11 thoughts on “New! – Your Random iPhone Fact of the Day”

  1. Ha ha now you know why I have a giant clunky black case covering my entire iPhone, the least flattering case ever invented. It also has a horrendous belt clip to make it even uglier. But that is why my iPhone survives…

  3. Ha iPhones. I have a Bubble Level (calibrated), a Sound Level Meter, a Metal Detector, a Geiger Counter(partially calibrated) and a Scale on my Android Sammy GS2.

    Only one is fake.

  7. Oh golly. It’s the scale.

    The Level is done with the hardware that senses acceleration and position.

    The SPL meter is pretty obvious.

    The Metal Detector app uses the magnetometer which is part of the compass suite.

    The Geiger Counter is perhaps the coolest. German nuclear scientists noticed a digital camera with black tape over the lens is a useful Geiger Counter and then calibrated a whole pile of phones so you can actually have a Geiger Counter that is fairly accurate on your phone.

    My phone a Sammy GS2 is a beast and I have replaced all the shipped software with my own chosen stuff. As ICS will soon be upon us, with a source release, I have almost got it together to cross compile my own OS image. I will probably still use CyanogenMod but I like to tinker.

  9. A lot of Android apps are clones of iPhone apps just as Android itself is a close clone of iPhone (even down to the app store.) If there is a market for an app on the iPhone, there is a market on the Android. A lot of developers write for both and their are cross platform development tools.

    The gieger counter relies on the ability of ionizing radiation to activate the charge coupling device (CCD) of digital cameras. Ionizing radiation will supply a charge just like a photon would. So, even with the lens cap on, a digital camera will still register random flashes. Counting those flashes gives you a good measure of the ionizing radiation.

    Interestingly enough, the human eye can do the same thing for gamma rays. Astronauts constantly see little sparkles or flashes in their vision from gamma ray particles activating the rods and cones in their retinas.

  10. Gee TM mine are all free. Also the Geiger Counter is completely different, some kind of hardware add on. As Shannon points out it’s a camera hack Android uses. Funnily enough the iPhone users do not seem to realize the scale is fake.

  11. “A lot of Android apps are clones of iPhone apps just as Android itself is a close clone of iPhone (even down to the app store.) If there is a market for an app on the iPhone, there is a market on the Android. A lot of developers write for both and their are cross platform development tools.”

    Android is Linux actually and iOS is some kind of pocket Freebsd/NeXT/Darwin OS mashup *nix so no not a clone at all. They are related though.

    Indeed is seems to be Java that rules the phones in one way or another so yes they run very similar stuff. As to the app store deal it’s a clone of iTunes in a way. It was and is a good idea for the tethered.

    I buy all my music direct from the source so iTunes does nothing for me. I run my own web server on my machine and all my stuff is available to my phone.

    I hate stuff that ‘just works’, where is the fun in that? A fairly large part of the American success in WW2 was the fact that the general soldier came from a background where you fixed your own stuff when it broke. That may be gone now.

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