Welcome to the Geek Choice Blog

For all you gamers out their Steam now has an application on their iOS device or their Android devices. Sadly however you will not be able to play games through this app but be able to purchase games and install them on your PC. It will also let you interact with your steam friends as well. Right now Steam doesn’t have any mobile games that you could actually download on your device but I am sure this is the starting point of that happening. There are still some minor issues with this app as it is really only optimized for the smaller screened devices so mainly phones or ipods. The device needs to run iOS 4 and for your Androids it can Android 2.1 or newer and can use it on 4.0.

The buzz today seems to be around the government of the US rocking the cyberlocker site megaupload. The reports are saying they not only seized its domain names but also took $50 million in assets, and got the police of New Zealand to arrest four of the sites major employees which also includes the Kim Dotcom. It seems this site megauploads earned $175 million since it was created back in 2005 which it is mainly based on copyright infringement. So with this big attack already in the works why does the government even want to try to make an act that attacks the freedoms of the internet? It looks like they have the ability to go after sites that are infringing on copyrights. Megauploads is a pretty big site and for the government being able to seize the domains and get the New Zealand police to arrest four of its employees makes me believe that SOPA’s true intentions is what we are all currently fighting for, no censorship of the internet and the freedom to speak. I want to keep a close eye on what happens here as this could make a major case for why SOPA doesn’t even need to be passed. If all of the big wigs in the government are looking to make this a act a law then let’s show them that there are already laws in place to protect copyrighted material on the internet and maybe the government needs to just do a better job of just compiling a cases on these sites that profit on infringing on copyrighted material.

So for all of you Android owners out there that have been looking to see what businesses are behind SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act, well there is now a way. There is an app on the Android Market that is apptly named Boycott SOPA. It works just like a regular bar code scanner app. You just take a product that has a bar code on it and scan it. Within seconds it will scan a database that will tell you if the product you are holding is made by a company behind the SOPA. It isn’t perfect though, it is said that the app itself is reliant on a user-curated list of supporters and is not publicly visible, although the app creators say the list is updated regularly. With the recent stance that Godaddy took on SOPA it is no doubt that any company that has even considered publicly lobbying for this act might want to take a step back on this one. I point to a blog I posted a week or two ago in which I talked about the comedian Louis C.K. and the awesome job he did with putting a comedy special online for 5 bucks. Cracking over a million dollars on that deal. Now the thing that draws me to this as my point is that CK asked that none steal his video and post it, he felt that the cost to view his special was reasonable. Well it seems the people listened! No it won’t stop piracy but I am sure most bought the special because it was affordable and they supported his ideal and what he wanted to do with no corporate BS. So the point of it is maybe you should just ask nicely for people not steal it and maybe you will turn a profit still. So if I was a corporation, I wouldn’t take a stance on SOPA in fear that my company will take a big hit, just ask Godaddy.

From sources that I have read it seems that new assistant for Apple, known as Siri is making owners use twice as much data then when they had an iPhone with no Siri. This obviously will put more of a pressure situation on Verizon Wireless which is the largest US carrier sold around 4.2 million 4th quarter phones. The interesting part is that if it is doubling your data, it would be interesting see how much money Verizon will make seeing that there is no more unlimited data packages. So it will be interesting see what data overages people will be seeing due to these types of data usage.

Motorola’s pair of Droid Xyboard tablets has finally gone up for order on Verizon’s site this morning. The 8.2-inch version is now available with 16GB of storage for $430, or 32GB for $530 (on a two-year contract). The 10.1-incher, meanwhile, is available in three flavors: 16GB, 32GB, and 64GB, for on-contract prices of $530, $630 and $730, respectively. All five Honeycomb models come with LTE functionality, and all five are available now.

Verizon has reported their 3rd quarter earnings and this showed that they are well on their way to hit the fourth quarter and the 2011 goals, thanks to the strength of their wireless business. The reported earnings was about $3.54 Billion or 49 cents a share on revenue of just about $27.9 billion dollars. Verizon did comment and said that they are very optimistic about the future of the company with the iPhone 4S and a bunch of new LTE devices making their mark. Also more than half of the Verizon’s 5.6 million smartphones that were sold in the third quarter were Android devices, it reported that 35% or just about 2 million iPhones.

Verizon CFO Fran Shammo made the following points on the company’s earnings conference call:
• A strike and storm outages shaved 5 cents a share from GAAP earnings. Both factors hampered FiOS installations and some enterprise provisioning.
• The company secured new agreements for cloud services with companies such as RWE of Germany, Smile Brands and the University of North Carolina.
• “Our 4G LTE deployment is going very well and we are now providing service in 165 markets covering more than 186 million POPs. With additional markets planned in November and December we are actually ahead of schedule and have already exceeded our year-end target of 185 million POPs.”

Facebook has filed for a trademark on the usage of “Facebook” on business cards and, more curiously, “non-magnetically encoded” ID cards among other things. If granted the trademark would protect using the word Facebook in the specified formats, not any actual invention.
So what if Facebook just wants to stop people from making fake Facebook business cards? Well, it seems like this trademark would cover that and a whole lot more including “business card and identity card design services,” “printing services” and the ominous, “facilitating social and business networking through the provision of data for use on its own business and identity cards.”
It also looks like the trademark would cover QR code and NFC/RFID uses — which work through magnetic induction, NOT the aforementioned magnetic encoding — much like the Presence cards and photobooths that allowed you to upload and tag photos at F8.

So the integrated Siri program that is in all the new 4S models will say some funny things if you ask the right questions. Matt Legend Gemmell, a software designer from Edinburgh, got a new Apple Inc. iPhone on Friday and asked it: “Who’s your daddy?”
“You are,” the phone answered, in the voice of an authoritative man.
Earlier, he commanded: “Beam me up.” This time, the iPhone responded: “Sorry, Captain, your tricorder is in Airplane Mode.”
The phone takes verbal commands and questions, and responds with computer-generated speech.
Real humans are responding to this alarming breakthrough by asking their iPhones ridiculous questions.
The good news is, Siri has a sense of humor.
Nicky Kelly, a 40-year-old from Suffolk, U.K., asked her iPhone: “Tell me a joke.” It answered: “Two iPhones walk into a bar…I forget the rest.”
So there is a bit of comedy you can have with your iPhone 4S if you are lucky enough to get one. So try and it and see what it says.

The unlocked iPhone 4S is scheduled to come out in November but it will only support GSM networks, which means CDMA carriers such as Verizon and Sprint are out of luck.
When it was announced on Tuesday, the iPhone 4S was unveiled as a “world phone,” meaning it is compatible with both CDMA and GSM networks. But customers who want to operate the handset on a GSM network, like Verizon, the largest carrier in the U.S., will need to buy Apple’s latest smartphone with a new two-year contract.

“The unlocked iPhone includes all the features of iPhone but without a contract commitment,” Apple’s description reads. “You can activate and use it on the supported GSM wireless network of your choice, such as AT&T in the United States.”

The contract-free iPhone 4S is available in all three standard capacities, and is priced at $649 for 16GB, $749 for 32GB and $849 for 64GB. It will be available in both black and white.

So on Tuesday Steve Ballmer noted that over 500,000 copies of Windows 8 had been downloaded but he did say there was tons of work still to be done to the OS itself.
Ballmer said there are all kinds of opportunities in technology, from cloud-based services to new types of devices.

“Our approach to these new opportunities is centered in Windows,” Ballmer said. “It’s not about doing something else. It’s about broadly re-imagining Windows. There is no phone, there is nothing on the tablet, there is no operating system on the planet that will ship 350 million units of anything other than Windows,” he said.

So it looks like Windows 8 is getting tons of buzz and is going to be successful. Is Microsoft finally making an OS that can battle Apple’s OS? This is sure to be a fun ride and I can’t wait to see more.