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Blu e-cigarettes help you make friends, light up when you're near another Blu smoker
Oh, that old adage: smoke, be cool, make friends. Die. Well, e-cigarette manufacturer Blu is now trying to resurrect that image, albeit perhaps without so much of the death bit, by making its packaging more sociable. It's new "smart packs" are equipped with radio sensors that detect when a fellow Blu smoker comes within 50 feet, causing your box to light up and vibrate. This is meant to encourage you to go over and make conversation, like "Hi, so, er... you also spent $80 on a pack of battery-powered smokes. Is that fur real?"
iPad apps: Twitter and social networking essentials
As you might've notice, either here on the site or likely elsewhere on the internet, we at Engadget have somewhat of an affinity to social networking. With a new screen sitting here saving us some screen real estate, we decided to give a number of Twitter and other pro-social apps a go for perennially staying connected to our online friends -- so long as there's a decent WiFi connection nearby. Here's the highlights from what we've toyed with, and stay tuned for even more roundups on the horizon. Twitterific for iPad (free; $4.99 for Pro account) - Definitely the best Twitter app on the iPad so far (pictured above). It works great in portrait and landscape, contextual links conveniently pop out and photos even get special format treatment. No option to upload photos when tweeting, but we're guessing with a lack of a camera, it didn't seem as necessary an addition -- we like to show off our screen captures and saved browsing images, but hey, that's just us. The only deterrent for power users is that you can only view one column at a time, but with lists, saved searches, and all other thread options easily accessible from the leftmost column, we didn't find it too inconvenient whatsoever. [See in iTunes]
