The folks of Scanomat have come up with a brilliant coffee idea: a fully automatic coffee maker powered by an iPhone. Once an idea popped into the head of designer Kim Vibe-Petersen, it took just about two days time the prototype was created and already going through test runs. The production ran for about two years, which much detail being spent on the milk foamer.

Named, the TopBrewer, the device consists over 75% recycled stainless steel, it is capable of being used in (yes, in) any tabletop. The set up is easy, just needing a flat tabletop, two small holes (for the swan neck faucets), and some type of drain; and viola, there is the start of a new coffee brewer.

As mentioned earlier in the article, the TopBrewer will be compatible with any iPhone or iPad. The iOS app that will run with the iDevice helps keep counter tops free of unwanted debris and leaves extra room for the cream and sugar. There is also the function of allowing the iPhone/iPad to keep track of how many drinks have been made and to help with inventory by allowing the operator to order beans.

The application is not yet ready for retail sale, but from the screen shots, it will be one of the best applications made for Apple users. Everything needed to run the TopBrewer will be displayed on the screen, giving accurate temperatures and any issues the machine might have.

The TopBrewer is being processed solely for businesses, allowing the owners to have a special save file for regular customers (which will help with keeping lines down and customer satisfaction up), and keeping a detailed report on what is used for future ordering purposes.

But wait, there’s more! The TopBrewer is designed to brew more than just coffee. With the ability to hold up to a liter of hot water every minute, the TopBrewer can whip up macchiatos, latte’s, and cappuccinos within the blink of an eye. The cleanup is super easy as well, there is a built in cleaner that sprays hot water throughout the faucet after each drink. All of this happens within a matter of minutes, which is great for any coffee rush hour.

Though it isn’t scheduled to make its debut until late January or so, the TopBrewer will be an answer to many a coffee shops prayers. Less table space, self-cleaning functions, and the ability to run more than one brewer per iDevice will keep every coffee shop on its toes. Scanomat is truly changing the face of the coffee brewing industry with the TopBrewer. Once this hits stores, guarantee a change in all coffee shops, from the design, to the employees attitudes. Home-brewers don’t fret though; the TopBrewer will be available for household use once all is up and running smoothly.

Guest article written by: Davis Miller. Davis is very much concerned about health and fitness and calories that he consumes. Visit his site for kiezen nl and  Beste koffiemachine.

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It is overwhelming to understand the buzz that has been happening around Apple’s new personal assistant, whether it can be used for tweets or Facebook updates. However, following some simple steps and using the SMS features of both the social networking sites, you can get Siri to update both your Twitter and Facebook accounts.

Here’s how we go:

How to update Twitter?

Step 1

Begin with setting up your phone on Twitter mobile settings page. Following the steps on the page enter your country and phone number.

Step 2

Then SMS the words ‘GO’ to the number allocated against your country; for U.S. it is 40404. This will help in verification of your phone number with Twitter.

Step 3

In the next step, in order to tweet, you can send and SMS to that registered number. For your convenience, you can add the number t40404 to the iPhone address book and name it as ‘Twitter’.

Step 4

Now to make Siri tweet for you, activate it by pressing the Home button for a long time. Post a text, which can be your status update, to the saved ‘Twitter’ number. Once you confirm and approve the text, the saved ‘Twitter’ number will post the update on your twitter account.

How to update Facebook?

Step 1

As mentioned above for Twitter account, you can follow the similar steps for your Facebook updates. Ensure to verify your phone number in the Facebook mobile settings page.

Step 2

When you visit the page, click on ‘add a phone’. You will be asked to enter your password and select your country and mobile operator. After doing so you have to text the letter ‘F’ to 32665.

Step 3

Once it is done, a confirmation code will be send which you have to enter on the web page. After the steps are completed, your will be set up with Facebook. Then following the similar steps like Twitter, you can update your status in by sending a text to the contact with the Facebook number.

These are some of the simple process to follow till Apple iPhone comes up with some innovative feature to update social networking via Siri directly. Till then one can enjoy the features of Siri on the move and have the advantages conveniently.

Guest article written by: Samantha Harper is a blogger by profession. She loves writing on technology and luxury. Beside this she is fond of gadgets. Recently an article on Ferrari 599 GTO attracted her attention. These days she is busy in writing an article on Sound systems.

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While most of us are always glad to see a new iPhone come along, there’s no doubt that recent news from the smartphone world has seen a fair degree of a attention focusing on the Galaxy Nexus from Samsung. This is the handset that comes running the so-called Ice Cream Sandwich, which is the Google operating system based around Android.

What’s the big deal?

There’s a lot of anticipation surrounding this handset because not only will the latest Android update feature a wealth of features and functionality aimed at competing with the Apple iOS, the phone itself will also boast a formidable technical specification.

Samsung has clearly spent quite some time on developing this smartphone and inside the delicious styling youíll find a 1.2GHz dual core processor, 1GB of RAM and a huge 4.65-inch screen that features a 1280x720p resolution from the Super AMOLED display. So, as soon as you power it up and start enjoying the features of the Android 4.0 interface itís clear to see that Samsung mean business.

Feature perfect?

However, take a closer look and it comes as a bit of a surprise to see something like the camera, which is becoming such a competitive area of the smartphone tech-spec, is only a 5-megapixel offering. The new Apple iPhone 4S now sports an 8-megapixel camera, but when you use it the Samsung counterpart is actually surprisingly quick, delivers great shots and there’s also the capability for shooting 1080p video recording.

Secret ingredients

But it might just be that operating system upgrade that will pull in a lot of new customers, because Android already has many happy users and is fast becoming one of the number one phone OS currently in circulation. There are certainly plenty of great new features on this in this version of the software. FaceUnlock is the one everybody is talking about, which uses the front-facing camera to allow the owner to unlock their own phone by face recognition.

What’s more, this is one of the best operating systems for ensuring that you can quickly and easily amalgamate all of your social networking contacts and connections, which is becoming a core area of the way we use our smartphones.While many rival handsets do much the same thing, itís the way that Android manages to do this in such a seamless and stress-free fashion that makes it such an enjoyable experience for the handset owner.

Staying power

The Samsung Galaxy Nexus is up against stiff competition though, and not just from the latest version of the Apple phone either. HTC is one of the other most prolific manufacturerís of smartphones and their upcoming crop of releases is no exception.

And, where this company excels is in producing a user interface that works beautifully, as the existing Sense UI proves. With revisions of that in the pipeline and the HTC knack for adding new features and functionality on successive models, then the battle for smartphone supremacy could really hot up in the coming months.

About the author: Rob Clymo writes on behalf of Mobile Phone Genie, your one stop shop for all the best mobile phone handsets in the UK.

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You can watch them all below:

Camera

iCloud

Siri

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The iPhone 4 was a device that stayed at the very top of the pile in terms of the best phones on offer for well over a year. In fact, between the launch of the iPhone 4 and the recent launch of the iPhone 4S there has only really been one mobile phone deal that has come close to challenging it in terms of popularity – the Samsung Galaxy S2.

So, will the iPhone 4S manage the same? Is it ‘future proofed’ as they call it in the industry, or will it fade into obscurity within a couple of months as the rate of technological development increases and Moore’s Law pushes us ever onwards towards the ‘singularity’?

In order to answer this question we will need to look at what features of the iPhone 4S are likely to have the longest shelf life. Sure, the dual core A5 chip and the 8 megapixel camera have already been superseded on other phones, but the new iPhone has a few features that will provide it with some amount of staying power.

The new iPhone operating system iOS 5 provides plenty of innovation, and enough new features that should allow it to adequately compete against Android for some months to come. There are over 200 new features in all, although some of them really stand out as being spectacular.

New messaging features like iMessage will completely change the way people message each other on their phones. This works a bit like BlackBerry Messenger, in that you can chat by text, as well as send images and videos to friends in real time. You can use emoticons and also see when the other person is typing. This is an over the internet service, and essentially a mobile equivalent of instant messaging clients like Windows Live and Google Talk. This is nothing new perhaps. What is innovative about iMessage however is that if no 3G or Wi-Fi connection is available the iPhone 4S will send your message as a standard SMS instead.

Other new social features include Twitter integration and Find my Friends. Find my Friends is a service that is perhaps more revolutionary than it would sound on paper – although a feature that could easily cause a lot of problems if you are not paying attention.

Find my Friends allows users to share their location with friends, which will then be displayed on the other persons phone on a map. This could be used for directing people to your new home or even just locating your chums in a busy public place such as a pop concert. However, it could potentially cause problems if you accidently share your location with someone when you are somewhere you do not want people knowing about, for whatever particular reason that may be.

Some of the other new additions to iOS 5 add in features that compensate for the edge that Android had for a long time. One thing that many people always preferred about Google Android was the notification system, neatly contained in a slide down menu. This was much more user friendly than the iPhone’s previous pop up messages. Of course there are many new features added into the latest Android Ice Cream Sandwich too, although the recent iOS 5 updates should keep the competition healthy for some time.

The Siri voice control option could surely be the new way forward for phones and really make a difference with the way we interact with them. The fact this system can tell what you are saying, while also learn as it goes along is very impressive. Siri is really the feature that will provide the iPhone 4S with a long shelf life, as Google’s voice control software is nowhere near as sophisticated or well integrated.

These innovations, alongside the fact the iPhone 4S now has the hardware power to do all of this, are huge leaps for the device and will see iPhone 4S deals stay at the top of the pile until the next iPhone comes out, sometime next year.

This article was written by one of the many guest authors of TechPatio. Thanks to Simon for submitting this one!

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With the launch of free iCloud on October 12th, it also meant the end of paid MobileMe.

MobileMe was Apple’s paid version for having a @me.com e-mail address, folder online (iDisk), a gallery online, some synchronization between Mac apps etc. It came at a fee of around €79 a year (if I remember correctly). For some of us, it didn’t mean a lot to pay that fee, cause we got a service that just worked and was well integrated with Mac OS X and iOS devices, even though you could get each individual service for free elsewhere, such as Google Calendar for synchronizing your calendar between iCal and iPhone.

If you’re a paid MobileMe subscriber, Apple would have extended your subscription for free until June 2012, at which MobileMe will be shutting down and your Gallery, iDisk and iWeb will be gone – so be sure to have your data backed up before then.

iDisk and Gallery are probably the most-used features of MobileMe that most people will  be missing. I enjoyed how easy it was to share an album from Aperture or iPhoto via MobileMe Gallery.

What alternative do we have to MobileMe Gallery and iDisk?

So far, the best and easiest (and cheapest – free!) alternative I’ve found, is Dropbox.

A free Dropbox account will give you 2GB of storage and offers 250MB extra if you complete 5 out of 7 “getting started” quests they offer – which are really easy, it’s just installing the app, uploading a file, sharing a folder etc. Stuff like that. On top of that, you also get another 250MB free if you signup for a free Dropbox account by clicking here. So by now, you should be able to have 2,5GB free storage in the cloud for files (iDisk alternative) and photos (Gallery alternative).

If you want more space than that, you can ask your friends to signup as well – each of you get an extra 250MB. You can earn up to 8GB in “referral space”, giving you a total of 10GB free storage at Dropbox. If that’s not enough, you can pay to upgrade to either 50GB or 100GB, which should be plenty for most people.

What’s good about Dropbox is how easy it is to use. Just download the app and run it – this will create a “Dropbox” folder in your Mac’s home folder (or where you place it). Everything in that folder is automatically synced to Dropbox – and you can pull the files from your iPhone also. Dropbox offers a free app for both iPhone and Android.

Your local Dropbox folder contains both a Public folder, for sharing files with the public, and a Photos folder, in which you can create albums and share them with friends/family etc.

MobileMe Galleries were quite simple. You couldn’t have people commenting etc., it was just a basic gallery – but it was fast and easy to use. Dropbox galleries are pretty much the same, except you don’t have the same tight integration with, say, Aperture 3. Sharing photos on Dropbox, I’d just go into Aperture 3 and export the photos to a subfolder within my “Photos” folder in “Dropbox”, and that’s it – automatically synced to Dropbox. Then you can send the link afterwards to whoever you want to show off your album to.

If you want more gallery features, you probably need to start learning how to use the Flickr integration in Aperture 3, or perhaps go with Facebook, if you need an even bigger community-part of photo albums. But my guess is, if you’re looking for a MobileMe Gallery alternative, the Dropbox Photos is going to be helpful to you – at least until something else comes along, offering tighter Aperture 3 integration.

One more thing…

Besides using Dropbox as an iDisk alternative or MobileMe Gallery alternative, you can also use it as a backup – it even has versions and is able to restore deleted files. Actually, I’ve also read of someone syncing their entire Mac home user folder to Dropbox – as a way of always having an up-to-date backup and being able to restore your files from everywhere.
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Usually, you’d do something like that by editing the /etc/hosts file on a Mac and then you’d be good to go.

However, I’m not sure when, if it was with Lion (10.7) or the recent 10.7.2 update, lots of people started to have problems with their hosts file, as if it was being ignored. Myself included.

Going into terminal and typing:

scutil --dns

… would indicate that the first resolver was actually the DNS server, and your local resolver came only 2nd, so Apple might have changed the resolve order, so your hosts file is no longer 1st priority.

One workaround suggested on the Internet was to install DNSMasq and run your own local DNS server based on your hosts file. That’s of course a possibility, but the whole installation process sounds complicated to me, and I’d rather avoid running a local DNS server if possible, considering that it should work with just the hosts file, and it used to.

So, after hours of googling around, searching and reading, I came upon this post, which suggests to run this command in Terminal:

hexdump -C /etc/hosts

… to confirm that your /etc/hosts file has Unix style line endings. I had no idea how to interpret the result, but it gave me an idea: To check if I’m actually saving the file with Unix style line endings or not.

Back into Terminal, I wrote the following:

sudo edit /etc/hosts

Which launched TextWrangler (free text editor for Mac, get if you don’t already have it), and I saw that it had selected “Windows (CRLF)” line endings. I simply changed it to “Unix (LF)”, as you can see on the screenshot below which shows a standard /etc/hosts file. I saved the file – and that’s it, the host files now works again!!

I also tried, in Terminal, to write:

ping google.com

… which of course gave me an IP address belonging to Google. Then I added this line to my hosts file:

127.0.0.1 google.com

And I ran the ping command again, and ping would now tell me that google.com points to 127.0.0.1. It works!

And yes, if you’re one of those bad people who didn’t bother paying for Photoshop, I believe this will also fix your “127.0.0.1 activate.adobe.com” stuff. If this helps, you can repay me by purchasing a legal license for your Photoshop
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At that time, Dropbox had only existed for two years and wasn’t as well-known around the world, as it is today. Steve recommended Drew and Arash to sell Dropbox to them, as Apple would soon be launching a competing service.

Drew and Arash turned down the offer and today Dropbox has almost 50 million users worldwide, who saves a billion files every 3 days.

Meanwhile, Apple has introduced their Dropbox competitor – iCloud, which has some advantages and disadvantages compared to Dropbox. But iCloud is not Dropbox’s only competitor these days, there are plenty of other similar services, for example box.net. However, Dropbox doesn’t just sit back and wait. Dropbox recently raised a whopping $250 million from investors and their company is now valued at $4 billion. They are also planning on moving to bigger offices where they will have room for 200 employees, compared to the just 70 employees they have now, in their San Francisco based office.

It is estimated that 96% of Dropbox users are Free users who signs up for the free 2GB plan, and the last 4% of their users are paying $10-$20 a month for extra storage space. Apparently that’s enough to make Dropbox a good business, especially because thousands of those 96% free subscribers throw in so much data each day, that they upgrade to a paid plan. Even if Dropbox doesn’t sign up a single customer in 2012, their sales will still double.

Dropbox may very well be a feature, not a product, as Steve Jobs said to the Dropbox founders, and as Forbes wrote in another recent article on how Dropbox will die – and if so, I can only say that it’s a very good feature, and free

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1 – WordPress/Blogger App

Probably the most obvious in terms of apps to download are the WordPress and Blogger apps, depending on which platform you use. With both apps you can log into your account and draft and publish new posts, as well as add in pictures and tags. It’s blogging on the go made easy!

2 – Evernote

If the WordPress and Blogger apps were the most obvious, Evernote is probably the most valuable. Evernote allows you to “jot” down notes via typing them out or recording an audio file, upload files, and take pictures. So if you’re ever in a situation where you need to quickly take down an interesting blog post idea without crafting an actual post, Evernote allows you to do so quickly and efficiently.

3 – Google Analytics

Like regular Google Analytics, this app allows you to monitor your website’s traffic, bounce rate, how long people spent on your site, etc. – the only difference is that you can do it all from your phone!

4 – HootSuite

HootSuite combines all of your social media into one easy-to-access app. It also allows you to schedule updates to your statuses and then monitor your traffic from those updates.

5 - Byline

This app syncs up with Google Reader and allows you to access all of the blogs and websites that you follow in one organized place. It is basically an RSS feed for your phone, and the best part is that it works whether you’re on or offline.  It’s the perfect way to stay up to date on what’s going on within your niche of the blogging community and keep fresh post ideas coming in.

Phones are quickly becoming the new mini-computers which allow you to do anything and everything while you’re on the go. Nothing is more frustrating than having a fantastic post topic and then losing it because by the time you get somewhere to put pen to paper you’ve forgotten the gist of what you wanted to say. The next time inspiration strikes, be prepared by downloading one (or all!) of these apps to ensure you capture every great idea.

This Guest post is by Christine Kane, a graduate of Communication and Journalism. She enjoys writing about a wide-variety of subjects including internet providers in my area for different blogs. She can be reached via email at: Christi.Kane00 @ gmail.com

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A US judge has made an initial ruling in favour of Apple in their attempt to take legal action against HTC for patent infringement. The verdict, which came from ITC administrative law judge Carl Charneski, is not final but is a good sign for Apple and their lawsuit that has been pending since mid-2010. If it holds, the ruling will mean that HTC will no longer be able to sell their handsets in the lucrative US market, a huge blow for Android.

The lawsuit between the makers of the most advanced smartphones on the market is over technology that is almost twenty years old. In 1994 Apple filed a patent for a “real-time signal processing system”, which is debated to be fundamental technology used across a wide range of smartphones. If HTC had to alter how their phones use this technology, they would have to rebuild a sizable piece of the mobile phone from the ground up in ways that hitherto have yet to enter human imagination.

The other patent that is causing trouble was also from over a decade ago. Filed in 1996, Apple owns the rights to the Linkify function, which scans emails, text messages and other written communication for addresses, phone numbers, internet links, etc., and turns them into clickable actions allowing users to map directions, make phone calls, or visit a website straight from the message without having to write anything down. This is a big functionality piece for both Apple and HTC and the loss of the function would be a big hit to the Taiwanese mobile phone maker.

Of course, HTC will be appealing the decision. “We are highly confident we have a strong case for the ITC appeals process and are fully prepared to defend ourselves using all means possible,” stated Grace Lei, the general legal counsel for HTC.

What’s more, fellow Android makers are coming alongside HTC to challenge the legitimacy of some of the Apple patents. Motorola, another of the world’s biggest Android makers, has approached the ITC about disbanding a dozen of Apple’s technology patents on the grounds of prior art. HTC has also filed a countersuit stating that Apple has violated five patents that HTC own; they have asked that the ITC halt the importation and sale of the iPhone 4 and iPad within the US borders. An initial ruling is yet to be made on these claims.

Guest article written by: Leanne Miller, www.playittoday.org.

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