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Google released a new app (right now for Android only) called Goggles. If you haven’t seen this year, go look!

I downloaded this on my Droid and have been playing around with it for a few days. All I can say is that this is crazy. Take a picture of something and Google will (most of the time) find you some info on it. I’ve played around with some examples:

Took a pic of my Macbook Pro sitting on my desk… and Google new it was a Macbook.

I was across the street from the Fox Theater in Boulder and I took a pic of the front of the building. Google knew it was the Fox, and brought up info and links to a map.

I found a Hanna Montana pink tissue box at a local store and I took a pic.. Google knew it was Hanna…

Supposedly it will recognize wine labels too. This is some neat technology and could be useful. Sometimes its hard to search for something based on text, especially if you dont know exactly what you are looking at or it is in some foreign language.

Maybe eventually this will couple with Google’s really great translation tools and do things like translate street signs on the fly… it also reads barcodes and book covers, but its a bit slower than other Android apps for just that.

Anyone out there heard about the new Zune HD? You might hear about it a lot more soon. I wrote about this a while back when there was less info, just an announcement really. But now we have videos and reviews. I have to say it looks impressive so far. And finally something that LOOKS just as good as an Apple product too.

The screen looks great, and this has the new nvidia tegra chipset, so the graphics should be excellent.

Sure it plays music, has an HD radio tuner, video, and all that… but I secretly hope this is just the beginning of the Zune take over of the world. I’m serious. What if they added a UMTS modem? Instant cell phone…. And the Zune OS looks a whole heck of a lot better than the upcoming release of WinMobile…

Ok, and here is the other killer things for Zune (phone or otherwise). Apps. Lets look at programming on Apple vs Microsoft platforms. (For the sake of this exercise, I’m ignoring shell scripts or C++ command line app, etc). For GUI programming and GUI apps you have XCode vs .NET.. and then you have Java on both sides. But Java GUIs are worse than other of the other options, so we can ignore that too. I’ve coded on both sides and I have to say .NET is the easiest development system I’ve ever used, by far. VisualStudio is epic for debugging and development.

So.. Zune goes all app store on us… and you get to use .NET mobile to develop the apps. This would explode overnight. EVERYONE knows C# or VB… but to break into the Apple app store you have to figure out XCode’s development methodology and Obj-C. That sucks. No one uses Obj-C except Apple and I really just don’t like it.

This would be better than Android as well. I’m a big fan of Google and what they are doing with Android, but the SDK is still a bit rough, and the GUI design is no were near as good as what a Microsoft tool would bring.

And the HD has an nvidia chip set. What if we got some mobile version of DirectX? Think about the gaming potential of that too?

So that is my wild dream.. a Zune Phone with a .NET dev tool and an app store… Do it MS… DO IT.

I got a Google Voice invite a few weeks ago, and since I’m also sporting an Android phone I thought this might be interesting.

In a nutshell, you get a Google phone number (I even got a local number) and you can configure the service to interact with all your other numbers – cell, home, work, etc. You can set which phone(s) ring in what order, and on Android installing Voice gives you to option to make a call from the handset from either your carrier’s number or your Google number. But here’s the issue, if you can’t port your main number, you have to go through the pain of changing your number, which is no fun at all. Google says you may be able to port over a number later on. For now, I’m not going to give out my Google number.

But here is the awesome part of Voice even if you don’t use it as a primary number – the voicemail is outstanding. I am now using it for my primary VM instead of T-Mobile. Here is how I set it up, and why its great:

1) I change my Android options to point my phone at my Google Voice number as my “voicemail” number instead of the T-Mobile default. This means that if I dont pick up my cell phone the call is sent to my GV number.

2). Set Google Voice to not forward to any numbers, and set it to go directly to voicemail when the Google number rings.

At this point if I don’t answer my cell, it forwards to google and straight to voicemail. So the caller can’t tell the different.

Now, GV has some great options to set for voice mail. It will transcribe your messages and txt or email them to you! Its not perfect, but over the few dozen messages I’d gotten so far, its close enough to know what the caller really said.

I setup GV to txt my cell when I get a VM. This is KILLER if you are in a meeting or a movie or a loud location. I can read my VM on my phone.

Second, the GV Android app will download the VM to my phone along with the transcript in the GV “inbox”. So later on I can go listen and/or read the message again.

Also, I can log into GV from any computer and get all my messages, send txts, even make calls, directly from the web interface.

Its not perfect yet, but so far its pretty amazing.

Good read here.

Apple has made some really odd choices with regard to apps and such. I don’t get it.

Latitude is kind of a cool option for maps. It’s most useful if you are out on the town and you can see where are your “peeps” are at. Well provided they are all on an Android device. The reason why Latitude is pointless on iPhone is that it can’t run in the background, so unless all your friends are walking around with their iPhones locked in map mode, you wont get any updates.

At least with Android I can run it in the background if I want/need to.