BlackBerry style keyboard for your iPhone

There was a time when BlackBerry dominated the smartphone market with an iron fist, physical keyboard, and promise of an exclusive, secure app that we still refer to as BBM. The BlackBerry days are well and truly over now, with the Canadian company’s well-documented fall from grace seeming only to speed up in the previous few months, but despite this, we all know those BB owners who remain defiant that they won’t cave in to the glamour of an iPhone or Android smartphone.

The main reason, I find, for people feeling this way is the famously responsive physical keyboard, but if there was a way for these users to enjoy the key-tapping benefits of owning a BlackBerry while taking advantage of the very much more advanced iOS ecosystem, surely every BB owner would wave the white flag? Enter: Typo Keyboard Case.

As a user of just about every major platform going, I have to say, typing on iOS, for lack of a more eloquent, explanatory word, simply sucks. On Android, you can install your own keyboard to suit the way you type, and almost every option available over at the Play Store is more dynamic, advanced and user-friendly than the stock iOS keyboard.

It’s grossly one-dimensional, and with the famously inappropriate (and sometimes censored) autocorrect still wreaking havoc even among seasoned typists, mistakes stemming from the difference between what you thought you typed and what you actually typed are aplenty.

The Typo Keyboard Case is by no means a prayer answerer, but it will provide some respite for those iPhone 5/5s users who sometimes long for their BlackBerry back when typing a particularly long and or tedious message. It’s comprised of a case that slides onto the back of your device, leaving a keyboard exposed at the front. It does elongate the already disproportionately long smartphone, but at the same time, brings the perks of a physical keyboard right to your iPhone.

Before you ask: yes, it is indeed backlit, and charging up time is an impressive one hour for a full battery. It connects to your iPhone via Bluetooth (of course), and for $99, looks a very good deal for those with less delicate fingertips.

It arrives in January, but you can preorder now by heading to: TypoKeyboards.com

Is your password as secure as you would like it to be?

The recent wave of data breaches on a number of popular sites and Web service providers should definitely be a cause for concern to most users. Malicious attacks on the likes of Yahoo!, Facebook and Adobe should act as a catalyst for us to review our current account setup and make changes accordingly to improve the strength of passwords, even if your data wasn’t amongst the batch that was compromised in any of the attacks. Microsoft Research is well aware that password strength is one of the most vital components in combating such breaches, and as such has created the Telephathwords tool to try and guess the next character of a password based on a large database and complex query patterns.

The Web-based tool is part of a program that involved Microsoft’s research team and was led by a PhD student from Carnegie Mellon University. The service is intended to bring the issue of password security and vulnerability to the forefront of people’s minds and has the mission of “preventing weak passwords by reading your mind”. If you take the service literally then it can all start to get a little creepy. As much as we love Microsoft, we certainly don’t want the Redmond based company reading our thoughts. The non-literal explanation is that Telepathwordsattempts to make predictions of the password being entered by using programmed knowledge.

The database behind the service contains a large list of passwords that have been shown to be commonly used by the public. Ironically, that list has actually been bolstered by including common passwords that have been found in the lists made public by security breaches. The underlying brain of the MSR tool also queries against common phrases that are regularly found on websites and search queries as well as looking for common password selection behavior such as using keys next to one another on the keyboard. When the user begins typing in a password, Telepathwords uses all of this power to predict the next character with alarming success.
The fun little tool is definitely worth checking out, even if just to see how easy your main password is to predict. All entries into the website are encrypted in the browser before they are logged and sent to the Microsoft Research team servers to be queried.
Head over to this website to get started: telepathwords.research.microsoft.com

Gaikai Game Streaming Service Coming To PS4 As Well As PS3 And PS Vita

Although the PlayStation 4‘s lack of backwards compatibility threatened to spill over into hysteria, Sony promised that Gaikai, a service recently acquired by the Japanese company, would allow gamers to enjoy PlayStation 3 titles via cloud streaming, and now, it has been revealed that the service will also be launched on the PS3 andPS Vita. Although the Vita had been looking like a bit of a dead horse – particularly given the popularity of mobile gaming via smartphones and tablets – its integration with the often record-breaking PS4 could bring a new lease of life to the handheld, and Gaikai support will certainly do its cause no harm.

In a statement released talking of worldwide PS4 sales, Sony confirmed that the Gaikai service would be a cross-platform affair. "Based on Gaikai Inc’s cloud-based technology, the [Gaikai] service will enable users to have access to a catalogue of critically acclaimed PS3 games on PlayStation 4 and PS3, followed by PlayStation Vita."

In a nutshell, it will probably become accessible to PlayStation 4, PlayStation 3 and PS Vita users – in that order – and although the PS4 integration is the most notable due to its lack of backwards-compatibility, it would seem that Sony is pulling out all of the stops to appease gamers. Having comprehensively lost the last-gen console war to Microsoft and the Xbox 360, Sony has responded in a defiant manner, and having outsold its close rival in just about every market hitherto with the fourth-gen console, the Gaikai news is surely going to further boost the PlayStation brand’s credentials.

Gaikai, for the uninitiated, operates in much the same manner as OnLive, and provided your Internet connection is up to scratch, you can readily stream games right to your console from the cloud. The price model definitely works in the favor of the heavy gamer, too, with gamers able to stream any game they like for a subscription fee.

Beaming games from remote servers also saves space on the console for other content, and with Sony boasting such a huge inventory of titles from the past few years, one suspects the Gaikai service could prove hugely popular.

It will be hitting the U.S. market in 2014, while British PS4 owners will unfortunately not be seeing any kind of support until 2015.

Sony Sells 2.1 million PS4 units in November

Sony was keen to let the world know that the North American debut of the PlayStation 4 ended with record breaking results. With just north of one million units sold in the North American region in the first 24-hours alone, it was evident that Sony’s next-gen console had captured the imagination of users. In the time that has followed, the PS4 has become available in a total of thirty-two different countries, with Sony officially announcing that more than 2.1 million consoles shipped during the month of November.

We already knew that the November 15th debut of the new console was the company’s most successful launch of a PlayStation product. More than one million units sold in 24-hours is a significant achievement, something which was topped off by Sony selling 250,000 PS4 units in just 48-hours in the UK. That achievement is made even more impressive when you consider that Microsoft achieved the same sales figures with the Xbox One across multiple territories, not just in North America. Sony’s expansion into countries like Europe, Asia and Latin America has seen consumers greet the console with the same excitement and enthusiasm that created such a buzz on the first day of availability.

It seems the future looks bright for Sony’s PlayStation division. The console may have only been available for a period of two weeks, but the consumer reviews of the hardware seem to be overwhelmingly positive. Sony is yet to launch the console into every corner of the market, with a number of locations around the world yet to benefit from the future of gaming. As game publishers start to realize the power of the hardware and produce games accordingly, it’ll be extremely interesting to keep an eye on adoption figures of the PlayStation 4.

Jailbreak for iOS 7?

Is the new iOS 7 Jailbreak out yet? Sources say that there is a tethered jailbreak for the idevice and it so far only works on the iPhone 4 both gsm and cdma (Verizon and Att). Now it is a tethered jailbreak meaning that if your phone shuts down for whatever reason you will not be able to turn it back on without plugging it into your computer and completing a series of specific steps. While for some people that is acceptable, I personally am waiting for the untethered jailbreak to come out so I do not have to worry about such things. What are your thoughts on the subject?

Xbox One can become a dev kit

Microsoft released that any Xbox One console can become a developer kit. This is great for people who want to develop indi games for xbox. Microsoft is working on making it even easier to upload user creations to the Xbox Live game store. Right now you can access the settings for the dev kit but however don't mess with any of the settings yet because you can unintentionally put your system in an infinite loop of rebooting. They (Microsoft) says the dev system will be released early 2014 so lets hope its as user friendly as they say it is. 

Is reinventing the wheel really a bad thing

As the old saying goes, "don't reinvent the wheel". We say this in reference to not work too hard to do something that has already been done. However one man decided to try to reinvent the wheel. and what he got was a new wheel that is very practical and completely innovative. Duncan Fitzsimmons created a new wheel called the Morph. The Morph is a detachable wheelchair wheel that can compress to around half of its original width. It is designed to provide greater flexibility and mobility to the estimated 65 million people around the world who need a wheelchair. Anyone who has ever tried to move a wheelchair knows that even when folded they take up a large amount of space.