Ziggy, The Siri For Windows Phone – Siri, Oh, Siri, you have successfully makes everyone to be crazy about you and there’s many clone out there! Now, let’s welcome, ZIGGY, the Siri for Windows Phone, your personal voice assistant on your Windows Phone.

“Ask Ziggy uses Speech Recognition to translate human speech into transcribed text, which is displayed in a speech bubble. The transcribed text is analyzed for patterns to detect commands or general queries. Commands are interpreted and routed to routine phone tasks such as emailing, texting, calling, social network updates, and getting directions.

When a general question is asked, a mixture of mash up technologies and web scraping is employed to search the web for relevant responses. Pattern matching is used to summarize a direct answer from a web page. Several passes may be required to find a concise answer. A direct answer is then spoken out loud, and displayed in a speech bubble. When a direct answer cannot be summarized the user is prompted by speech to click on their search bubble to see web search results based on their spoken query.”

Ask Ziggy is a new app on the Windows Phone Marketplace, available for free, as well as ad-free. Download Ask Ziggy On Windows Phone Marketplace now.

Mytubo Is “Instagram For Android” – Day by day, I am waiting for Instagram for Android. I have been waiting since N years already. Hahaha. Instagram is my favourite and super-like apps on iOS and I very hope it will be port to Android. Recently, Instagram announced that they are starting work on the Android app, good news right? But at the mean time, I need alternative app or Instagram-like app on the Android to ease the wait and that’s Mytubo.

Mytubo is a Chinese-made app that has similar feature like Instagram which you can share photo with add-on filter to social networks and Mytubo network. You can also hashtag your photos to join photo community.

What I like about Mytubo is the variety of filter. It also gives you the choice to pick between square or wide photo format, as well as to include frame in the photo or not. You can also Like people’s photo. Besides that you can share your photo to Facebook, Flickr, Tumblr, Twitter and other Chinese social sharing site too.

In your profile page, it organizes your photos by date which makes it easier for viewing. People can follow you as fans too. The main page shows random hashtag photos of others and Mytubo has a special features which is Squads which you can join. Basically, it’s a hashtag pool of photos named Squad.

Well, for the time being of waiting for the official “Instagram For Android”, check out Mytubo which is pretty cool too.

You can download it for free on Android Market.

Microsoft just released the BETA version of Windows Live Essentials.

Windows Live Essentials consist a list of useful software by Microsoft like the Windows Live Photo Gallery, Windows Live Movie Maker, Windows Live Mail, Windows Live Messenger, Windows Live Sync and more. It’s all under the Windows Live brand name. Also include is a new version of Windows Live Messenger.

I was curious so I downloaded the whole BETA version of Windows Live Essentials to check out what’s new and the big changes is the new Windows Live Messenger, an IM software that I always use. The contact list has changed, now added a sidebar showing all the social and status update. It can have Facebook and Myspace update there but I somehow couldn’t get it work. I can’t change my display name like before, it couldn’t fancy, it’s very standard with my first name and last name. I don’t like it. I like fancy display name. Add on and hacks of course are not working with the new Live Messenger BETA.

There’s tabbed conversation window but I prefer a separate one. Used it for like a few minutes, couldn’t get myself comfortable with the new one and I uninstalled it and install back the old Live Messenger. I believe this is not a final one, they will change, for sure. As for other essentials software, I didn’t try it though because I never use them.

Download the Windows Live Essentials here. Then share your experience. =D

My previous original home screen.

Recently I found a new application that will replace your standby screen with various customization. Actually it’s out quite some times in Chinese version. It’s actually created by the Chinese and have been ported to English recently.

It added weather, Google search, a big digital clock, and a rotating news feed. The to do notes and memos are still there and it shows the number of to dos you have in your calendar instead of one in the original standby screen. Another thing I didn’t set is that it allows two rows of shortcut instead of one. I don’t really have that many shortcuts, so a row is fine for me. One row that is missing is the Share Online thing that was on the original standby screen, this is a good thing because I don’t use it and I believe many of you don’t too, another is the WLAN scanning, but you can add the WLAN wizard shortcut into the shortcut line. =)

On the original setting, the right key is actually MyFav which shows a list of your frequent used contact. I prefer having Calendar as my right shoutcut key. Pressing the red End Call keys will switch between opened background application. So let’s say you have Gravity on, you hide it, you need not to go can choose from your shortcut but instead, pressing the End Call button brings you straight into unclose app.

For the left shortcut key, it actually opens up a menu which brings to a list of shortcut again. So you actually can get a lot of shortcut with this Voyager Homescreen. One thing that bothers me is that I don’t know why my Start menu is in Chinese, maybe is the install and uninstall of different version causes this. I can read Chinese so it does fine to me. A little big translation on my Start menu, the first *key is Lock Keypad, 1. is News Feeds, 3. is Setting, 3. is More Setting and 4. is Camera.

Clicking on the weather bar brings up this 4 day weather forecast. You need to have a Internet connection for this and the rotating news feed. Setting up the weather was a little bit troublesome at first, I recommend you to use a Wifi or 3G, it just can’t detect the city when I got an EDGE connection.

Another feature that comes with it is vApp which is like a App Store built in with the vHome app. Showing some of the useful free app. This is faster than Ovi, but I didn’t really use it because I have what I want already.

Besides that, you can do smart dialing which is like on the E71. Straight dial a name and the names on the phonebook or app will show on screen. I like this feature a lot.

I also found out that the app has changed my web browser’s home screen, showing a list of shortcuts. That’s pretty good, but if I am allow to change the links of the shortcut will be nice.

One feature that is missing from the Chinese version is the social networking bar, which you can update Facebook and Twitter right from the standby screen, hopefully next update will include this.

Available for Symbian S60 v3 and it’s unsigned. So look way around to install unsigned app in your phone and have fun!

Download here.

Windows 7 is coming out soon or you have already using the leaked version or the Release Candidate? One of the changes in Windows 7 is the new startbar with Vista’s start orb and list of opened program thumbnail. I am not on Windows 7 but I’ve just found a way to have the start bar on my Vista.

It’s ViGlance by Lee-Soft. It grouped your programs of the same thumbnail into one and there’s live preview too. However, navigating around the thumbnail is a little bit slow and sometimes, you may miss some of your flashing IM conversation window like I do.

Easy to install too, download the program and run it. Then you got your Windows 7 startbar on your XP/Vista.

Download ViGlance and enjoy.

I thought of Lifeblog was cool. When I try to download Lifeblog software from Nokia’s site, it had turned into Nokia Photos. It only sync your phone’s photo and video and then organize it in a timeline view. The problem is it doesn’t sync well, I always get an error on the computer and also on the phone. It just don’t work.

As for the original Nokia Lifeblog (I downloaded it on some archive site) which I believe Nokia has discontinued developing it, it will sync your messages, text, notes, photos and videos and arrange it in a timeline. It’s more like a a backup and a phone log. However it also can’t sync and it makes my phone slow.

Perhaps I got too many things on my phone? I don’t think so. I have been trying for so many solution, reinstall program, refresh Lifeblog on the phone, restart my PC, restart my connection, restart my phone but none of them helps. So in the end, I uninstalled Nokia Lifeblog and also Nokia Photos, forget about Lifeblog.

I want to use Lifeblog to backup my text message into my computer so I can view it when I need to. I can choose export all text messages into my computer via PC Suite in *.csv file but then little problem is it can’t read my Chinese messages. That’s the problem of my log being not complete.

Just forget about this program and wait until Nokia announce support for it. It sucks at the moment. It could be a good software but then not many Nokia users use it.

The built-in calculator in your Nokia Symbian smartphone is very hard to navigate and use right? It takes a lot of click and buttons to get the calculation done. Introducing Calcium which I have it install in my phone and to replace my N95′s calculator, it’s so easy to use and operate. It’s so easy for you to do some basic calculation with the the basic function lies on the joystick.

Download here. [Symbian S60 V1,V2 and V3(Nokia N95)]