Zoom

Camera 360 1.0.1 Review

If your smartphone has become your point-and-shoot camera, you're probably missing some of your go-to shooting modes. Camera 360 will help bring them back and add some cool effects, too. It's a big shift from what you're used to in Android's default camera, but it's a switch worth making.

This app does away with the translucent viewfinder tools you'll find in most camera apps. That means there's not as much room for you to actually frame your shot, sadly. It's even worse when you factor in the ad that the app floods … Read more

Apple wins 39 new patents on Smart Cover, pinch-to-zoom

Apple has won dozens of new patents across a wide array of technologies, including how pinch-to-zoom works in software and its iPad Smart Cover's attachment features.

Perhaps the most important patent is one that relates to how a touch screen reacts to a person's thumb and index finger during a pinch-to-zoom gesture. Sensors within the touch display change in size and shape based on the gestured detected by those fingers. If a thumb and forefinger start to move together, the sensory panels change around that. When they move apart, the sensors once again adapt. Other sensors around the … Read more

Tweak your media with Zoom Player Free

There's a media player out there for just about everyone, from technophobic grandpas to people who edit various types of media for fun and profit. Zoom Player Free is definitely geared toward the more advanced users, given the depth of its features and its tendency to be a bit less-than-simple to use.

Once installed, Zoom Player Free greeted us with a long list of additional components to download. If you don't know what FFDShow, DirectVobSub, and FFMPEG Core Files are, you're likely going to be frustrated by the fact that you're being asked to make decisions … Read more

Zooming options for Safari in OS X

When browsing the Web you may find text or images to be too small for you, and you may wish to increase their size or otherwise adjust the browser so you can properly see the content.

Though each browser has its own options for making text and images more legible, there are a few approaches in Safari that are a bit uncommon and not only help you zoom in and adjust what you are seeing, but also allow you to manage tabs and other content you are viewing.

Systemwide zoom The first option for zooming in Safari is to use … Read more

How to enable pinch-to-zoom in Gmail on your Android device

Last week when Google rolled out Gmail 4.2.1 to all Android users, swipe-to-delete wasn't the only feature added to the app. Google also added pinch-to-zoom, but it's not called pinch-to-zoom in the settings. Wait, what? Yeah, it's a bit confusing. So here's what you'll need to do to enable pinch-to-zoom in Gmail on your Android device.

Download the latest version of Gmail from the Google Play Store. It should be version 4.2.1. After you're up to date, launch the Gmail app and navigate to Settings > General Settings. Check the … Read more

Verizon's Motorola Xoom gets Android 4.0 update

A few weeks ago, we reported that two Verizon products, the Motorola Xoom and the HTC Rezound, would soon be slated for an Android 4.0 update. Lo and behold, it's happening -- at least for the Xoom anyway.

Customers on the Big Red are now able to update their tablets (which won our CES Best of Show title in 2011) to the Ice Cream Sandwich operating system.

New features include the Roboto system font, panoramic shooting, e-mail search, the capability to save Web pages for offline reading, and a photo editor integrated in the Gallery app.

In addition, … Read more

A great-sounding pocket recorder: Zoom H2n

I wrote about Zoom's nifty $99 H1 pocket recorder last year, and really loved its sound, so I was curious to see how the H2n recorder measured up. It's a bit shorter, just 4.5 inches high, but fatter and a little heavier. The H2n's body is shiny black plastic, but it feels more solidly built than the H1.

It has four recording modes: Mid-Side (MS) stereo, 90 degree X/Y stereo, two-channel, and four-channel surround modes. The H2n can record MP3 files (48 to 320 Kbps) or WAV files (44.1-kHz/16-bit to 96-kHz/24-bit). The &… Read more

Crave giveaway: Zoom Q3HD HD video recorder

Congrats to Angela C. of Spartanburg, S.C., for beating out almost 2,700 giveaway entrants to win last week's freebie, a 42-inch Vizio 3D TV. This week, we've got another great prize, the Zoom Q3HD.

The handy HD pocket camcorder, compatible with Windows and Mac, is basically a Flip camera with the microphones and recording quality of a high-end audio recorder. It captures video in 1080p at 30fps or in 720p at both 30 and 60fps in MPEG-4 H.264 (MOV) video format. Three lighting settings -- Auto, Concert, and Night -- let you capture your star subjects just so.

Audio recording settings allow for recording quality up to 24-bit/96kHz WAV. … Read more

How to disable the pinch-zoom gesture on Windows laptops

I may have saved my mother's sanity with this tip. She was enjoying her new Dell laptop except for the fact that it would suddenly zoom in and out when she was browsing the Web or using Outlook, sometimes deleting a half-penned e-mail in the process. (Not helping matters was the fact that my dad was not experiencing such mousing behaviors.) During my last visit, I discovered the problem: pinch zoom.

One of the many multitouch gestures on today's laptops is the ability to pinch two fingers to zoom in and out in a window. When viewing images … Read more