going to come cheap. The $3,500 price tag on the SUB 1 is comparable to the outgoing SUB 25, but the SUB 2 will sink your wallet to a $7,500 crush depth. Pick yourself up off the floor and read the full release after the break if you're interested.
Have a MacBook running Snow Leopard? Give someone your Autograph
Up to this point in time, if you wanted to "sign" an electronic document (other than a secure PDF), you either had to scan your signature with a scanner and import the resulting graphic into your document, or purchase a digitizing tablet. Ten One Design, the same folks who brought us the Pogo Sketch stylus, have come up with a way for anyone with Snow Leopard and a MacBook that supports multi-touch gestures to sign documents. Autograph (US$6.95) is a signature capture application that works with your MacBook and a finger or stylus to make signing your name a snap. If you don't know if your MacBook will work with Autograph, you can download a trial copy that adds a watermark to the signature just to try it out. To add your John Hancock to an email or document when Autograph is running (I have it set up to launch at startup), you can either select the menu bar icon or press control-option-A, and then a semi-transparent gray window appears. Using your finger or a stylus on your trackpad like a pen, you can write your name or draw a little picture. Pressing return embeds the signature or sketch into your document. Autograph works great! I was able to use it in Mail, Word, Keynote, and Pages, and I'm assuming that it will work fine in any Mac application that lets you paste in a graphic. I know I'll be using this handy little program to add a personal touch to my documents. The short silent video below demonstrates Autograph in action.
How do you like your TiVo, with bleeps & bloops or without?
This isn't one of our polls but it's a worth question: TiVo users, do you leave your unit's distinctive bleeps and bloops on, or turn them off? Our friends at TV Squad want to know, claiming that once they turned off the menu's audio cues the DVR seemed hollow and lonely. So let us know if you keep the sounds on, Sex & the City style, even if it's just to lord them over your cable DVR owning friends, stuck timeshifting in silence.
Paradigm SUB 25 subwoofer hands-on
The Paradigm Signature SUB 25 looked small enough in the back of the freight truck, but by the time it was at our front door, all 150-pounds of it seemed appropriately intimidating. If you're fortunate enough to have one of these $4,000 beasts delivered to you, we recommend you get a friend to help with setup. All the better if that friend happens to be an electrician -- have them install 15A, 250V service to the living room so you can make use of that other power cord and test out the 3,000-Watt amplifier spec. The SUB 25 is menacingly handsome in glossy black and built like a tank; unfortunately, the grille is also fixed, so no pics of the 15-inch driver. Around back are RCA and XLR inputs and adjustment controls, but we'd recommend you spring an extra $300 for the Perfect Bass Kit and automatically get your SUB 25 dialed in via its USB port. Even though it's nowhere near cheap, that doesn't mean the SUB 25 can't present value to well-heeled bassheads, and we'll try to suss that out over the coming weeks. Feel free to peruse the photos after the break while we grab some ibuprofen for our aching backs and alert the neighbors (not necessarily in that order).
Google warms to location-based apps with My Tracks, new Gmail signatures
As if the addition of TeleNav GPS to the T-Mobile G1 wasn't evidence enough, Google is totally into exploiting the GPS capabilities of its Android-based handsets. First up is My Tracks, which quite simply "records tracks of outdoor activities using the phone's built-in GPS." From there, it shows the data points on a map and presents live statistics (which even includes an elevation profile); obviously, sharing said routes is a lesson in simplicity thanks to Google Maps and Google Docs. Next up are location-based Gmail signatures, which oddly enough, use your IP address in order to append a current location to your sent emails. Granted, this approach is better than nothing, but there's certainly the chance of it missing your real whereabouts by a town or three. At any rate, feel free to dig into both in the read links below.Read - Google My TracksRead - Location-based Gmail signatures
