Meet Maya Elektra, CuteGeek’s youngest tech reviewer and the star of our HP Wireless Printer Video clip earlier this month.

Maya is 7 and a half years old and is just learning to read. She has grown up around technology, art and literature and loves anything that brings them together. She attends The Child School on Roosevelt Island where she competed in this years science fair against kids from kindergarten to twelfth grade and she won a Science Award this month in her Washington Heights community through The Children Arts & Sciences Workshop. Her Science Club teacher has agreed to let Maya demo some educational tech in class when they reconvene in September.

This is Maya chillin’ in the subway at Columbus Circle, immersed in playing Angry Birds on the new Android Infuse.

(Maya is Wendy Wick’s daughter – if you are interested in getting Maya to review items – please email Wendy@CuteGeek.com)

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The Girls Out Loud Show has been created! Join us each week as hosts Maya Grinberg and Cristina Cordova discuss, debate, and discover the weeks most interesting tech, web, and social news stories.

In Episode 001, we get into the Facebook privacy issues of late, which seem so poorly timed for Facebook’s reputation to withstand.

• http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2010/05/facebook-board-members-account-hacked.html
• http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/11/yelp-security-hole-puts-facebook-user-data-at-risk-underscores-problems-with-instant-personalization/
• http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2010/05/15/facebook-is-a-utility-utilities-get-regulated.html

We couldn’t bring up Facebook this week without discussing Diaspora, the new concept for a de-centralized social network thats all over the interwebz:

• http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/05/facebook-open-alternative/

We also talk about the hype around square phones, and how we think the hype is a bunch of silly hoopla:

• http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/05/cellphones-go-square/

A cool new idea for public transportation:

• http://www.wired.com/autopia/2010/05/fly-through-the-city-on-an-urban-chairlift/

Some surprising study showing Symbian as being the mOS with the highest ad click-thrus (yes, in the U.S.!)

• http://gizmodo.com/5539833/when-it-comes-to-mobile-ad-click-through-symbian-is-number-one

Also, the girls have emails and a place for comments now! Send questions, suggestions, tips, info, and other such pleasantries to comments@girlsoutloudshow.com or either of our names@girlsoutloudshow.com To download the MP3 for this podcast to your computer for use on an iPod or MP3 player, right click and select save as or download file as. MP3 Download.

Cheers!

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I got an email last week asking that I check out this new iPhone app, with a redeem code for iTunes. My reaction? Sweet! Now I get to be added to the ranks of other such internet celebrities that have checked the app out and wrote about it, like Fake Steve Jobs, who wrote a funny little sentence about it possibly being a hoax.

Is the app, Love Vibes, a hoax? I don’t think it is. Does it have any more utility to you than a hoax would? It doesn’t.

What it is: the Love Vibes app supposedly can rate, on a scale of 1-10, how good you are in bed, using only your self-input bed hardness level and the accelerometer on your iPhone. Yes, it’s that easy. Just leave the phone on the bed when you’re doing the freak nasty, and when you’re done, it will calculate your mojo on a three dimensional scale– your levels of passion, variety, and duration.

This “data” it then compares to its backup research, which was compiled during development from “thousands” of  surveyed couples. It certainly sounds scientific.

Armed with this information, I was lacking just one thing, being as how I regularly spend half the week on the East Coast working and the other half living on the West, my boo was not on the same coast as me, let alone in the same bed. So I did the next best thing. I shook the phone up and down for a little while, left and right, some wiggling here, a jiggle there. There was no bed involved, so the following results are probably not the most accurate depiction of how awesome I am in bed. Probably. ANYWAY– this is what the app looks like:

During the shakedown.

Complex statistical analysis going on here.

Finally, my score:

Nice! Go, me.

But how awesome am I in comparison to the “thousands” of couples previously surveyed?

And that’s it, folks! I suppose you could think you have room for improvement and use the app as a gauge over time, but that would only be if you took this type of ridiculousness seriously. Otherwise, its $1.99 cost is good for a quick chuckle with friends when you tell them about it. It’s not like you would urge them to try it out, on your phone. That would be, at the very least, kind of germy. And if you know me, you know I don’t handle germs (or the thought of them real well.)

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The HTC Hero is an attractive phone, with a large clear screen and a small panel for buttons. While it is an Android phone, it is interestingly not marketed as a Google phone, as the MyTouch is or the first TMobile G1 that came out. What this may mean in terms of how the phone operates is not completely clear to me, the operating system remains the operating system, its running Android Cupcake (yum!) just like the other Android phones (although 1.6,Donut is arriving soon…so. Hmm.)

I like how the screen transitions are super smooth– using your finger to flip between screens (which you will have to do, as the phone will tell you you’re out of wall real estate once you have a screen full of icons positioned– no scroll downs, just more walls) rivals the iPhone experience, which is something that can’t always be said for multi-touch screen phones that are not brainchildren of Infinite Loop street in Cupertino.

One place I noticed the transitions become to get slow and clunky was in the pictures app. After taking a few unflattering glamour shots (because it was 4 am, not because the camera was sub par) I was flipping through them and the response rate to my inputs decreased very  noticeably. The same thing happened with multi-touch adjustments– pinch to zoom in or out was almost painfully slow. Why, Hero? I wasn’t even running all the apps and widgets simultaneously!

I love certain little interface characteristics  of Android, like the process of creating an app shortcut as an icon on your screen– you hold down the app in the menu for a bit, until it pops itself off in a very intuitive animation and then guides you with little messages until you’ve successfully “dropped” it onto your wall, or one of your walls (as real estate goes fast, like I mentioned earlier.)

Boo- worthy aspects of the phone, for me. What the HELL is up with the unlock process? The phone is on, and you want to use it. There are two COMPLETELY unintuitive ways to go about this:

1) Press the “End” button once and then swipe the curve icon DOWN. (Why? What in the world?)
2) Press the flush “Menu” button TWICE. (Why twice? Why not once, or three times, or hold it down?)

Most notable point to be made about the (should-be simple) unlock process is that NONE of the other buttons will make the phone “awaken.” You could press them until your face turns  blue, but the phone will remain locked and the screen will remain off, until you press happen across Menu twice (which is how I figured that one out) or you press End once and then swipe across the screen in all directions until it tells you to swipe DOWN, not UP.

Its not disfunctional, to be sure, but its VERY unintuitive, and annoying, especially to an iPhone user (Swipe to Unlock, anyone?) where almost any function of the phone or the interface can be figured out instantaneously with no prior instruction, because it was designed just THAT well.

Call me a fangirl, why don’t you.

And there it is! I haven’t tested the call quality yet, but in my experience, that has a lot to do with the carrier and Sprint is a strong carrier, generally. (Definitely loads better than my network, AT&T, which is horrifyingly awful, especially when handling– and failing to handle– data interactions from the millions of 3G customers fiddling with their iPhones all day).

Verdict*?

Thumbs up!

The HTC Hero is a very pretty, highly functional Android phone on a solid network. The screen resolution, picture and video capabilities, and apps functionality will make it a very strong contender for the upper echelon category of smartphones currently occupied (and in my opinion dominated by) the iPhone, as well as other strong fighters, like certain Blackberries (properly pluralized?), the G1 and MyTouch, and the Pre.

Welcome, Hero!

*Thumbs up image courtesy of free clipart! Woopee!

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How cute is this?

My friend sent it to me in an email knowing I’d love it.

Romantic!

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Do you Twitter?

At this point, with all the hubbub about Twitter all over the news and mainstream media in general, everybody and their mom knows what Twitter is. But do they use it? While there are over 25 million users of the service already, 80% of accounts have fewer than 10 followers which implies that the majority of such users are only followers, and not Twitter “leaders.” Couple this with the fact that many folks hop onto Twitter to see what all the fuss is about, don’t get into the groove of “leading” a social stream in this manner, and go inactive, and you get the picture. Maybe it’s not as wildfire as everybody makes it out to be?

I Twitter, for SURE. I love it. I like pulling out my phone when something random happens to me and I want to share it with my friends. I like quick blasting the name of a song I’m listening to or the link to the news story I’ve just been shocked by or laughed aloud at. I even ask for advice.

So me, I’m on the bandwagon. But I know Radiris, geek though she may be, is NOT! Whattup, Radiris? I’m callin you out.

Do you Twitter? Leave it in the comments.

(And it you do, follow me! I’m Papayamaya.)

PS: Tweet is SO not the accepted term for it anymore, a la here, but I like it anyway! So there.

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Last week, I was among the lucky folks who got a promotion got lucky won the lottery got a Google Voice invite. (It sure felt like winning the lottery, though!) Since then, I’ve done my fair share of playing around with it, and so far, what I’ve seen has been very promising. While it’s not a completely intuitive interface, I feel that this can be allowed given that what Google is going for is a communications revolution.  It’s not immediately obvious how to reply to “Waves,” the usual commands are a little over-reactive while being under-reactive at the same time. Allow me to explain: Google Wave, as it exists now, is not ready for complete public consumption, and the private invite-only beta is more of a use “experience.” In fact, it’s even branded as the Google Wave preview right now. As such, this experience is usually pretty slow. Which makes it really a little frustrating to press ENTER to try and reply to a Wave, have nothing happen, press it again, maybe double click a few times, maybe hit reply– only to watch 15 “Wave-lettes,” as I would like to call the Wave responses, appear on the screen, all blank.

My Wave interface...inbox in the middle, open wave on the right, "one-on-one" private wave in the top left

In addition, its kind of a process to figure out how to make things work like you would expect. Embed videos? Sure! But how? Pictures? Totally, but no dedicated button or easy to follow instructions…its a hit or miss until you hit. Once you do though, the picture rendering is great, pretty instantaneous, no need for a download to preview or even view. You can play the embedded movie right in the Wave (and then invite everyone you know to the wave to watch the Youtube video of the French Bulldog who can’t get up.) Documents work the same way, with everything sitting pretty right in the Wave, enabling in line commentary from all of the Wave participants. Oh, and you can see what people type, letter for letter, in real time as they type it (if you are both online) which can be both awesome and ridiculously embarrassing. (“So, wanna go on a date go out to a movie make out grab lunch can i get your number?”)

As for me, I love it. The concept is superb, the ideas, brilliant. Sure, its almost frustratingly slow right now, but I am thankful that it’s finally here! And you can bet your bottom dollar (um, not real money, of course. Virtual currency, how ’bout it!) that when it does roll out of private beta it is going to be KICK ass. Yeah, you can call me a fangirl. I dig it.

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Greetings! My name is Maya, and I am a super geek.  I’m not sure that you would be able to tell immediately that this is the case– I look and act normal (…uh, I’ve been told) and I don’t have a CS degree or a technical background. But here it is, in one sentence (with a colon, because I never do things the simple way)–

There are three things I love: my family, my boyfriend, and the interwebz.

I consider it pant-worthy when Apple unveils some new ultra-cool device after letting the public speculate themselves into the ground for many months. I consider internet people to be celebrities– once, Steve Jobs rode past me on a bicycle as I waited to cross the street after lunch in Palo Alto (along with two bodyguards). I nearly got hit by a car whipping my phone out to Twitter about it as fast as I could. My news comes from my favorite podcasts and blog networks. Oh, and Twitter, of course. Television newscasts, you ask? What is this, the 20th century?

One of my favorite things to do is go to the retail stores where new gadgets are sold and play with them. Try before you buy type of deal. Last weekend, I was at Sprint playing with the Pre and inquiring about when the Pixie gets store bound. The week before that, I was fiddling with test videos on the new nano in the Apple Store. I once made an unboxing video when I got a Kindle 2, but didn’t want to put it up until I got my own blog more prettified– the vanity!

I am all about social media, gizmos and gadgetry, and the latest internet memes. I love to write and I could read all day, whether it be on a screen or in a book.  I could probably write you a whole essay in LOLspeak.  And still, there’s so much to explore and discover!

So! When I met Radiris at work, the first thing I did after shaking her hand was Google her. And that’s when I discovered my long lost twin (or, geek sister, at least…we should start a sorority.) She was a geek too! We speak the same language (when I keep it english, and not internet meme-ish.)

So when she asked me to write for the site,

Are you kidding? Do I even need to finish that sentence?

I just hope I do the blog justice, in the name of lady geeks everywhere. A-men!

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