The jury may still out on the health effects of cellphones, but in one way at least they may be able to do you some good – by helping pick healthy foods on the supermarket shelves. Software developed at the VTT lab in Tampere, Finland, allows a cameraphone to snap the barcodes on food products and send it as an MMS message to a central database. The shopper then receives an SMS detailing the product’s nutritional value.
To get music from a CD onto your cellphone’s memory card you first have to rip it onto a PC. Panasonic’s latest hi-fi system simplifies this by cutting out middle step: its Audio Ripper squirts CD tracks straight onto a memory card. Because it spins the CD player at four times normal speed, it can copy an hour of music in 15 minutes. It even has an auto-changer that allows up to five albums to be ripped in quick succession.
