'South Africans prefer their mobile phones to TV'

South Africans spend more time on their mobile devices than they do watching television to listening to the radio, according to a Mobile Media Consumption survey. Sowetan Live reports.

On any given day, mobile web users spend 30% of their media time on mobile devices, 29% on television and 20% listening to the radio, mobile advertising network InMobi said in a statement.

“Availability, ease of use, and privacy are the top three driving factors to be on mobile,” it said.

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Google automatically uploads photos to Google+ from your iPhone

While checking my Google+ page, I noticed a photo taken on my iPhone last week that I has no intention to post online. It had been automatically uploaded to my Google+ account via the Google+ app that has an Instant Upload feature that is enabled.

Worse, I checked "Photos from your Phone" and there are 7 other photos that have been automatically uploaded to Google in February.

According to Google, these photos and videos were uploaded from your phone via Instant Upload after you enable it. They are visible only to you until you share them.

Google also says: To get started, enable Instant Upload for Android or iOS. Once you've enabled Instant Upload, all photos taken with your phone will appear in your Photos tab in Photos from your phone. These photos are only visible to you until you post them or move them to an album that you've shared.

I never enabled Instant Upload.

I don't care if "These photos are only visible to you until you post them or move them to an album that you've shared", I never meant for them to be online.

I'm furious.

To disable this feature, Open your Google+ app on your cell phone, click on Settings (wheel-like icon top left), then select Instant Upload and then OFF.

UPDATE 29.02.2012 One day after deleting my photos from Google+, in a vanity search for "Emily Turrettini", personalized results in Google bring up the same images. They have not been deleted!

FaceTime Video Calling Is Making People Get Plastic Surgery

No—not an Onion article. A Washington, DC-area plastic surgeon is being hit with patients rendered so self-conscious by their video chatting visages that they're asking for phone-specific facelifts. Gizmodo reports.

Patients come in with their iPhones and show me how they look on [Apple's video calling application] FaceTime," says Dr. Sigal. "The angle at which the phone is held, with the caller looking downward into the camera, really captures any heaviness, fullness and sagging of the face and neck. People say ‘I never knew I looked like that! I need to do something!' I've started calling it the ‘FaceTime Facelift' effect. And we've developed procedures to specifically address it.

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Nokia Unveils 41-Megapixel 808 Camera Phone

One of the big jaw-droppers at this year’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona is the new 41-megapixel camera-phone from Nokia: the 808 PureView. Forbes reports.

The Verge notes that while the phone is billed at 41 million pixels, “as you might have surmised, this handset doesn’t take full 41-megapixel stills. Instead, it oversamples — taking the image data from seven neighboring pixels and consolidating it into one pixel’s worth — and generates pictures roughly 5 megapixels in size.

That’s still plenty of dots for most uses, and the image quality you can obtain from such a system is frankly ridiculous.

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Cell phone videos show horrors inside Syria

From CBS News:

The city of Homs - remember the name - is a little bigger than Philadelphia and it's been under artillery fire for two weeks. Rebels claim 100 civilians were killed Tuesday alone. The citizens there have been filming the siege on cell phones.

The man shooting the video was saying: "We are being slaughtered. Where are you, all Arabs?"

Watch CBS News video which shows the sights and sounds of what it's like to be a citizen of Homs today.

New Technology Erases People in the Background of Your Camphone Pics

Gizmodo reports on Scalado's Remove, that let's you take a picture without worrying about who or what is in the background.

In their own words: Remove is a technology that automatically highlights and removes any unwanted object from a captured photo. It is the world’s first Object removal software to be released on a mobile device.

Remove solves common photographic problems with unwanted objects in captured images, such as people getting in the way of our camera shot. Remove detects and selects the unwanted objects which simply can be removed automatically or by touching the selections on the screen or after capturing the image.

How cool is that?

UBC researchers win $100,000 grants to adapt cellphones to diagnose pneumonia

The Camera Oximeter - Pulse Oximetry Embedded On a Mobile Phone for the Diagnosis of Pneumonia from Grand Challenges Canada on Vimeo.

Two UBC researchers who are testing the use of mobile phones to diagnose pneumonia and helping treat AIDS patients in Africa have just won $100,000 grants to help them do just that. The Province reports via @jranck.

Walter Karlen, a post-doctoral fellow in the university’s department of engineering is developing a cellphone-based “camera oximeter” that rural doctors and nurses can use to test patients’ oxygen saturations levels — a key indicator of pneumonia.

Instead of having to access expensive diagnostic equipment Karlen hopes they’ll soon be able to use his cellphone device, shining a light through the patients’ finger to get a reading.

“These devices (standard pulse oximeters) are usually quite expensive and here in Africa they are not that available. Even if people know how to use them, they can’t get access to them. What we are trying to do is provide a solution,” said Karlen, who is in South Africa at Stellenbosch University working on the project.

The technology could save some of the two million children under five who die of pneumonia every year.

Read full article.

Adapter connects smartphones to microscopes for scientific photography

The SkyLight device holds the user’s smartphone camera steady over the eyepiece of a microscope so as to enable the user to take pictures with the phone of the images seen through the microscope. Springwise reports via @jranck.

Now available for preorder on Kickstarter, where it has been successfully funded, the SkyLight device holds the user’s smartphone camera steady over the eyepiece of a microscope so as to enable the user to take pictures with the phone of the images seen through the microscope. Compatible with any smartphone and almost every microscope, the device is intended for a range of global health and educational applications, as well as personal photography.

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'Second Screen'. Super Bowl marketers bet on mobile

In what is being marketed as the first "second screen" Super Bowl, the game's promoters and advertisers are offering interactive experiences aimed at getting people to spend more money and time on mobile phones and devices. USA Today reports.

Roughly 60% of Super Bowl viewers will use their phones during the game, says a survey by Velti, a mobile marketing firm. An E-Trade survey says 31% of viewers expect to use Facebook and 6% will be on Twitter. "This is the first year where you'll see fans using the cellphone more often than the remote," says Krishna Subramanian of Velti. "Advertisers are trying to figure out how to leverage the second or third screen."

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