Gadgetory

Tech is the language of love my friends I'm Bridget Carey and this is your cnet update there's lots of buzz about a report from The Wall Street Journal saying that Apple is working on making its own cable box replacement you could think of it as a blend between live TV recorded shows and streaming choices on Apple TV the report says Apple has not made any deals with cable providers but has talked with Time Warner also we saw Apple was granted a patent for a cable box earlier this week but Apple is not the only one with a one box goal Microsoft has been working on making the xbox 360 into your main entertainment device and it already has made partnerships with some cable providers what we all would love though is just one box that does it all smoothly with one easy search menu for all the live and on-demand that cable provides and the streaming choices from subscription services yes one box to rule them all hmm that'll be the day Sony's new touchscreen ereader is out now for a hundred thirty dollars it doesn't have any big new tech perks like a glow light but they did add some social features also made it easier to download books and improve the battery life so good for Sony for hanging in there probably will be more popular overseas though than in the US but glad to see they're still around also for some reason only the black version gets a free copy of the first Harry Potter book the Google+ app on android and iOS has been updated it lets you join live broadcasted hangouts on air from your mobile device it's also letting teenagers use hangouts via phones and tablets because before that the video chat service was adults only and they're having reports of Google gift cards being spotted in the wild the blog androidcentral posted photos of gift cards for the google play store which sells movies music books and apps and today's appt to watch can come in handy on a vacation it's the free Google Translate app and the Android version just got an update that lets you take a picture of text to get a translation the technology it's called optical character recognition or OCR for short you point your camera at the text take a picture then use your finger to highlight the text you want to translate pedo noah's perfecto i found it to be a bit tricky to get it to work just write the words cannot be at an angle and it needs to be in focus it took me several tries to get a sentence translated right even though I got a clear shot and it just kept giving me a bizarre translation each time now keep in mind it will not work well with stylized fonts it translates 11 different languages but it can't help you with East Asian characters google says though it will be adding more languages for the photo feature in time now that's your tech news update for today from our studios in New York I'm Bridget Carey