Put your phone into 'car mode' with these dashboard apps

Sadly, Android's original Car Home app is incompatible with most modern versions of the OS.

(Credit:
Google)

My first
Android phone, the original Motorola Droid, was one of the first phones to debut Google Maps Navigation. Now, Google knew that this feature would get drivers interested in using their Android phones in the car and that the tiny virtual buttons and shortcuts that worked well when the device was handheld wouldn't cut it behind the wheel. So, when users popped their Droids into their
car docks, they were presented with a simplified interface with large shortcut buttons to car-centric apps, designed for safer use while driving.

Smartphones have come a long way since I retired my Droid, but--with the exception of a few devices with customized OSes--the Car Home feature has largely disappeared from newer Android phones. In a time where drivers are more concerned than ever about distraction behind the wheel, this is a shame.

Here's where the third-party steps in to help. We've rounded up a collection of our favorite dashboard apps that closely replicate (and in many cases, exceed) the functionally of that old Car Home app for both Android. We've also included a number of apps for iOS devices, which have never boasted such a car-specific feature.

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Vlingo Virtual Assistant
Android, price: Free

Vlingo Virtual Assistant is one of my favorite apps for in-car use. When placed in its Vlingo InCar mode, the app listens for an activation phrase and responds to your voice commands without your ever having to actually touch your phone. Simply say, "Hey Vlingo, navigate home." or "Hey Vlingo, text Wayne, 'I'm going to be a bit late.'" to interact with your phone in the safest way possible. You can even ask Vlingo trivia like, "What's the capitol of California?" or "How tall is the Empire State Building?"

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CarHome Ultra
Android, price: $3.99 after 30 day free trial

CarHome Ultra hearkens back to the original Car Home mode that debuted as part of Android 2.3 Gingerbread. Firing up this app presents the user with large, easy to see and tap shortcuts for functions commonly used while driving, such as Maps, Navigation, or Voice Search. Any of these buttons can be customized, so can add shortcuts to Pandora or MOG, for example, if you're a heavy Internet radio listener. CarHome Ultra also features a Night Mode to reduce glare and can automatically disable your Wi-Fi and enable your Bluetooth when activated.

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Car Widget
Android, price: $0.99 after 10-use free trial

CarWidget is a bit like a simpler, cheaper version of CarHome Ultra. This widget lives on your Android phone's home screen and presents six customizable shortcuts to car-centric apps such as Navigation, Phone, or your favorite music or podcast player. CarWidget can be set to automatically adjust your phone's settings when certain conditions are met--such as pairing with your car's Bluetooth system--to automatically disable Wi-Fi, disable the screen timeout, or adjust the volume levels for calls and media. This 4x4 widget takes up an entire homescreen, which could be problematic for some users.

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Awesome HUD
Apple iOS, price: Free

Awesome HUD transforms your iPhone in a customizable GPS speedometer that also offers easily touchable shortcuts for control of your iPod music app. Put the Awesome HUD app into its HUD mode and place your phone screen up on the dashboard to see a head-up display reflected onto your car's windshield. This way, you can monitor your speed, direction, and drive time without taking your eyes off of the road. The HUD is really only visible at night and, unfortunately, Awesome HUD isn't compatible with the
iPhone 5, but it's not bad for a free app.

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Drive
Apple iOS, price: $1.99

Drive is probably one of the better car-specific dashboard apps for the Apple iPhone and is definitely worth its $1.99 price tag. Fire up the app and you'll be greeted with four large shortcuts for four functions. Music gives quick gesture-based control of the iPod app; Map brings up, well, a Map and enables users to track their trip; quick text fires off predefined text messages to predefined contacts, such as "I'm stuck in traffic and will be late."; and quick call puts your favorite contacts at your fingertips for quick hands-free calling.

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iCarMode
Apple iOS, price: $1.99

iCarMode is another great dashboard app for the iPhone--possibly better even than the aforementioned Drive--that presents a number of large, easy-to-tap shortcuts to music controls, contacts, audio controls, and your favorite GPS navigation and audio streaming apps. Users can also search for destinations from the iCarMode interface and quickly locate their car thanks to the app's ability to save the location of a parked car when exiting the vehicle and be reminded when it's time to feed the meter with the parking meter timer.

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Car Dock Mode
Apple iOS, price: Free with $2.99 in-app premium feature unlock

Car Dock Mode is more of an honorable mention than a bona fide player in this space. It's designed to work with the Dension Car Dock for iPhone, but doesn't require the hardware to be installed on your iPhone. The free app presents large shortcuts to your contacts for hands-free calling, iPod music library playback, and maps. An in-app purchase unlocks the app's premium features, enabling Web Radio streaming of thousands of Internet radio stations, a GPS car finder function, and the ability to customize and re-color the app. iCarMode and Drive are much better apps, but if you're looking for a free alternative, Car Dock Mode will make do.

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iOnRoad Augmented Driving Pro
Android, Apple iOS, price: $4.99

Odds are that you won't be using your phone's camera while you drive, so put it to work enhancing the safety of your car with the iOnRoad Augmented Driving app. This app watches the road ahead of your car for obstructions and other cars. When it detects that you're approaching an obstruction too quickly and there's potential for an collision, it sounds an alarm and flashes the screen. The app can even run in the background, if you want to also use your phone to navigate.

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Space Pictures This Week: Frosty Mars, Mini Nile, More

Photograph by Mike Theiss, National Geographic

The aurora borealis, also known as the northern lights, illuminates the Arctic sky in a recent picture by National Geographic photographer Mike Theiss.

A storm chaser by trade, Theiss is in the Arctic Circle on an expedition to photograph auroras, which result from collisions between charged particles released from the sun's atmosphere and gaseous particles in Earth's atmosphere.

After one particularly amazing show, he wrote on YouTube, "The lights were dancing, rolling, and twisting, and at times looked like they were close enough to touch!" (Watch his time-lapse video of the northern lights.)

Published December 14, 2012

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Conn. Shooter Adam Lanza: 'Obviously Not Well'

Adam Lanza of Newtown, Connecticut was a child of the suburbs and a child of divorce who at age 20 still lived with his mother.

This morning he appears to have started his day by shooting his mother Nancy in the face, and then driving to nearby Sandy Hook Elementary School armed with at least two handguns and at least one semi-automatic rifle.

There, before turning his gun on himself, he shot and killed 20 children, who President Obama later described as between five and 10 years of age. Six adults were also killed at the school. Nancy Lanza was found dead in her home.

A relative told ABC News that Adam was "obviously not well."

Family friends in Newtown also described the young man as troubled and described Nancy as rigid. "[Adam] was not connected with the other kids," said Barbara Frey, who also said he was "a little bit different ... Kind of repressed."

State and federal authorities believe his mother may have once worked at the elementary school where Adam went on his deadly rampage, although she was not a teacher, according to relatives, perhaps a volunteer.

Nancy and her husband Peter, Adam's father, divorced in 2009. When they first filed for divorce in 2008, a judge ordered that they participate in a "parenting education program."

Peter Lanza, who drove to northern New Jersey to talk to police and the FBI, is a vice president at GE Capital and had been a partner at global accounting giant Ernst & Young.

Adam's older brother Ryan Lanza, 24, has worked at Ernst & Young for four years, apparently following in his father's footsteps and carving out a solid niche in the tax practice. He too was interviewed by the FBI. Neither he nor his father is under any suspicion.

"[Ryan] is a tax guy and he is clean as a whistle," a source familiar with his work said.

Police had initially identified Ryan as the killer. Ryan sent out a series of Facebook posts saying it wasn't him and that he was at work all day. Video records as well as card swipes at Ernst & Young verified his statement that he had been at the office.

Investigators are looking into whether Adam Lanza was carrying his older brother Ryan's identification at the time of the shooting, which may have caused the confusion. Neither Adam nor Ryan has any known criminal history.

Numerous relatives of the Lanzas in New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts, as well as multiple friends, are being interviewed by the FBI in an effort to put together a better picture of the gunman and any explanation for today's tragedy.

"I think the most important thing to point out with this kind of individual is that he did not snap this morning and decide to act out violently," said former FBI profiler Mary Ellen O'Toole. "These acts involve planning and thoughtfulness and strategizing in order to put the plan together so what may appear to be snap behavior is not that at all."

With reporting by Pierre Thomas, Jim Avila, Santina Leuci, Aaron Katersky, Matthew Mosk, Jason Ryan and Jay Shaylor

MORE: 27 Dead, Mostly Children, at Connecticut Elementary School Shooting

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Today on New Scientist: 13 December 2012

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Robots should be cleaning your home

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Search for aliens poses game theory dilemma

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'Robot ecosystem' in sight as apps get a cash boost

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UK government urged to consider relaxing drug rules

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Unemployment low, job vacancies remain up in Q3: MOM

SINGAPORE: The Ministry of Manpower (MOM) said employment growth stayed high despite a rise in layoffs in the third quarter of this year.

In a statement, MOM noted that job openings rose in the quarter, resulting in a rise in job vacancies to job seekers ratio.

Meanwhile, the increase in layoffs remained substantially below recessionary highs.

Total employment grew by 26,200 in the third quarter of 2012, moderating from the growth of 31,900 in the same period last year, and 31,700 in the second quarter of 2012.

In the first nine months of 2012, total employment grew by 85,100 -- just slightly more than the increase of 85,000 in the same period last year.

The Ministry said unemployment rates have remained low, reflecting high manpower demand amid the tightening in foreign manpower controls.

- CNA/xq

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Yahoo considering purchase of news summarizing app Summly

Nick D'Aloisio, founder of Summly, speaks to the "CBS This Morning" co-hosts about his application that transforms the way people consume the news on mobile phones.

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer is looking at buying Summly, an app created by boy genius Nick D'Aloisio to summarize news articles, according to a report from All Things D.

Mayer met with the teenage D'Aloisio in recent weeks, unnamed sources told All Things D. The app uses an algorithm to pull out relevant information from news articles and turns them into neat paragraphs that fit on an iPhone screen, while also linking to the full article.

CNET has contacted both Yahoo and Summly for comment, and we'll update if we hear back.

Summly would be an attractive buy for Yahoo, as Mayer revs up her search for apps to bolster the company's presence in the mobile. Mayer expressed during a quarterly earnings call that "a focused, coherent mobile strategy," is the company's top priority. The company boasted more than 500,000 downloads in its first month. If Yahoo did buy Summly, it would be the company's third acquisition since Mayer took over this past July.

Yahoo acquired Stamped, a recommendations engine app, in late October, and mobile video-chat startup OnTheAir earlier this month.

The technology behind Summly, started out as an app called Trimit, which summarized the information in Web pages. D'Aloisio created it as a tool to help him comb through the vast amount of information he needed to review for his school work. Soon Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-shing, founder and chairman of of Horizon Ventures, invested $250,000 in D'Aloisio's company and Trimit was renamed as Summly. On Halloween, Summly relaunched as a news summarizing app.

Coincidentally, this news comes as D'Aloisio celebrates the first anniversary of Summly's first launch.

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Global Checkup: Most People Living Longer, But Sicker

If the world's entire population went in for a collective checkup, would the doctor's prognosis be good or bad? Both, according to new studies published in The Lancet medical journal.

The vast collaborative effort, called the Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study 2010, includes papers by nearly 500 authors in 50 countries. Spanning four decades of data, it represents the most comprehensive analysis ever undertaken of health problems around the world.

It reveals that, globally, we're living longer but coping with more illness as adults. In 1990, "childhood underweight"—a condition associated with malnutrition, measles, malaria, and other infectious diseases—was the world's biggest health problem. Now the top causes of global disease are adult ailments: high blood pressure (associated with 9.4 million deaths in 2010), tobacco smoking (6.2 million), and alcohol use (4.9 million).

First, the good news:

We're living longer. Average life expectancy has risen globally since 1970 and has increased in all but eight of the world's countries within the past decade.

Both men and women are gaining years. From 1970 to 2010, the average lifespan rose from 56.4 years to 67.5 years for men, and from 61.2 years to 73.3 years for women.

Efforts to combat childhood diseases and malnutrition have been very successful. Deaths in children under five years old declined almost 60 percent in the past four decades.

Developing countries have made huge strides in public health. In the Maldives, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Iran, and Peru, life expectancy has increased by more than 20 years since 1970. Within the past two decades, gains of 12 to 15 years have occurred in Angola, Ethiopia, Niger, and Rwanda, an indication of successful strategies for curbing HIV, malaria, and nutritional deficiencies.

We're beating many communicable diseases. Thanks to improvements in sanitation and vaccination, the death rate for diarrheal diseases, lower respiratory infections, meningitis, and other common infectious diseases has dropped by 42 percent since 1990.

And the bad:

Non-infectious diseases are on the rise, accounting for two of every three deaths globally in 2010. Heart disease and stroke are the primary culprits.

Young adults aren't doing as well as others. Deaths in the 15 to 49 age bracket have increased globally in the past 20 years. The reasons vary by region, but diabetes, smoking, alcohol, HIV/AIDS, and malaria all play a role.

The HIV/AIDS epidemic is taking a toll in sub-Saharan Africa. Life expectancy has declined overall by one to seven years in Zimbabwe and Lesotho, and young adult deaths have surged by more than 500 percent since 1970 in South Africa, Botswana, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.

We drink too much. Alcohol overconsumption is a growing problem in the developed world, especially in Eastern Europe, where it accounts for almost a quarter of the total disease burden. Worldwide, it has become the top risk factor for people ages 15 to 49.

We eat too much, and not the right things. Deaths attributable to obesity are on the rise, with 3.4 million in 2010 compared to 2 million in 1990. Similarly, deaths attributable to dietary risk factors and physical inactivity have increased by 50 percent (4 million) in the past 20 years. Overall, we're consuming too much sodium, trans fat, processed meat, and sugar-sweetened beverages, and not enough fruits, vegetables, whole grains, nuts, fiber, calcium, and omega-3 fatty acids.

Smoking is a lingering problem. Tobacco smoking, including second-hand smoke, is still the top risk factor for disease in North America and Western Europe, just as it was in 1990. Globally, it's risen in rank from the third to second leading cause of disease.

To find out more and see related charts and graphics, see the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, which led the collaboration.

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Health-Exchange Deadline Looms

All of the Affordable Care Act, also known as "Obamacare," doesn't go into effect until 2014, but states are required to set up their own health care exchanges or leave it to the federal government to step in by next year. The deadline for the governors' decisions is Friday.

The health insurance exchanges are one of the key stipulations of the new health care law. They will offer consumers an Internet-based marketplace for purchasing private health insurance plans.

But the president's signature health care plan has become so fraught with politics that whether governors agreed to set up the exchanges has fallen mostly along party lines.

Such partisanship is largely symbolic because if a state opts not to set up the exchange, the Department of Health and Human Services will do it for them as part of the federal program. That would not likely be well-received by Republican governors, either, but the law forces each state's chief executive to make a decision one way or the other.

Here's what it looks like in all 50 states and the District of Columbia:

20 states that have opted out -- N.J., S.C., La., Wis., Ohio, Maine, Ala., Alaska, Ariz., Ga., Pa., Kan., Neb., N.H., N.D., Okla., S.D., Tenn., Texas and Wyo.

Charles Dharapak/AP Photo

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Several Republican governors have said they will not set up the exchanges, including Chris Christie (N.J.), Nikki Haley (S.C.), Bobby Jindal (La.), Scott Walker (Wis.), John Kasich (Ohio), Paul LePage (Maine), Robert Bentley (Ala.), Sean Parnell (Ark.), Jan Brewer (Ariz.), Nathan Deal (Ga.), Tom Corbett (Pa.), Sam Brownback (Kan.), Dave Heineman (Neb.), John Lynch (N.H.), Jack Dalrymple (N.D.), Mary Fallin (Okla.), Dennis Daugaard (S.D.), Bill Haslam (Tenn.), Rick Perry (Texas), and Matt Mead (Wyo.).

3 States Out, but a Little More Complicated -- Mont., Ind. and Mo.

The Montana outgoing and incoming governors are both Democrats, but the Republican state legislature rejected the Democratic state auditor's request to start setting up a state exchange. So a federal exchange will be set up in Montana as well.

The Indiana outgoing and incoming governors are both Republicans and outgoing Gov. Mitch Daniels deferred the decision to governor-elect and U.S. Rep. Mike Pence, who said his preference is not to set up a state health care exchange, paving the way for the feds to come in too.

In Missouri, Gov. Jay Nixon is a Democrat, but Prop E passed on Nov. 6, which barred his administration from creating a state-based exchange without a public vote or the approval of the state legislature. After the election, he sent a letter to the Department of Health and Human Services saying he would be unable to set up a state-based exchange, meaning the federal government would have to set up its own.

1 State Waiting for the White House -- Utah

Utah already has a state exchange set up, a Web-based tool where small-business employees can shop and compare health insurance with contributions from their employee. In a letter Republican Gov. Gary Herbert sent to the White House Tuesday, he asked for its exchange, called Avenue H, to be approved as a state-based exchange under the Affordable Care Act as long as state officials can open it to individuals and larger businesses.

Norm Thurston, the state's health reform implementation coordinator, says authorities there "haven't received an official response" from the White House, but "we anticipate getting one soon."

There are some sticking points that don't comply with the exchanges envisioned by the Affordable Care Act and Utah would like to keep it that way.

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UK government urged to consider relaxing drug rules

JUST say yes to considering relaxed drug controls, urged a panel of UK parliamentarians this week - but Prime Minister David Cameron has rejected the calls.

Many countries have loosened their penalties for drug use, including the Czech Republic and Portugal, which introduced a "de-penalisation" strategy in 2000. Citizens caught in possession avoid criminal records but must attend drug advice sessions. Last month, the US states of Colorado and Washington voted to legalise the recreational use of cannabis.

The UK report calls for the effects of these legal moves to be monitored. "Drugs policy ought to be evidence-based as much as possible," it concludes. "We recommend that the government fund a detailed research project to monitor the effects of each legalisation system."

The report notes that 21 countries have now introduced some form of decriminalisation. But the government's response has been lukewarm. "I don't support decriminalisation," said Cameron. "We have a policy which actually is working in Britain. Drugs use is coming down."

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S'pore strongly urges N.Korea to work with international community

SINGAPORE: Singapore has strongly urged the North Korean government to refrain from further actions that would escalate tensions, and work with the international community to preserve peace and stability in the Korean Peninsula.

A statement from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said North Korea's rocket launch on Wednesday is a violation of United Nations Security Council resolutions.

It added that Singapore deeply regrets this defiance of the concerns of the international community. The launch also does not serve the best interests of the North Korean people.

- CNA/ck

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