Tweeting is an Olympic sport

With only a year to go, the London 2012 Olympics has started to spread its hype. Headlines of our South African Sportsman breaking records are starting to get competitive, DSTV subscribers are purchasing more sports channels and a watchful eye is being kept on London, as if to say “can they pull it off?”. And if that wasn’t enough, the official website for the Olympic and Paralympic Games just got a bit more R-O-W-D-Y.

The website now features and interactive contest designed to discover which country has the biggest online fan base. The contest ranks the top 20 countries based on the number of tweets, Youtube videos and Flickr photos submitted.

Fans already have submitted more than 20,000 tweets with Great Britain in the lead, followed by Brazil, the U.S., Canada and the Netherlands.

The aim of the contest is to promote that it is only a year away from the opening ceremony which takes place on July 27, 2012.

With South Africa in the bid for the 2016 Olympics, it is only our duty to get involved. How do you do it? Your tweets need to include the hashtag #1yearToGo along with the three-letter code for your country. E.g ZAR.

Blackberry: the new Crack

Blackberry users are as addicted to their phones as drug addicts. Research defines that someone is an addict when they rather focus on their phone instead of the people around them and that those deprived from their cellphone show symptoms a drug addict or smoker would feel when going cold turkey. Sound familiar?

With a Blackberry you are constantly informed as to what’s happening in your email or the social networks you’re on. There is no break; you are constantly connected to work and everything else. You don’t put it on silent when you sleep; you even put it under your pillow so you won’t miss anything. There is a website dedicated to people that act like this with their phones, and it’s called Crackberry.

A phobia has even been developed called Nomophobia, which is short for No Mobile Phobia. There are even solutions to decrease the time you rely on your phone.

If you’ve had enough of being out with your friends and suddenly talking to the tops of their heads while they check their Blackberrys, put your foot down and ban them from bars. Cellphones are a part of anti-social behaviour and need to be handled as such. And if you’re an addict, put it on silent and go out and enjoy spending time with real people.

Money Gets Mobile

As a generation on the move, mobile and tablet apps need to keep up with our daily manoeuvres. There are plenty of apps made to entertain us but where are the apps that make our lives more convenient? FNB has taken the banking innovation game to another level, introducing a free app that runs on any smart phone or tablet device.

The FNB Banking App allows you to view your account info and balances, transfer funds, make payments and get a detailed transactional history. The app also includes additional benefits like the ability to access a FNB directory and make free calls to any FNB Call Centre.

If you were wondering if this is just some fancy cellphone banking scheme, try completing those tasks through regular mobile banking. We dare you to try locate FNB branches and ATMs on a map. Good luck.

Download the app and this comes standard using the app's location-based services. Although it needs a secure connection to run off, its response is quick and surpasses our expectations. Hopefully this kicks off a spiral of innovation as other service providers try to out do each other.

Start a Band with iPhone

From Playstation to iPhone we can't leave our virtual instruments alone. That combo of entertainment and skills development makes them irresistible time wasters. Guitar playing apps have circled the interweb, plucked and played to suit the average Joe’s strumming skills versus those who think they're Jimi Hendrix re-incarnated. These are the Apps taking centre stage for us right now:

TabToolkit: Learn the ins and outs of your inner rock star. This is an essential tool for learning and practicing music. It also provides playback tempo control, a metronome and a tab upload and download manager. However, the download is not free so spontaneous guitar solo moments need to be thought out.

PocketGuitar: This is as basic as a guitar app will go we reckon. If simple is your thing, PocketGuitar turns your iPhone into a virtual guitar, electric Bass and even a Ukulele. Spend a buck and give it a go.

Gibsons: Learn and Master Guitar. As the 2010 Billboard Music App Award Winner, we need not say much more. As far as free Apps go, this one is for the win. GL&MG provides you with essential tools to help you become a better guitar player as well as free full length lessons that will take you from beginner to advanced.

Here's a list of more musical vibes on the go. Hit us up on Twitter if you have suggestions you think we should check out.

Mobile Entertainment

There is a seemingly never ending war between the size of data, storage capacity and the cost of storage. As compression gets better and file sizes get smaller, the display resolution capabilities increase, the file size jumps and the cutting edge, very expensive device that held your entire movie collection can now only contain your top 5 feature films and maybe one season of your favourite series.

External Drives are a great stop gap, but the inconvenience of them feels like a compromise rather than a solution. Which is why Wi Fi portable drives are so damn cool. Two options on the market are the Kingston Wi-Drive and the Seagate GoFlex Satellite. Both offer streaming to multiple devices, excellent battery life and easy to use functionality.

They bode well for the future when your supplementary storage will be able to nestle in your luggage and comfortably beam terrabytes of data to your entertainment device.

On the other hand, hopefully the future holds wireless data connectivity so fast and cheap that taking your data with you becomes a thing of the past and you simply stream it from an online source or connect to a storage device at home. In the interim, you could just get an iPad 2 and a year's free bandwidth, though that's probably the pusher equivalent of offering the first hit for free.

Better Health through Mobile

Despite all the concerns about the potential threat of cancer from exposure to cellular phones and the very real likelihood of getting taken out by someone driving and Tweeting simultaneoulsy, chances are phones will make us healthier.

Whether it's using them in conjunction with brands like Nike or Endomondo to make exercise social or an app that makes it easier to track and change your dietary habits, the potential is there to improve fitness, nutrition and overall well being.

We were inspired by the announcement of Jawbone's wearable health tracker UP to go and look for some cool health Apps for Android and iPhone. Some of them are practical, like the calorie counter while others like the SpecTrek bring a more fun element into getting exercise.

Whatever your vibe, stop worrying about what all those invisible rays are doing to you and offset the potential negative impact by using your phone in a way that will make you healthier. If you've got a favourite way to use your device to improve your health, let us know about it.

Facebook for Dummies

If you're like the vast majority of mobile phone owners worldwide who have a Facebook account but haven't yet upgraded to a smartphone, updating your status on the go just got a whole lot easier.

Facebook announced yesterday the release of an app that will work on over 2500 "Dumb" phones. The project has been designed to use a minimal amount of data and is quite feature rich. You can read more about it on Facebook Mobile's Fan Page  or go straight to their mobile site. If you're really in a rush just copy and paste d.facebook.com/install into your browser.

There's a Youtube Video that explains the process and the features, and with mobile being the way most South Africans access the internet despite smartphones being in the vast minority, this might help the world domination of the Social Media site through countries with demographics similar to ours.

Sign of the Times

Considering there's a bunch of people referring to themselves as iPhoneographers, it's not much of a surprise that a company has figured out a way to bring all the SLR lenses gathering dust in cupboards back into the game. The very dedicated people at Photojojo have done just that. You'd think it would have been Canon or Nikon, but nope, it was a company that is about as insanely head over heels passionate about photography as you can possibly be without being committed.

The new mount essentially converts everyone's favourite happy snapper into a DSLR housing, allowing the user to mount any lens they want.

There are many photo related apps available, and we found a great list of the better ones on The Next Web. The majority focus on either post production or enhancing your shooting ability. We have yet to find a good one that converts the iPhone to an SLR camera set on Manual. If you have one you recommend let us know.

The rumour-mill is going into overdrive about the next generation of phones from Apple, including upgrades to it's picture taking capabilities. Something like this may seem a bit silly now but it's not hard to foresee a near future where photojournalists are able to shoot, edit, retouch and post images straight off a device that blurs the line between an SLR and a handset.

Android App Must Haves

Apps are taking over the mobile world one download at a time, so we thought we'd highlight a few cool ones from the rapidly expanding Android Marketplace. These are simple, functional and guaranteed to add value.

Flashlight sure beats searching for your dropped keys simply using the glow of your screen. It is generated off your camera LED light but remember to turn off the light when you are done or your battery life will die and then you’ll be all alone, in a dark place, and no way to call.

Hook your laptop up to your TV, switch on your Wi-Fi connection and you can  use your phone as a remote control. We recommend you don’t tell your girlfriend about this one, Remote wars could go up a notch.

The open source RemoteDroid makes use of your wireless network to act as another keyboard and mouse for your computer. There are programs you need to preinstall but once you have done that, hey... get controlling.

There are plenty of others, but which have you found indispensable?

BlackBerry Down but Not Out

Kinda weird how a phone made for businessmen by Canadians has become South African youth's coolest brand.

Research In Motion may be in the news for all the wrong reasons. It's share price is plummeting and it's leadership is in disarray but locally they've managed to establish a solid and loyal following by offering cheap unlimited access to the internet, which means inexpensive always on communication. Blackberry have also recently considered opening BBM up to other platforms.

R59 a month for unlimited online access has garnered over one million users in SA and made Blackberry the coolest brand in the country according to the Sunday Times Generation Next 2011 Survey.

It remains to be seen whether decreasing data prices, cheaper entry level smartphones and more cost efficient ways to communicate erode that lead, but for now Blackberry enjoys a comfortable lead. Other concerns are the fact that RICA may want to ban BBM as it can't monitor the communication the way it can SMS, email and phone calls.

For now, Blackberry users looking to find frineds via Facebook should check out a new app called SearchBBM, and should also be on the lookout for a new Facebook 2.0 update which will further integrate the social network with BBM features.