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Tech News & Commentary
Jeff in Columbia, Tennessee listens to the Podcast asked us: “I upgraded from the iPhone to the Samsung Galaxy Note a couple years ago, and I was finally in there upgrading to the Note 3. The girl in the AT&T store had a Samsung Wrist Watch on. I was wondering if it is worth getting? And is there any risk of cancer with the radio waves.”
Jeff, As far as the risk of cancer because of radio waves, anyone can get cancer but the Bluetooth link between your phone and your watch or even the link between your phone and your service provider shouldn’t raise your risk of getting it.
With that, if you are still interested in the watch, YES it’s a great wearable tech watch that syncs that would sync to your Galaxy Note 3. It has many cool options ranging from taking pictures and videos to making phones calls and actually talking to the person through the watch. You can even answer text messages via speak-to-text. You can even use S-voice through your watch, you ultimately shouldn’t have to 
constantly take out your phone.
One cool feature that some like, besides all the other cool ones, is that it alerts you when you’ve walked out of range of your phone, so if you’re leaving the house and tend to be in a hurry, you’ll never forget your phone.
But before you get all worked up over the cancer risk from using your cell phone, you need to know that there has never been a direct link shown between cell phone use and increased instances of cancer. So when we, or anyone else, say “you are at an increased risk,” you have to take the rest of that sentence to be “as opposed to sitting in a dark room, never exposing yourself to sunlight, chemicals, or other people.” Is that how you want to live?
We don’t mean to make light of something as serious as cancer, there isn’t a single one of us here who hasn’t lost someone they loved to it. We discourage unhealthy behaviors like pressing your smartphone to the side of your head and talking for hours. But, we are really very comfortable saying that the risks associated with radio waves are not immediately apparent to the small ARMY of researchers studying it, and that makes us comfortable enough to strap on a smartwatch.
Just for context, the International Agency For Research On Cancer classes cellphone signals as a Class 2B – Possible carcinogen. That means that they don’t believe it to be more or less likely to cause cancer than coffee or pickled vegetables, and they don’t feel they should rate it lower because, out of all the studies they conducted, two contained the following conclusions:
• “could not be dismissed as reflecting bias alone”
• “casual interpretation between mobile phone RF-EMF exposure and glioma was possible”
Which means that, since two studies out of all of the ones they did concluded that “it’s probably fine, but we couldn’t prove it 100%,” they decided it was not safe to conclude that it was less dangerous than coffee or pickled vegetables, but they concluded that it was at least no more dangerous. Also, those “only as safe as coffee” studies were conducted using old phones that put out about 100 times more RF waves than 3G phones.
For more information tune in to Hour 1 of our podcast.
Consumer Reports Feature With James McQueen
Sharp Quattron Plus TVs claim to be a lower-cost bridge to the next generation of TV technology. But what are they really? Consumer Reports set out to test whether these TVs are HD, Ultra HD, or something entirely different. Electronics spokesman James McQueen is here with the results.
The “Into Tomorrow” team discussed the latest apps that they have been playing with recently.
• AppChek recommends: Inky Mail, FREE
- “Inky Mail is a smart, simple, and fun new email app that helps you get organized, reduce clutter, and find your most important messages quickly. Stop feeling overwhelmed by the constant flood of mail. Inky puts you in control and lets you focus on what matters. “
• Mark recommends: MahJong+, FREE
- “MahJong Solitaire is a matching game for one player. The goal of the game is to remove all tiles out of the board by pairs. Select tiles with the same picture and they will disapear. Only free tiles that are not covered are allowed to remove. The game contains 200 different layouts, including the classic “Turtle”. At any moment you can use Undo, Hint and Shuffle.” — Mark
• Samantha recommends: Hotels.com, FREE
- “Find hotels around you, fnd local deals and book hotels straight from the app.” — Samantha
What are your favorite Apps? Let us know at 800-899-INTO and we’ll feature them in this segment!
Tune in to Hour 1 of our podcast for more details
Guest Segment:
Manish Patel, Co-Founder – NOIZY Brands
for wireless bluetooth sport headphones, earbuds and speakers and over the ear headphones.
Joseph in State College, Pennsylvania listens on WRSC 103.1 asked us: “I’m interested in getting a tablet. I like to go online and order over the Internet and I also like to get information over the Internet. Can you give me the best price on a good model or the best model you think would be sufficient?”
Joseph, The Apple iPad Air is a very good tablet which seems to be dominating the market lately and getting a lot of attention, but for the price of $500, it can do some damage to your wallet. Rest assured though, there are many alternatives.
The Google Nexus 7 rings up around $200 to $229. Featuring a quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Pro processor and 2GB of RAM, browsing and usage is a lot faster than other tablets. For someone that wants to get information and order online, the 7 inch tablet is an appropriate size. It’s not too big, and not too small, just the right size for online purchasing. The Nexus 7 is currently running on Android Jelly Bean 4.3.
If you want to stretch your budget a bit further, you should look at the iPad Mini. Featuring a 7.9 inch LED-backlit display, the Mini is slightly larger than the Nexus 7. With over 270,000 apps in the app store and iCloud, its a tablet that is great for browsing, entertainment, and miscellaneous task. It is currently priced at $299.
The ASUS MemoPad HD 7 is one of the most affordable tablets on the market at the moment. It ranges between $150-$160. For the affordable price, it is an ideal tablet for someone that just wants a tablet to browse the internet.
That $299 price for the iPad mini, by the way, is for the older model. The newer model, the iPad mini with Retina display, starts at $399. And since we’re bringing up the subject of old models, be sure to shop carefully for that Nexus 7. Google has updated that tablet at least a couple of times, and sometimes that super-great low price can be a sign that you’re looking at last year’s model.
We’ve been impressed with the new tablets using Intel processors. They seem to perform very well, and if you’re considering Android it might be worth looking for tablets using Intel Atom processors, you might also hear them called Intel “Bay Trail” processors.
For more information tune in to Hour 1 of our podcast.
Bonnie in Denham Springs, Louisiana – listening via Talk 107.3FM Baton Rouge asked us: “I have a iPhone 4s and ever since I got it I have not been able to get on our netgear wifi router. I have tried everything I can think of. I can connect with my kindle, laptop and my granddaughter can connect with her iPad. I hope you can give me some insight to it. Thank you for all your info on your show.”
Bonnie, If you just got it and everything else connects and the phone doesn’t, you may want to return it and get a new one… there may be something wrong with the phone and if it’s new they should still honor your warranty.
If you can’t or don’t want to do that, you can reset the phone’s network setting by going to settings, general and reset at the bottom of the list. Doing that will get rid of all of the passwords for every WiFi network you connect to, so while it may fix this problem, it may not be the best solution if you connect to a lot of different networks.
Before trying that, you may just want to go for the default answer for all electronics ever, and unplug everything and plug everything back in, turn the phone off and on, power cycle everything that can be power cycled… that fixes a ridiculous amount of problems.
The iPhone 4S doesn’t use any special method to get on WiFi, in fact it works pretty much the same way as the iPad, so if your granddaughter can get her iPad online, but she can’t get your phone online, you should probably consider having it replaced if you still can.
For more information tune in to Hour 1 of our podcast.
Wireless Update with Chuck Hamby
Summer can be care-free for kids. Riding their bikes and playing in the neighborhood. But this means drivers need to be even more cautious. Chuck Hamby is here to tell us one way to be safer on the roads.
This Week’s Prizes for Our Listeners
Other World Computing (OWC): NUGUARD KX – Kinectic Energy X-Orbing Case for Samsung Galaxy S4
Joos: Portable Solar Chargers – gives you power anywhere there is sun.
Tylt: ENERGI Travel Chargers with USB ports and built-in cables for iPhones and Micro USB devices
“Into Tomorrow”: Microfiber Screen Cleaning Cloths with Dave’s cartoon on them, for all your smartphones, tablets, TVs, camera lenses and computer screens!