Google Wallet launched in the US today, sounds like the future has finally arrived. It promises contactless payments and the end to bulky wallets all in one universal device. More precisely Google Nexus S smartphone, with it’s NFC chip as that device.

The concept is brilliant, but like all adoptions of technology it’ll take time for it to be cast out as standard payment option. It will require everyone to upgrade to a NFC chipped phone and the cost of retail payment units to become affordable enough to replace the traditional PDQ machine. I mean the old paper cheques are still being accepted in our ultra technological world!

Anyway watch the video and have a glimpse into the standard payment of the future!

The iNQ Cloud Touch isn’t a phone I’d ever heard of before I received one to review. In fact, I’d never heard of iNQ at all. This isn’t saying much, as being a bit of an Apple fangirl I tend to ignore most other phone brands.

The Cloud Touch is a budget Android smartphone, with a choice of casing colours: red, white and black. The phone is very heavily linked to your Facebook account – it’s no wonder the phone has been dubbed “The Facebook Phone”. The home screen displays the latest news from your feed, with links to your Facebook friends, events, notifications and places. Sliding left gives you a Google search screen with icons leading to YouTube, Gmail, Maps and the all-important Android Market. Sliding right gives you quick access to the phone’s built in Spotify controls and yet more social media icons. For an entry-level phone, it really seems to pack a punch when it comes to features.

The phone’s Spotify features seem to only be available to those with paid accounts, so being the cheapskate that I am I wasn’t able to test them.  They seem to be well integrated into the phone, and it’s clear to see how you’d use everything.

Now for the boring bits: a button on the side of the phone takes you straight to a nicely designed, colourful settings page. There are a lot of simple toggle controls which make it easy to do things like turn vibrate, Bluetooth, airplane mode and silent mode on and off. There’s a whole host of other useful apps pre-downloaded such as Shazam, MSN Messenger and My Hub, the phone back-up service. The phone itself is fairly light, and the buttons are easy to use. The case is quite large, curved and easy to hold, but does feel a tiny bit cheap. It’s not a phone that feels like it would survive more than one drop on the floor. However, this doesn’t distract from the style of the phone, which is clean and simple.

Overall, it’s the kind of phone I’d be thrilled with if I hadn’t made the upgrade from pay-as-you-go. It’s not quite in the same league as the HTCs and iPhones but it’s a very good introduction to the world of Android.  I’d say it’s the perfect phone for teens – massive Facebook presence, every other kind of social media they could wish for, and it looks pretty funky. Even the grafitti-covered box is cool.  My 16 year old self gives it a huge thumbs up.

Zite dubs itself the personalized magazine for your iPad that automatically learns what you like and gets smarter as you use it. Zite gives you personalized news, articles, blogs, videos and other content from a variety of both mainstream and niche publications and sites. Zite can personalize by syncing with your Twitter or Google Reader account or on its own.

The interface looks nice enough and the whole concept seems like a combination of stumble upon meets amazon recommends and aims to be a rival to the popular Flipboard App.

3M have invested a lot in pioneering research and are really trying to push things forward by introducing a new flexible micro pattern product which hopes to shape the future. (Quite literally!) It will be sold as a product to existing manufacturers and hopes to be the standard for malleable touchscreen technology.

The possible uses of the “flexible transparent conductor” could be a fully functional touchscreen wrist strap, e-publications or gaming devices as shown in the concept video below.

You can see an explanation of the technology below (unveiled at this years CES 2011).

Chester Based iphone and ipad developer/trainer Dave Verwer has just set up a new weekly newsletter for fellow iOS developers who need a weekly burst of inspiration and iOS dev love. Issue 1 about simulating poor network conditions has just been mailed out – so get on it quick!

All you have to do is just sign up on the iOS Dev Weekly site

Dave is a seasoned veteran and runs the iOS dev company Shiny Development. He has direct experience in designing, developing, shipping and marketing successful apps to running extensive training courses.

For more information you can follow Dave Verwer on Twitter.

Vintage 80′s Gameboy cases

Little Black Book

Leica M9 Camera Skin with Transparent Case

Cassette Case Back Cover

Totoro iPhone Case

McLovin iPhone case

18k Gold case with 200 Diamonds Worth ($100,000)

Rosewood Wood Case & Stand

Retro Calculator Case

Chocolate Bar Silicone case

Some of the best apps are those that integrate with other apps to make something amazing. Goodfoot is one such iPhone app. Goodfoot takes information from Gowalla, the popular location app that award users pins and badges for checking in at various places, and uses the amount of Gowalla check-ins at local spots (pubs, restaurants, shops etc) to create lists of popular venues near you. It gives you three lists: places within walking or biking distance, and those a short drive away. Goodfoot also filters the results on the list so it won’t give you huge chain brands, doctors surgeries and petrol stations – just quality locations.

When you’ve chosen your favoured watering hole, Goodfoot gives you an Awesometer: a guage of how many check ins the venue has had. The more check ins, the better the venue. Simple! You can then get directions using the iPhone’s built-in Maps app, or get more information via the Gowalla app.

Simple pub-finding apps are great, but they’re no use if they point you to unloved tourist traps. The Goodfoot concept is simple, but a very useful.You can pick the app up here for just 69p.

We’re all about devices that can make communication that little bit easier here at MOFU, so we were delighted to receive the new HTC Cha Cha to test and review. The HTC Cha Cha is aimed squarely at 14-21 market, it currently has an average UK contract price of £20 per month, and a sim free cost of £200.

It’s been dubbed one of 2 (non-facebook) facebook phones alongside the HTC Salsa!

In fact it’s so highly regarded that Mark Zuckerberg praised the deep social integration. (See video)

It’s not the prettiest phone out there, it doesn’t have the highest spec, but it offers an experience that we may see more of in phone standards of the future.

The most noticeable thing about this Android Gingerbread phone is the big ass facebook button at the bottom. You’re supposed to notice it. It’s designed so that no matter where you are in you’re menu screen you can access and post to facebook in an instant.

In fact it pulses when you take a picture (like some kind of primal heartbeat), to ensure you instantly upload the snap of you and your mates. It bypasses the clunky app interface you find on other phones, by allowing you to make status updates with one click. Just viewed a site you like? Press the facebook button. Listening to some tunes? Press the facebook button to tell people what you’re listening to. It’s the physical equivalent of the facebook like button! Want to check in on facebook places? Just hold down the facebook button a little longer. Super easy, super usable!

Super usable too, because of it’s Dual touch screen and keyboard interface making messaging a doddle for those who have more ‘slightly rounded fingers’. Although the screen size will inevitably be a challenge to those who are used to the HTC desires or iphones of this world I think it’s a small sacrifice for a full qwerty keyboard. After all this phone was designed for the message-savvy heavyweights out there.

So much so, that facebook messages show up in the phone’s unified inbox, alongside emails and texts. Which although a little confusing at first, really drives home the fact that HTC are trying to make your life a bit easier. The ChaCha will also check your address book to see who’s online in Facebook Chat – so you can get IM’ing your heart out!

Although there are many other great features such as a 5MP camera, this phone is all about the deep social linking and how it plans to lead the way in making things as simple as possible for us all. With the iphone and ios5 soon to integrate natively with twitter, it will be interesting to see which brands side with which social networks. Either way I believe this is the start of a slew of much more effective social based devices than we’ve seen before.

Appcelerator Titanium makes cross-platform native application development easy. As a free and open source application development platform, Titanium lets you create native mobile, tablet and desktop application experiences using existing web skills like Javascript, HTML, CSS, Python, Ruby, and PHP. It’s also vastly under documented, so the good guys over at Testled have kindly decided to run us through a building a simple titanium app. Let’s begin!

The best way to learn a new technology is to build something real, so we decided to build a useful little tool to check if any of our sites or servers are down from a mobile device. Given that this is quite a simple application, I decided to write up the process. Hopefully this should give anyone using Titanium a useful starting point.

This article doesn’t cover setting up Titanium, or installing any SDK’s, as there is already the excellent documentation on the Titanium site.

Essentially, all this application does is:

• Grab some JSON data.
• Use that data to build a tableview.
• Setup a window for each item of data.

We’re going to be getting data from our own internal server monitoring software, but you can substitute our data with anything you like, such as JSON from someone’s Twitter feed, or maybe blog posts from a WordPress JSON feed.

We start by building some wireframes for the application:

The application consists of just two pages. The first is a scrolling list, which is split into two categories, servers and websites. The second is a detail page for a server or website, which gives the current status, and some detail about uptime over the last month.

Next, we created the project in Titanium Developer:

As this app is so simple, we don’t really need to split the application up into multiple files, so we kept all the code in app.js. First, I wanted to setup the window for the application.

The above code just sets up a simple TabGroup object, and then attaches a Tab, which contains a Window. As this application doesn’t have any other tabs, we hide the actual tab bar on line eight.

As our application does nothing unless it has some data to work with, the next thing we do it setup an event handler to immediately load our JSON data. The JSON response we’ll be dealing with looks like this:

The simplest thing we can start with it to make the request for that JSON, then output a log message to show that we got a response.

Now that we are successfully retrieving data, we need to turn the raw data into something useful. We walk through the JSON, appending to a ‘data’ array as we go. Once we have finished, we attach the ‘data’ array to a TableView, and display it on the screen. There is also a few other things going on here, though; first, I’m watching the ‘group_name’ field for changes, so we can insert headers into the list. I’m also attaching a search bar to the list, as in our real-world implementation, we have a list of nearly a hundred domains. The code looks like this:

Running the application, you should see something like this:

We’re now half-way through creating our app; most of the hard part is done. We are getting data from our web service, and parsing it to create the main list. In part two, we’ll build the individual screens for each server, and play with making the app a little more user-friendly.

THAT’S IT FOR NOW! PART 2 WILL BE AVAILABLE VERY SOON.

In the meantime, feel free to share your thoughts below.

This tutorial was originally published on the Testled Blog. Go there and say hello! Be nice!

When Sheffield based Industrial Designer Andrew Bond was looking for a stand for his iphone 4, he struggled to find one that suited his needs – so he decided to design one himself! This little iphone 4 stand is perfectly formed from a thin strip of thermoplastic elastomer to keep it sleek and pocket size. It even has a hole to hook it onto a keychain. Perfect for the consummate traveller who likes to watch films, youtube and other media on the go!

It’s a commendable story of a design being born out of necessity, and we at MOFU always like to support independent home-grown creativity! And so should you! You can pick up a Piolo for the measly sum of £4.00 from the Piolo Shop – that’s less than a couple of pints of beer! And read the full story on the Piolo Site.

BUT WAIT… You can win one of 6 Piolos right here at MOFU!

All you have to do is go to The Piolo Facebook Page, ‘LIKE’ it and  leave a comment about why you would like to win a Piolo. It’s as simple as that!

THIS COMPETITION IS NOW CLOSED. THE WINNERS WERE:

If you’re one of the winners above, please email mike@mofuture.com with your postal address and you will be sent a Piolo in the post!

Get liking, commenting and why not share with 5 of your friends? You could all be winners!