Toda crianca agora tem um smartphone? Hum... Para decorar nomes de presidentes? Hummmm...

Have smartphones in every pocket made memorization obsolete?

By David Pogue

Scientific American, August 2013

When my father was growing up, his father offered him 25 cents to memorize the complete list of U.S. presidents. “Number one, George Washington. Number two, John Adams …”

A generation later my dad made the same deal with me, upping the reward to $5. (The prize had grown, he explained, “because of inflation and because there are more presidents now.”)

This year I offered my own son $10 to perform the same stunt. My son, however, was baffled. Why on earth should he memorize the presidents?

Nowadays, he argued, “everybody has a smartphone” and always will. He'll probably turn out to be correct; 2013 is a tipping point, in which, for the first time in history, smartphones will outsell plain ones.

In other words, having a computer in your pocket is the norm. Google is always one tap away. So there's very little sense, as far as my son is concerned, in memorizing anything: presidents, the periodic table of the elements, the state capitals or the multiplication tables above 10.

Now, parents in my generation might have a predictable reaction: dismay and disappointment. “Those young kids today! Do we have to make everything easy?” we say. “If they don't have enough facts in their heads, they won't be able to put new information into context.”

That's an understandable argument. On the other hand, there is a powerful counterargument: As society marches ever forward, we leave obsolete skills in our wake. That's just part of progress. Why should we mourn the loss of memorization skills any more than we pine for hot type technology, Morse code abilities or a knack for operating elevators?

Maybe memorization is different than those job skills. Maybe having a store of ready information is more fundamental, more important, and thus we should fight more fiercely to retain it.

And yet we've confronted this issue before—or, at least, one that is almost exactly like it. When pocket calculators came along, educators and parents were alarmed about students losing the ability to perform arithmetic using paper and pencil. After hundreds of generations of teaching basic math, were we now prepared to cede that expertise to machines?

Yes, we were. Today calculators are almost universally permitted in the classroom. You are even allowed to use one—encouraged, in fact—when you are taking the SAT.

In the end, we reasoned (or maybe rationalized) that the critical skills are analysis and problem solving—not basic computation. Calculators will always be with us. So why not let them do the grunt work and free up more time for students to learn more complex concepts or master more difficult problems?

In the same way, maybe we'll soon conclude that memorizing facts is no longer part of the modern student's task. Maybe we should let the smartphone call up those facts as necessary—and let students focus on developing analytical skills (logic, interpretation, creative problem solving) and personal ones (motivation, self-control, tolerance).

Of course, it's a spectrum. We'll always need to memorize information that would be too clumsy or time-consuming to look up daily: simple arithmetic, common spellings, the layout of our hometown. Without those, we won't be of much use in our jobs, relationships or conversations.

But whether we like it or not, we may as well admit that the rest of it will probably soon go the way of calligraphy, the card catalogue and long division. Whenever we need to access abstruse facts, we'll just grab our phones—at least until we implant even better technologies right into our brain.

SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN ONLINE
Six ways that brains trump tech: ScientificAmerican.com/aug2013/pogue

Smartphones Mean You Will No Longer Have to Memorize Facts:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=smartphones-mean-no-longer-memorize-facts

This article was originally published with the title The Last Thing You'll Memorize.

Poupe tempo no computador, no celular, com estas 10 dicas de David Pogue (TED)

Simples, não é?
Como podemos ser tão estúpidos?
Provavelmente, nenhum de nós é pago por minuto...
Paulo Roberto de Almeida 

Veja em: http://www.ted.com/talks/david_pogue_10_top_time_saving_tech_tips.html?utm_source=newsletter_weekly_2013-04-26&utm_campaign=newsletter_weekly&utm_medium=email&utm_content=talk_of_the_week_image

Tech columnist David Pogue shares 10 simple, clever tips for computer, web, smartphone and camera users. And yes, you may know a few of these already -- but there's probably at least one you don't.

David Pogue is the personal technology columnist for the New York Times and a tech correspondent for CBS News. He's also one of the world's bestselling how-to authors, with titles in the For Dummies series and his own line of "Missing Manual" books.

O novo Blackberry, para os addicted - David Pogue

The New York Times, April 25, 2013, 3:11 pm 20 Comments

Typing, Made Easy

When I reviewed the BlackBerry Z10 in January, I wrote that it was a surprisingly complete, elegant, attractive phone, considering that the company was on its deathbed. (The BlackBerry’s share of the smartphone market was a dismal 2.9 percent, down from 85 percent a few years ago.)

• BlackBerry will start offering its Q10 next month.
• 
  
• The key benefits of the Z10:
  • Swappable battery
  • Memory-card slot for expansion
  Over 100,000 apps in its app store
• Clever word-completion system
• Ingenious BlackBerry Hub: a single in-box for everything (calls, texts, e-mail, Twitter and Facebook posts) that’s always available with a swipe in from the left side
• Separate on-screen “worlds” for work and personal use
• 80 million BlackBerry fans already

I’m still not sure that the Z10 will save BlackBerry. It’s awfully late, and its offerings aren’t so much more advanced than iPhone or Android that the masses are likely to risk betting on this dark horse.

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But next month, BlackBerry will improve its odds by offering the Q10 (around $250 with contract). It’s a sister phone to the Z10, with all the same advantages. But instead of a full-height touch screen, this one has the classic BlackBerry design: half-height screen above, physical keyboard below.

That is a feature few rivals offer. Touch-screen phones with physical keyboards, especially from the most popular brands, are rare, and they’re usually not especially successful.

The Q10’s screen is 720 by 720 pixels — the biggest, sharpest screen ever on a keyboard phone, according to BlackBerry. The battery is bigger than the Z10’s; since the screen (the single most power-hungry component) is also smaller, that means the Q10 lasts much longer on a charge — 13.5 hours of talk time (compared with eight hours on the iPhone 5).

And then there’s the keyboard. Yes, that’s something BlackBerry is really good at. After so many years of fussing with typing on glass and making fidgety corrections, it really is sweet to have real keys. They’re not only useful when you’re writing; they also let you use all the beloved BlackBerry keyboard shortcuts: “T” for top of message, “R” for reply, “F” for forward, “L” for reply all, and so on.

Autocorrect is much less important when you have a real keyboard, of course. But at your option, the Q10 still displays, just above the keyboard, the three most likely completions of the word you’re typing. You tap one of these words to insert it into what you’re writing.

And man, is it smart. I wanted to type “Unfortunately, the company is notprepared to comment.” All I had to type were the letters shown here in boldface — six letters in total. In each case, the phone correctly predicted the next word I wanted — and even punctuation — requiring only one tap each. (That is, I typed “Un,” and the options included “Unfortunately.” I tapped that one, and then the button options included a comma. I tapped that one, and the choices included “the.” And so on.)

I’ll come right out and say it: no phone on the market offers a better combination of speed and accuracy for entering text.

As a bonus, the Q10 lets you type out shortcut commands from the home screen. “BBM Chris” lets you jump into a BlackBerry Messenger (instant message) chat with Chris. And so it goes with “Email Robin,” “tweet” (to enter a Twitter post), “txt” (to send a text message), “call 556-1000,” “Facebook” (to make a Facebook post), “li” (to say something on LinkedIn). Efficiency freaks everywhere should be rejoicing.

The Q10 comes with BlackBerry 10.1 software, an upgrade from what arrived on the Z10. (The Z10 will get this upgrade eventually.)

The enhancements are pretty minor. You can now paste a phone number into the dialing pad. You can opt to have your ActiveSync e-mail keep only the last 30 or 60 days’ worth of e-mail. And the BlackBerry Balance feature (the one that keeps your personal and corporate worlds separate) has been enhanced to let companies enforce even more restrictions on what your phone can do.

Now there’s a high-dynamic-range (HDR) mode in the camera app, which combines the brights and darks from three photos, taken with different exposures, for richer shots.

Now the big drag with a physical keyboard is, of course, that you lose half the screen space. You pay the price when you try to look at a map, a photo or, in particular, a movie. You also lose the niceties of an on-screen keyboard, like the ability to switch its keys to a different alphabet.

But there are thousands of people who use a smartphone mostly for e-mail, texts and typing — thousands who’ve been waiting for a physical keyboard on a modern smartphone. If the screen-space trade-off is worth it to you, and if you don’t mind betting on an underdog, you’ll find no better keyboarded phone than the BlackBerry Q10.

iOS 6 + iPhone 5 - David Pogue

David Pogue

The New York Times, September 19, 2012, 12:26 pm56 Comments

New iOS 6 Loses Google Maps, but Adds Other Features

The arrival of the iPhone 5 isn’t the only big news for phone fans this week. Wednesday, Apple is also making iOS 6 available to anyone with a recent iPhone (3GS, 4, or 4S), iPod Touch (fourth generation) or iPad (2 or 3). It comes installed on the iPhone 5 and the new fifth-generation iPod Touch.
(Caution: Not all features are available on the older models. I’ve noted the biggest such exceptions below, but you should check here for full details.)

Apple’s Maps app for iOS 6.

The Times’s technology columnist, David Pogue, keeps you on top of the industry in his free, weekly e-mail newsletter.
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The challenge in creating a new operating system is always this: How do you add features without adding complexity?
On a tiny phone screen, that challenge becomes even more difficult. The answer, of course, is, you can’t — but few companies try harder to minimize the complexity than Apple. In iOS 6, for example, Apple counts more than 200 new features, but you wouldn’t know it with a quick glance.
Here’s the best of what’s new:
Maps. Apple, as you may have noticed, has been quietly dismantling its relationship with Google. In iOS 6, for example, there’s no longer a built-in YouTube app (Google owns YouTube); fortunately, YouTube offers a new app of its own.
And now Apple has replaced the iPhone’s longstanding Google Maps app. Apple says that Google had been steadily improving its Maps app — but only for Android phones, leaving the iPhone in the dust. For example, the iPhone app didn’t have spoken turn-by-turn directions. And on Android, the maps are composed of vector art—smooth lines generated by the computer — rather than the square tiles of pixels that you saw on the iPhone.
In any case, the new iOS Maps app offers those features — spoken navigation, vector maps — and more. You can just tell Siri where you want to go (“Give me directions to LaGuardia Airport”), and let the app start getting you there with one of the cleanest, least distracting navigation screens ever to appear on a GPS unit. The visual cues are big, bold and readable at a glance, and the spoken cues are timed perfectly so that you don’t miss a turn. You can even turn the screen off and let the voice alone guide you.
Real-time traffic and accident alerts are built in — no charge, courtesy of crowdsourced speed and position data from millions of other iPhone owners out driving.
Not all is rosy in Mapsland, though. Apple’s database of points of interest (stores, restaurants, and so on), powered by Yelp, is sparser than Google’s. There’s no built-in public-transportation guidance. For big cities, you get Flyover, a super-cool 3-D photographic model of the actual buildings — but losing Google’s Street View feature is a real shame.
During navigation guidance, you can’t rotate the map with your fingers or zoom in by more than a couple of degrees—to see your entire route, for example. Turns out you have to tap the screen and then tap Overview to access that more detailed, zoomable, rotatable map.
Flyover and the vector maps require a fast Internet connection, by the way. When you’re not in a 4G cellular area, it can take quite awhile for the blank canvas to fill in. (Navigation and Flyover don’t work on the iPhone 3GS or 4, the original iPad, or pre-2012 iPod Touches.)
Call smarts. These are some of my favorite new features. If you’re driving or in a meeting when a call comes in, you can flick upward on the screen to reveal two new buttons: Remind Me Later and Reply With Message. The first button offers choices like “In 1 hour” or “When I get home” (a message will remind you to call back); the second offers canned text messages, like “I’ll call you later” or a custom message, that let your caller know you can’t take the call now. Excellent.
Do Not Disturb is also incredibly useful. It’s like Airplane Mode — the phone won’t buzz, ring or light up — except that (a) it can turn itself on during certain hours, like your sleeping hours, and (b) it can allow certain people’s calls or texts through (people on your phone’s Favorites list, for example). You can sleep soundly, knowing that your boss or family can reach you in an emergency, but idiot telemarketers will go straight to voice mail.
(Similarly ingenious: The option called Repeated Calls. If someone calls you twice in three minutes — possibly someone who needs to reach you urgently — that call is allowed to ring during Do Not Disturb.)
Siri. Siri, the voice-activated servant, now understands questions about movies (“When is the next showtime of ‘Finding Nemo 3D?’” or “Who directed ‘Chinatown?’”), sports (“Who won the Yankees game yesterday?”) and restaurants (“Where’s the closest diner?”). In each case, Siri’s responses are visual and detailed—for restaurants, you can even make a reservation with one tap, courtesy of Open Table.
You can also speak Twitter or Facebook posts (“Tweet, ‘I just broke my shin on a poorly placed coffee table’”) and—hallelujah!—open apps by voice (“open Camera”). That’s a huge win.
Siri is also available in more languages and on more gadgets (the new iPod Touch; the iPad 3).
FaceTime over cellular. FaceTime is Apple’s video-chatting feature — and until today, it worked only in Wi-Fi hot spots. Now, at last, iPhone 4S, iPhone 5 and cellular iPad 3 owners can make video calls (to other iPhone, iPad, Touch and Mac owners) even when they’re out of Wi-Fi range, out in cellular land. When the signal is decent, the picture looks great. (AT&T doesn’t let you use FaceTime over cellular unless you have one of its complicated and expensive shared-data plans.)
Camera panoramas. You can now capture a 240-degree, ultra-wide-angle, 28-megapixel photo by swinging the phone around you in an arc. The phone creates the panorama in real time (you don’t have to line up the sections yourself). Available on iPhone 4S, iPhone 5, and iPod touch (5th generation), and very welcome.
Passbook. This app collects and consolidates barcodes: for airline boarding passes, movie tickets you bought online, electronic coupons and so on. The feature hasn’t gone live yet, so I couldn’t test it except with phony coupons and boarding passes supplied by Apple to reviewers. But the apps for Delta, American, Starbucks and Fandango will be Passbook-compatible almost immediately, and that should be a great time-saver—your boarding-pass barcode appears automatically when you arrive at the airport (thank you, GPS), even on the Lock screen.
Safari browser. You can now save a Web page to read later, when you don’t have an Internet connection, and in landscape mode, a full-screen browsing mode maximizes screen space by hiding toolbars. (I don’t think the third new Safari, feature, iCloud Tabs, will be as useful. It lets you open up whatever browser tabs you left open on your Mac or iPad—if, that is, they’re all signed into the same iCloud account.)
Shared photo streams. You can “publish” groups of photos to specified friends; they can view the pictures on their Apple gadgets or on a Web page. They can add comments or “like” them.
Mail. In Mail, you can indicate the most important people; they get their own folder in the Inbox, helping to lift them out of the clutter. And at long last, you can now attach photos to a Mail message you’re already writing, instead of having to start in the Photos app — better late than never, I guess.
Miscellaneous. The option to publish utterances, photos or other bits to Facebook pops up in a bunch of different apps. A new Privacy settings page gives you on/off switches for the kinds of data each app might request (access to your contacts, location and so on). Tweaks have been made to the App Store app, Reminders, Videos and other apps.
And you no longer have to enter your Apple password just to download an update to an app you already have. Hosannah.
In the end, iOS 6 is to software what the iPhone 5 is to hardware: a big collection of improvements, many of which are really clever and good, that don’t take us in any big new directions. Lots and lots of nips and tucks — that’s Apple’s motto lately.
Unlike the iPhone 5, however, upgrading to iOS 6 doesn’t cost anything. It’s free and available now. In general, you should go get it—and you sacrifice very little (a few Maps features) and gain a lot.

Seu iPhone sumiu ou foi roubado?; encontre-o...

How to Make Your Lost Phone Findable

David Pogue, 9/08/2012 (The New York Times)

Last week, I lost my iPhone on a train. I used Apple’s Find My iPhone feature to track it to a house in suburban Maryland, and the local police were able to return it to me. Because I’d tweeted about these developments, the quest for the phone became, much to my surprise, an Internet-wide, minute-by-minute real-life thriller. (You can read the whole story here.)

The Times’s technology columnist, David Pogue, keeps you on top of the industry in his free, weekly e-mail newsletter.
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Several readers wrote to ask how to set up their own phones to be findable. As you’d guess, given last week’s experience, I have some strong feelings about the importance of setting up Find My iPhone or the equivalent on Android phones.

First, though, some caveats.

These phone-tracking systems work only if your lost phone is turned on and online; if its battery is dead or it’s powered off, it can’t see the Internet and can’t show you its location.

Furthermore, professionals know about Find my iPhone. As soon as they steal a phone, they connect it to a computer running the iTunes program and wipe it, so that Find My iPhone won’t work anymore.

All right — duly warned? Here’s how you set things up. iPhone first.

First, you need a free iCloud account; sign up at www.icloud.com. You’ll provide your e-mail address and a password that you make up.

Now, on the iPhone or iPad, open Settings. Tap iCloud. Scroll down and turn on Find My iPhone. When the phone asks if you’re sure, tap Allow.

While you’re at it, you might consider tapping Settings (top left corner) to back out to the main Settings screen; then tap General, tap Passcode Lock and give your phone or tablet a password.

I was very glad I had protected my phone this way when it got lost; the password meant the thief couldn’t actually use the phone or access my e-mail, photos and so on.

All right. Now suppose the worst has come to pass. Your phone is gone.

Go to any computer and log into icloud.com. (Or use the Find My iPhone app on another iPhone or iPad.) There, when you click Find My iPhone, you’ll see the location of your phone on a map. You can switch to satellite-photo view to see the actual building or land.

If the phone is offline, a check box lets you request an e-mail alert if the phone ever pops back online. That’s precisely how I found my own phone. The thief turned it off on a Monday, so I couldn’t use Find My iPhone. On Thursday, an e-mail message let me know it had been turned back on, and showed me where it was.

Often, the phone is somewhere in your car or your house. If that’s the case, you can make it ping loudly for two minutes, even if it the ringer was on Mute, and even if the phone is asleep.

You can also make a message pop up on the screen; if you left the phone in a taxi or a meeting room, for example, you can offer a reward this way, or transmit your phone number. If a well-meaning person finds your phone, you might get it back.

If you didn’t protect the phone with a password, you can either click Lock (to password-protect the phone by remote control) or, if you’re really concerned, click Remote Wipe. That’s a means of erasing the phone by remote control. So the bad guy gets away with your phone, but your e-mail, photos and other digital treasures remain private. Of course, at that point, you can no longer find the phone or send messages to it using Find My iPhone.

If you have an Android phone, you have to visit Google Play, the new name for the Android app store, and download an app in advance. One great, free option is Find My Droid. Despite the name, it works on any recent Android phone.

If your phone gets lost, you text a password to the phone to activate the app. Suddenly your ringer turns on at maximum volume and rings for 30 seconds. You can send a different code to request a link to the phone’s location; you get coordinates and a link to a Google map. The Remote Wipe feature requires the Pro version, $4.

Another app, Plan B, lets you see where your Android phone is, in much the same way, but you can download it after the phone’s gone missing. That’s right; you can remotely download it. When you do, the app self-opens and sends the phone’s location to your registered Gmail address.

These apps are amazing; they even out the odds of recovery when your phone has gone missing. A couple of readers even felt sorry for the person who took my phone, maintaining that Find My iPhone rendered him hopelessly outmatched, and asserting that it was an invasion of his privacy for me to be able to see where he took my phone.

Still, many readers shared Find My iPhone failure tales. The phone may not be turned on. The bad guy may be smart enough to erase it. And there may be no way of recovering the phone, even if you know where it is. Even if you provide the phone’s location, some police departments will help you get it back, and others won’t.

These problems could be overcome. Police help recover jewelry, cars and other stolen goods — why not expensive cellphones?

And the cellphone carriers know where our phones are at all times, even when the phone has been erased; they can track the phone’s serial number. At the moment, however, the Verizons and AT&T’s of the world have no interest in using that information to help you recover your lost phone. Why should they? If it’s lost, you’ll buy another one.

In other words, fewer phones will be stolen or lost, and more will be recovered, if society comes to its senses. But for that to happen, we need more than Find My iPhone; we need Find My Common Sense.