Famous Brands - Unexpected Products

What If Famous Brands Make Unexpected Products

Famous brands are recognized for their flagship products, but would their brand shine on other products? Like if Crocs actually developed an umbrella. Would it be legit?

Lipton Cigarettes. The cigarettes smells like tea, and actually tastes healthy! (If only it were true.)(Image Source: Ilya Kalimulin)

M&M’s Bullets. Already a threat to your blood sugar level, M&M’s just got more dangerous. (Image Source: Ilya Kalimulin)

Tic Tac Bomb. It will always blow your mind. (Image Source: Ilya Kalimulin)

McDonald’s MacBook. Oops, looks like an ultrabook from McDonald’s! On a side note, you can actually rebrand your MacBook with these skins and decals! (Image Source: AdMe)

Google Goooooo. What if in a parallel world, Google is not a world-changing company, but a ring game maker?

(Image Source: Ilya Kalimulin)

Kaspersky Insect Killer. Kaspersky can help you eliminated not only virtual bugs, but real-life insects too. Comes with 1 free refill. (Image Source: AdMe)

Adobe Skincare Master Collection. The latest feature of this Adobe Master Collection is that instead of just a digital facelift, you now get real-life, permanent skincare. (Image Source: AdMe)

Chanel Soap. The design might be a little out but hey, at least it cleans! (Image Source: Ilya Kalimulin)

Crocs Umbrella. Worst idea ever or revolutionary reinvention of the idea of the umbrella? (Image Source: AdMe)

Heineken Fire Extinguisher. Heineken is dedicated to "putting out" your sorrows and sadness.(Image Source: AdMe)

IKEA Piano. Yes, you will need to assemble this piano yourself. (Image Source: Ilya Kalimulin)

Marshall Fridge. And behold, the Marshall fridge for cold drinks after a jamming session! Actuallythis fridge is a real product, except that it’s not an amplifier, but who’s complaining? (Image Source:insidemarshall)

 

Source: [EnjoyTheMasti]

Fabulous Phablets!

Fabulous Phablets: The 5 Best Big-Screen Smartphones You Can Buy

By Mihir Patkar

Big-screen phones are awesome. These aren’t smartphones you can use easily with one hand, but if you’re comfortable being a two-handed user, then they give you more real estate and a fantastic large screen to get more stuff done.

Mobile phone screens are rapidly getting bigger and bigger. Just three years ago, the flagship handsets had a screen size of 4.3 inches, and it’s now increased to 5-5.2 inches. And somewhere along the line, a whole bunch of “phablets” (phone-tablet hybrids) popped up.

If you’re going to buy a big-screen phone now, and by that, we mean something that’s larger than a 5.5-inch screen and smaller than a 7-inch tablet, these are your best options.

Best All-Rounder: Samsung Galaxy Note 3 – $625.99

There’s no competition, the Samsung Galaxy Note 3 is the absolute best phone you can buy if you are looking for a phablet. It’s the only one to include a built-in stylus and custom software to make the most of that feature, letting you easily take notes, draw, and perform other tasks. Plus, it’s kitted with top-of-the-line hardware and the new faux leather back makes it feel good to hold. Samsung’s got a winner on their hands and if you can afford it, this is the phablet to buy. You can read more about it in our Galaxy Note 3 review.

• Screen: 5.7-inch Super AMOLED (1920×1080 pixels) with Gorilla Glass 3
• Processor: Quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 / Octa-Core Exynos 5 Octa 5420
• RAM: 3 GB
• Camera: 13 MP rear (1080p videos), 2 MP front (720p video)
• Memory: 16/32/64 GB internal, microSD up to 64 GB
• Connectivity: 3G, Wi-Fi a/b/g/n/ac, Bluetooth 4, NFC
• Battery: 3200 mAh
• OS: Android 4.2 Jelly Bean (Upgradable to 4.4 KitKat)

Waterproof: Sony Xperia Z Ultra – $470.55

If you want a big-screen phone that’s not going to be damaged when using it in the rain or out by the pool, the Xperia Z Ultra is your best bet. As long as the protective flaps for ports are sealed, it’s completely waterproof and you have nothing to worry about. But be warned, the camera is atrocious and the battery life is substandard. You really, really need to want that waterproofing feature to choose this over the Note 3.

• Screen: 6.4-inch IPS (1920×1080 pixels) with scratch-resistant glass
• Processor: 2.2GHz Quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 800
• RAM: 2 GB
• Camera: 8 MP rear camera without LED flash (1080p videos), 2 MP front camera (1080p videos)
• Memory: 16 GB internal, microSD up to 64GB
• Connectivity: 3G, Wi-Fi a/b/g/n/ac, Bluetooth 4, NFC
• Battery: 3050 mAh
• OS: Android 4.2 Jelly Bean (Upgradable to 4.4 KitKat)

CyanogenMod & Selfies: Oppo N1 – $669.89

Not everyone is a fan of how companies like Samsung modify Android’s interface. You could just install Cyanogenmod on any Android, but that’s not everyone’s cup of tea. So if you want something that’s closer to stock Android and assured of updates, then check out the Oppo N1. This is the first phone to come with CyanogenMod built-in. It features a rotating camera so you can click selfies with the same high-quality snapper as regular photos. There are a couple of other neat additions, like a rear touch panel and a keychain dongle, but these don’t work as well as advertised. You can read our full Oppo N1 review for more details.

• Screen: 5.9-inch IPS (1920×1080 pixels) with Gorilla Glass 3
• Processor: 1.7GHz Quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 600
• RAM: 2 GB
• Camera: 13 MP with rotating lens (1080p videos)
• Memory: 16/32 GB internal, no microSD slot
• Connectivity: 3G, Wi-Fi b/g/n, Bluetooth 4, NFC
• Battery: 3600 mAh
• OS: Android 4.2 Jelly Bean (Upgradable to 4.4 KitKat)

Budget Buy: Huawei Ascend Mate – $299.98

The Huawei Ascend Mate is not a new phone, but that also means it’s one of theaffordable Android phones that don’t suck. At just above $300, you get good hardware (quad-core processor, 2GB RAM) and long battery life (4050mAh). There are two issues, though. First, you probably won’t be getting updates beyond Android Jelly Bean. Second, the customized Emotion UI skin doesn’t look too great and doesn’t auto-rotate.

• Screen: 6.1-inch IPS (1280×720 pixels) with Gorilla Glass
• Processor: 1.5 GHz Quad-core Huawei K3V2
• RAM: 2 GB
• Camera: 8 MP rear (1080p videos), 1 MP front (720p video)
• Memory: 8 GB internal, microSD up to 64 GB
• Connectivity: 3G, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4
• Battery: 4050 mAh
• OS: Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean

The Non-Android Choice: Nokia 1520 – $559.89

If you don’t fancy Android but still want a large-screen mobile phone, Nokia has you covered. The new flagship, the Nokia 1520, features a 20-megapixel PureView camera to take sharp photographs and is packed with hardware that rivals any Android phone. Of course, this runs on Windows Phone 8 and has some awesome apps that will make you buy a Nokia phone.

• Screen: 6-inch IPS (1920×1080 pixels) with Gorilla Glass 2
• Processor: 2.2GHz Quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 800
• RAM: 2 GB
• Camera: 20 MP rear with Carl Zeiss optics (1080p videos), 1.2 MP front (720p video)
• Memory: 16 GB internal, microSD up to 64 GB
• Connectivity: 3G, Wi-Fi a/b/g/n/ac, Bluetooth 4, NFC
• Battery: 3400 mAh
• OS: Windows Phone 8

Your Thoughts On Big Screens?

With televisions, it’s always been as simple as “the bigger the better” when it comes to screen sizes, but that’s not everyone’s opinion with mobile phones. So what’s the right size, according to you? Would you buy a big-screen mobile phone and why? Let us know in the comments!

Source: www.MakeUseOf.com

Create Amazing Photo & Movie Slideshows With Music

4 Ways To Easily Create Amazing Photo & Movie Slideshows With Music

           By James Bruce

Get creative. You spend all that time taking little videos and photos of everything you do, just to leave them electronically rotting on your hard drive. What a waste! Or worse still, you subject the family to agonisingly boring slideshows. Stop that, stop it now — get creative! Here’s how.

Stupeflix

Stupeflix remains my firm favourite when dealing with lots of still photos: it’s an online video creation tool that creates a themed slideshow in time to music,automagically.

There are 13 themes to choose from, and a few more on the Pro plans that are designed for corporate videos. Each theme comes with it’s own appropriate default music, but you can replace this with your own track (30mb limit).  There’s no scene direction given on the edit screen though, so you’re free to upload photos (as well import from popular services) or videos and arrange them as you like — the tool will tweak the timings to fit the music, but that’s about far as it goes. You can also add titles or maps. It strikes a good balance between a full offline video editing tool, and the kind of scripted sequences that iMovie Trailers will create.

It isn’t free though — plans start from $8/month for HD export — but you can earn free credits for inviting friends; each signup is given one credit (i.e. you can export your video in HD 720p for free.). You can create and preview those videos as much as you like though, so if you wanted to make lots then signup just for the month, that would be fine too — there is no limit on the number of movies you can create on a paid account.

Stupeflix also offers an interesting video assistant tool which scans your Facebook page weekly and creates a video from the photos it finds from both you and your friends. This is in beta currently, and can be easily disabled.

This is a video I made to celebrate my 32nd birthday, with my own choice of music.

• Online tool to mix both videos, photos and music
• $8/month for the Personal HD plan
• Good selection of themes, easy to use and arrange clips

Animoto

In a similar vein to Stupeflix, Animoto invites you to choose from a selection of themes — of which there are many — though some are locked for Pro accounts only.

The process of creating a video is incredibly simple: select a bunch of photos either by importing them from popular services (like Facebook, Flickr, Photobucket, Picasa, SmugMug, & Instagram), or upload them from your computer. There’s a hard 10 second limit on videos though. Re-arrange, add some text, choose some music, and let the magic happen. There’s a huge royalty free song library you can use, or upload your own. Finally, you can share with a click to social sites and YouTube.

You can start with the feature limited Animoto free account before you move to the other personal plans. Animoto costs £5/month for unlimited full length videos though you’re limited to the 360p resolution (£35/month for HD, which is quite pricey) — but you can create 30 second clips for free, like this one I made with some wedding photos and the fireworks theme.

• Online tool to mix videos, photos, and music
• Large selection of themes and free music
• Low resolution movies up to 30 seconds are free, unlimited length is £5/month, and HD is £35/month
• Apps available for iOS and Android.

iMovie (iOS, Mac)

For combining short movie clips, iMovie is the undisputed king — and now both the Mac and iOS versions are free with all new devices. In particular, the “trailers” feature walks you through the production process with a set template so that the finished product is cohesive and professional.

Here’s how it works. You start by choosing a template — there’s a good range, each based on a traditional movie genre such as epic adventure, film noir, or horror. (Here’s our tutorial for the iPad version)

Each has an accompanying soundtrack and the shot timings are exactly laid out, as well as the ideal number of cast members. All you need to do is customise the text of the story board, and pick appropriate clips from your collection for each shot.

Each shot has an illustrative thumbnail giving you an idea of the right kind of clip to choose, such as “landscape” or “group” — just drag and drop, and choose the start and end points for each clip. When you’re done, hit export and you’ll be left with a professionally put together and often quite amusing trailer — it really couldn’t be simpler. Here’s the evil Mr Squiggles.

One caveat: Each trailer has a set piece of music. If you’d like to add your own, selectConvert to project from the File menu, where you’ll then be given complete creative control. Be sure to make a duplicate of the trailer first, as the conversion is one-way.

• OSX and iOS, for mixing short video clips only
• Free
• Choice of 20+ scripted “trailers”
• Stunning results

FrameBlast (iOS, Android)

FrameBlast has been called the Instagram of video, but it’s so much more than that. FrameBlast is 100% free — there’s no in-app purchases. As a mobile app, you’re limited to video clips currently on your phone or any you record live — but if you can work around that it’s a really easy way to create great looking videos, easily, in time to music. You’ll need at least an iPhone 4S for 1080p output support. Here’s one I put together in 10 minutes from the clips lying around on my phone.

Having imported your video into FrameBlast, you’ll be presented with the create screen. From here, drag left and right to pick the pace style of your video — ranging from fast cuts between shots, to slow cuts. Drag up and down to select an Instagram-style effect to add. The storyboard screen lets you rearrange clips by highlighting and dragging. The interface can be sluggish on older phones, but aside from choosing and shooting clips, there’s not an awful lot you need to do. Just hit save to output the file when you’re done.

• iOS and Android app to mix videos — so you’re limited to either taking the shots when you use the app, or footage stored on your phone
• Instagram video effects
• Completely free

These four apps are in my opinion, the best for putting together professional looking videos from short clips or photos. If you have the creative ability and don’t need fancy themes, any old video editor is going to suit you (have a go at green-screening in iMovie, it’s quite fun!)

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The Secret Of Happiness......

Source: EnjoyTheMast

Cloud Storage Managers

Are Your Files Getting Lost in the Cloud? These 4 Cloud Storage Managers Will Help

 By Dann Albright on 18^th March, 2014 | The Internet |  9 Comments

How can you keep track of your files when they’re all in different places?

With the availability of free cloud storage increasing all the time, and more people using multiple providers, you’ll probably need to answer this question soon.

When you have documents and photos all over the Internet, it’s easy to lose track of them. Was that spreadsheet in Dropbox or Google Drive? Is your presentation in OneDrive or SugarSync? Did that picture get uploaded from your phone to Amazon Cloud Drive or Flickr? These four websites promise to help you keep tabs on your cloud accounts. Let’s see how the pros and cons of each service stack up.

Primadesk (Web, iOS, Android)

Primadesk aims to be more than just a way to manage your files in the cloud — it’s a one-stop online hub. When you log in, you’re greeted with a dashboard that shows you all the activity that has happened in your accounts within the past 24 hours, making this a great tool if you do a lot of cloud collaboration. It also gives you access to a unified inbox, letting you manage multiple e-mail accounts from the same window.

Pros

• 39 different providers, including e-mail, photo, document, and social accounts.
• Support for multiple accounts from a single provider.
• Drag-and-drop transfers between services.
• Unified e-mail inbox.
• Advanced search capabilities, letting you search by keyword, date range, and content type in a single operation.
• 256-bit encryption and HTTPS to protect your information.

Cons

• Only 10 accounts available to free subscribers
• Only 1GB of backup space available to free subscribers
• Inability to view or edit Evernote notes

Overall, Primadesk is a very competitive option, though the lack of Evernote viewing and editing support will be a big strike against it for a lot of people. Primadesk, however, does have a free option, and that’s a big plus. If you upgrade to the Pro account for $5 monthly or $50 yearly, you get the ability to attach an unlimited number accounts, instead of 10, and you get more space to backup all of your files to the cloud. The top-tier premium account provides even more space.

Also Download: Primadesk for iOS / Android (Free)

JoliCloud (Web, iOS)

Like Primadesk, JoliCloud offers an integrated dashboard that lets you manage a lot of different cloud services from a single page. It doesn’t provide an integrated e-mail inbox, instead opting for a unified social feed called Home that combines Facebook, Feedly, Google+, Tumblr, and a few other services. Your cloud storage accounts get added to the Drive section, where you can manage your files.

Pros

• Clean, easy-to-use interface.
• Unified social stream.
• Easy to see how much storage you’re using in each account.
• Integration of Evernote previews.

Cons

• Only 13 providers.
• Unable to transfer files between accounts.
• Limited to one account per provider.
• No unified search feature.
• No backup feature.
• Still in beta.

Without the ability to search through all of your cloud files or transfer things between different accounts, JoliCloud falls a bit flat on the file management side. The unified social feed is a cool feature, though, and the interface is quite easy to use, meaning this could be a contender if you need to do more browsing than management.

Also Download: Jolicloud for iOS (Free)

CloudKafé (Web)

While it falls in the middle on the scale of supported providers, CloudKafé is completely free and offers a beautiful user interface and one of the most useful sharing features in this list with Baskets. Baskets allow you to choose items from any number of providers and share them in a single place by simply adding your friends’ or colleagues’ e-mail addresses.

Pros

• Unified contact storage for Google, Yahoo, and LinkedIn, creating a giant address book
• Support for multiple accounts from providers
• Simple navigation groups your accounts into documents, photos, videos, notes, contacts, and baskets*
• Ability to view and edit Evernote notes
• One-click search with results broken down by category
• Easy multi-provider sharing with Baskets

Cons

• No file transfer ability
• 18 providers is on the low end
• No backup options
• No mobile apps

*Although this classification is nice, most cloud storage services, like Dropbox, Box, OneDrive, and SugarSync, can also store photos and videos, meaning that some of them will end up in your documents folder.

CloudKafé has few drawbacks, but it does lack some important functionality in file transfers and is hurt by the lack of mobile apps. However, the integration of Evernote viewing and editing is a huge plus, and the easy-to-navigate interface makes this a great option for beginners to cloud storage management.

ZeroPC (Web, iOS, Android)

This is definitely the most unique cloud management app on this list. Instead of the file-explorer-type view offered by the other sites, you get a whole online desktop to work with, complete with apps like a text editor and a web browser. Unfortunately, in my testing, they fell short of the performance offered by even the most basic free apps that come standard on any computer.

Pros

• Universal inbox for managing multiple e-mail accounts
• Easy drag-and-drop file transfer capability
• Quick search by keyword, provider, file type, and date range
• Cloud Attach allows you to attach any files from cloud storage directly to e-mails in your Gmail account
• 1GB of free storage
• Secure SSL encryption and no storage of your usernames and passwords

Cons

• Online desktop interface is much more complicated than other options
• 25MB file size upload limit on free account
• 1GB data bandwidth limit on free account
• No backup option for free account

While a Pro account gets around most of these drawbacks, I found the cloud desktop format to be very “un-user-friendly” and the apps to be sub-par. Drag-and-drop file transfer, quick search, and Cloud Attach are extremely useful features, though, so if you’re not bothered by the desktop, this might be worth looking into.

Also Download: ZeroPC for iOS / Android (Free)

Which one should you use?

Primadesk is the standout option here, as it offers the biggest number of supported providers, file transfer capability, a unified inbox, and up to ten accounts in the free plan. If you’re looking for more than ten accounts but don’t want to pay for a premium plan, CloudKafé is a good compromise — it lacks some of the features of Primadesk, but more accounts and basket sharing are great features. JoliCloud might be a contender if it gets more functionality when it comes out of beta, but it’s not very compelling at the moment. As for ZeroPC, I’m not convinced that it’s a good way to go, but I’d love to hear your arguments to the contrary.

Do you use a cloud storage manager? Which would you recommend? Or do you skip it and just manage each one individually?

Image Credit: Baltic Servers via Wikimedia

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