twotechguys.com  

We certainly thought this recently development was good news – but that might be because we are quite clutzy.  Up until now, AT&T hasn’t offered any type of insurance on the iPhone. If you drop it, lose it or it gets taken, it’s your problem.  However, it sounds like AT&T has recently changed its mind.  Starting soon, they will be offering MobileProtect insurance which will cost $13.99 a month to insure your handset against loss or damage.  It will include a deductible and other details you can read more about.

While this might seem high when you first see it, it’s certainly less than the $600 or more you’ll need to spend if you lose your iPhone and are still under contract.  This program, as far as we’ve heard, won’t be included on your AT&T bill.  Rather, it will be handled through iTunes.  To enroll, you’ll download the MobileProtect application from the app store within 30 days of purchasing your iPhone.  We aren’t sure what this will mean for current iPhone owners – but time will tell how all of this will work!

Yes, it sounds like Amazon may be getting nervous with the new iPad that hit the streets recently.  They have recently announced plans to unveil a thinner Kindle with sharper pictures and more clarity in August.  While the new e-book is not supposed to have the touch screen or color choices that the iPad has, it is going to have a shaper display and more be more responsive.

Color is far in the future, apparently, with Amazon.  CEO Jeff Bezos said that a Kindle with color is still quite a while in the future. To counter any questions about Kindle’s purpose and whether they feel threatened by the new iPad, Bezos said recently that Kindle plans to continue focusing on what they’ve always been – a great reading device.

Certainly, time will tell how the Kindle does, as many other companies are jumping into the e-reader market as well.

If you love to travel, you might want to check out Google Goggles.  In recent news, they are now able to translate texts from many languages, as Google recently announced.  Google Goggles version v1.1 can read English, French, Italian, German and Spanish and can translate into even more languages.

Google is working hard to get this software to recognize other Latin-based languages, and to, eventually, even recognize non-Latin languages such as Chinese, Hindi and Arabic.

In general terms, what Google Goggles does is allow users of Android-based phones to search the Web based on pictures they’ve taken with their phones.  In order to translate something, you simply need to point the phone at the word or phrase and then use the “region of interest” button to draw a box around the words. You then press the shutter button and, if Goggles recognizes the text, it will give you the chance to translate it.

Goggles v1.1 offers other great features as well as the new translation one.  It has “improved barcode recognition, a larger corpus of artwork, an improved user interface, and the ability to initiate visual searches using images in your phone’s photo gallery,” Bissacco and Flamholz explained.