If The Truth Fits

I wouldn’t really describe myself as being an Apple fanboy, and I wouldn’t necessarily say that I’m an iPhone fanboy, I know it has a fair few failings, but I’m afraid that you’re going to have to let me gush for just a minute about the shiny slab of magic in my pocket.

This morning I downloaded the updated version of the Google Mobile app (here’s an iTunes link if you want to check it out yourself) to my phone because I’d heard quite a lot of buzz about it. That buzz related to being able to conduct searches using voice recognition. I’ve never found voice recognition software to be particularly accurate, and if you ever see me in public Googling with my voice rather than tapping away at the keyboard you have my permission to strangle me until I can no longer conduct voice searches which will almost certainly be based around pop culture facts just so that I can settle bets amongst my friends.

On a quick side note, having an iPhone has almost become a threat. If I’m sat in the pub with my friends and someone says something slightly dubious, like, for example “when scared, a squid will balloon to twice its size and turn red,” all I have to do is mutter “I have an iPhone” and all of a sudden their confidence and bravado will be shattered, because people now believe Google results more than their own memories. Hopefully, as smartphones become more prevalent in society, there will be less BS spoken in bars around the world, though being the guy that just sits there fact checking what people are saying all-night between sips on your beer is hardly a good way to be the life and soul of the party. Also, I try and keep my iPhone in my pocket as much as possible when I’ve had a drink or two, because as we’ve discussed before, drinking and e-mails do not mix.

I don’t believe that the ability to search the internet is someone that will catch on too quickly (maybe one day when everyone is comfortable with using those stupid bluetooth microphones), but I think its pretty amazing that ‘we’ seem to have reached a point in technological evolution where we can do things that were in science fiction not so long ago. Imagine if you told someone in the 80s that in about twenty years time that they would be able to pull a phone out of their pocket (that wouldn’t be the same size and weight as a brick) speak into it, without speaking to someone else, and the answer to your query would then be displayed on a screen, how do you think they’d react? Oh, and then you told them that the phone could also hold and play hundreds of hours of music and video. Hell, when I was a kid, I was impressed that ‘they’ could get Tetris to fit onto a wristwatch!

Oh, and in case you missed it, a spider has gone missing on the International Space Station, and that is a genuine story, not the set up to a low budget scifi movie.

I’ve read about this story a few times on my travels around the web today, and I’ve found that every single one of those stories felt the need to point out that this is NOT an April Fool’s style prank or faux-feature, possibly because Google are so well known for the hoaxes that they spring upon a very skeptical public every April 1st, some of which were pretty obvious (does anyone else remember Google PigeonRank?), and some of which were so crazy that they had an air of plausibility about them (Virgle? It made so much sense!). I’ve always thought that one of these years, Google would pull the old switcheroo and launch a real product on April Fools Day and not get involved in the web’s April 1st shenanigans, since I’m sure it would confuse the hell out of people, which would probably be the funniest thing they’ve done for Fool’s Day for a few years.

Sorry, I’m afraid I went off on a bit of a tangent there, Google announced a new product today which seems to have caught a lot of attention. It is called ‘Mail Goggles‘ and can be enabled in the Settings>Labs tab when you’re using Gmail. The idea behind it is that there are quite a lot of people who after a night out on the sauce might come home and decide that they’d better check their e-mails before they go to bed, just to see if anything really important has come up, but in the process they might decide to tell a few people what they really think of them in a few e-mails that they’ll probablycertainly regret sending in the morning. These people need protecting from themselves in their inebriated state, and that’s where Mail Goggles comes in. Once enabled, it will activate itself at certain times of night and over the whole weekend (Googlers must party hard at weekends!), and before you are allowed to send an e-mail it will ask you to complete a number of fairly simple maths problems (though you can alter the difficulty level) within a time limit. If you complete the problems, your e-mail will be sent, if not, Google will tell you to have a glass of water and go to bed (no, really).

Whilst I’m sure that if I were really determined to send an e-mail telling them that “they should go to hell” then I would make sure that e-mail got there, I might start by simply disabling ‘Mail Goggles’ (duh!), but I do think its a fun little feature, and it might actually be pretty effective. For one thing, I remember coming home (staggering home, some might say) from a night out, and for some reason I decided it would be a good idea to try and play sudoku on my phone (yep, you can even play sudoku on an iPhone, it can do anything!), after staring at the screen for a minute I’m pretty sure I fell asleep, so maybe Google are onto something with this whole numbers angle. Also, I think that if I were to fail at completing the maths problems once then it might set off a few alarm bells in my head that it might be a good idea to re-read that e-mail, maybe they shouldn’t go to hell, just New Jersey?

As Ars Technica comments, it would be really great if someone made something for cellphones on Friday and Saturday nights!

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