What the hackintosh community brings, Apple taketh away. And the hackintoshers then put it back. With the 10.6.2 Mac OS X update, Apple removed support for Intel Atom CPUs, so all of those netbooks running Snow Leopard lost their spots. A modified kernel brings back support, says MacWorld, although I’d be pretty leery of said kernel. Put another way: I’d live with OS X 10.6.1 on my netbook — but that’s just me.

Even though I had fun running OS X on a both a netbook and a touchscreen UMPC, a couple of weeks with the operating system turned semi-frustrating. Ironically, it was for the same reasons that Windows was a hassle on UMPCs when they first hit: the desktop operating system isn’t designed to fit in a space under 1280 x 800 or so. Does it fit? Yup. Does it work well? Sometimes yes and sometimes no, depending on the dialog boxes you see. It simply required too much tweaking to use on a full time basis for me — not to mention that pesky licensing issue.

I tested Apple’s Magic Mouse with Windows 7 not long after I bought the device a few weeks ago. It paired through Bluetooth with no issues as expected, and works well, but lost was the scrolling I enjoy with a finger flick on my MacBook. Obviously, it’s a driver issue and I never thought twice about it — why expect a Mac-specific function to work in Windows, right?  Luckily, someone else looked into it and hacked a method to get the magic on Windows.

UNEASYsilence peeped a pair of modified bits from Apple’s latest Bluetooth Update and word is that they add touch scrolling to 32- and 64-bit versions of Windows. Although geared for using Windows in Bootcamp, folks are reporting success on non-Apple hardware as well. So far, it’s reported that vertical scrolling is working in a few apps like Firefox and Internet Explorer 8, but no multitouch mousing is here yet. If you’d rather not go the hacked route, Microsoft’s own Sidewinder X8 mouse driver could do the trick as well. I haven’t had time to try either method yet, since I don’t run Bootcamp. I have paired the Magic Mouse with the Windows 7 partition on my netbook though, so I expect a little hackery later today.

MoTR 190 is 37:49 minutes long and is a 34.7 MB file in MP3 format.

CLICK HERE to download the file and listen directly.

HOSTS: James Kendrick (Houston), Matthew Miller (Seattle) and Kevin C. Tofel (Philadelphia)

TOPICS:

Matt’s back from möbius with a handset rundown
Maybe Pocket PC isn’t such a bad name, after all
Hands on with the HTC HD2
Kevin has a 3.5G wireless broadband secret he’s been holding out on
Google’s Chrome OS explained

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Earlier this year, I got my hands on a Pogoplug. This small device aligns with my “personal cloud” theory by easily turning any USB drive into a hybrid device — data is available locally on the drive and remotely over the web. Today, Cloud Engines introduces the next-generation Pogoplug for $129, with availability in time for the holidays. This new version adds three more USB ports, bringing the total to four. That allows for the addition of multiple USB drives — traditional drives or flash memory-based — to your personal cloud. Along with easier sharing on Facebook, Twitter and MySpace, the new features supported include:

• Automatically Synchronize Photos, Videos, Music and Other Selected Content – you can set Pogoplug to monitor drives for media so you don’t have to manually add the files. New content from iTunes, Windows Media Player and iPhoto is supported.
• Drag-and-Drop Music and Photo Slideshows – once you create a slide show with drag-and-drop, it’s easily sharable with anyone via the web, right through a browser.
• Easier Sharing with Pogoplug Address Book — after sharing your data with someone, Pogoplug remembers their contact information for future use, even if you remove the share.
• Global Search Across Multiple Drives and Pogoplugs — want to share data but you’re not sure which of your drives has it? Pogoplug can search all of them at one time. And if you have multiple Pogoplugs on the same account, it will even search across the devices.
• Organize Your Music, Photos and Videos — Music media is easier to browse with automatic displays sorted by album, artist and genre, complete with cover art. Video previews are shown live thumbnails.
• Play movies directly from my.pogoplug.com, or even to the iPhone — Video streaming from a Pogoplug is supported on most cameras, video cameras and mobile phones. You can also share movies for viewing over the web or with an iPhone.

All in all, this sounds like a solid step forward for the Pogoplug. Are there other options for these functions? Sure there are: Orb, Windows Home Server, various web storage and file synchronization services come to mind. But the ease of use and super-fast setup is what I found valuable in my testing of the original Pogoplug. It’s a product that doesn’t require any technical know-how of what’s going on — it simply works after the short setup. Pogoplug is now available for pre-order directly from Cloud Engines.

Here are some of today’s phone conversations I enjoyed reading or viewing on the web, along with some brief thoughts:

TomTom for iPhone gets voicevoice (TomTom) — $99 for an iPhone navigation app is a bit steep for me, but there are some new features to help justify the cost. New are the iPod player controls for music use,  text-to-speech functionality, and advanced lane guidance. Sounds good, but all the lanes by me are single lanes.

Motorola Motus takes a fuzzy picture (AndroidGuys) — I’m not talking about the camera of the phone — the picture of the actual handset is fuzzy. It looks like a Motorola CLIQ with a foldout, flat keyboard to me. Rumored specs show support for both T-Mobile’s and AT&T’s 3G frequency, but it’s way too early to make that determination.

Google News refreshed for mobiles (Google) — iPhone, Android, and Palm Pre devices get a new edition of Google News. The update includes a new, customizable “Jump To” menu, making it easier to get at the news you want. First take my iPhone? I like it — it’s snappy and I can get at what I want in fewer clicks.

Image Credit: Tech Radar

Google’s Chrome OS might have the focus today, but Qualcomm made sure that people don’t forget about Android. The company showed off a smartbook concept made by Quanta and powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon platform. Although this is the same chipset running in some high-end smartphones, the Snapdragon chip isn’t underclocked — it’s powering Android on the full 1GHz speed on the Cortex-A8 architecture.

Bill Timmons of Qualcomm envisions smartbooks in the same price range as a smartphone, but I think that’s a tough challenge, barring the subsidy factor. While the devices have the guts of a smartphone, there’s still a larger display to pay for. If these devices are too close in price to netbooks, I suspect that netbooks will win out with most consumers — people will perceive the fuller featured netbook running the familiar Windows OS as a better value. Anything over $200 and I just don’t see smartbooks becoming successful. And while I was leaning towards Chrome OS boosting the slow starting smartbook market, the lack of application support brings me back to Android as a potential operating system for smartbooks and netbooks.

Google held their developer and press event today to show off the upcoming Google Chrome operating system. The source code for Chrome OS is open source and available as of today, so theoretically, you can build your own Chrome OS. However, the actual release isn’t planned until late in 2010.

Some takeaways from the live stream that I watched:

Continue reading »

I’m on a bit of a camera kick this morning. Just after I scored a $299 Panasonic 1080p camcorder from Amazon today, I caught Sal Cangeloso’s thoughts about BorrowLenses.com – a camera lens rental service. I’ve been using my Canon EOS Rebel T1i for months, but only with two lenses. The standard 18-55mm kit lens is a good starter lens, but I’ve added a Canon 50mm f/1.8 prime lens as well. I’m in the market for a fast telephoto, but they don’t come cheap and that’s where BorrowLenses comes in.

For one week, Sal rented a Canon EF 85mm f/1.2 II USM for his digital SLR at the cost of $74 plus shipping and optional insurance. While that might sound like a large sum for a week’s worth of use, this particular lens would cost you $1,900 to purchase. So with that perspective in mind, I think the rental rate is quite reasonable. Some of the telephoto glass I’ve been longing for will easily set me back over $1,000. And if the lens doesn’t really meet my needs, I’m either out that $1,000 or I have to deal with selling it at some discount. From where I stand, a small up-front rental fee is cheap insurance to ensure that I like what I’m planning to buy. Note that some brick-and-mortar camera shops offer lens rentals, so BorrowLenses isn’t necessarily unique. However, Sal’s experience appears very positive, which is good enough for me.

Yesterday, Google introduced a Gmail Labs feature that tells you if your friends are online using an Android device. I can definitely see some benefit to this — before even sending an instant message to someone, you gain a little context of that person’s mobility. And that can help dictate the message scope you send. If I know that someone is on their handset, for example, I try to keep my IM conversations shorter and I also give them more time to respond. I’ve found that if I don’t make that adjustment, the chat conversation gets laggy and both parties are typing over each other because we’re “out of sync.”

The obvious flipside here is one of privacy. I don’t think it’s a big deal that people know that I’m on an Android handset as opposed to a computer of some type. The whole point to instant messaging is the “instant” nature when you want to communicate with friends — if you don’t want people to know you’re online, simply don’t sign in. Or better yet — go invisible. But I’m curious if you see this as a huge red flag. Bear in mind that you can turn this feature on or off in your Gmail Labs settings, so ultimately you have control. Your IM buddies can see the standard availability dots or they can see the little Androids — it’s up to you. Thoughts?

Using Gmail on a Mac? Then you may already know about Mailplane — if not, and you’re looking for an email client to use with Gmail, Mailplane is worth a look. The standalone software integrates seamlessly with multiple Gmail accounts and can make email wrangling far less of a chore. Version 2.1 is fresh out of beta and adds useful features like support of offline Gmail using Gears and image insertion within the text of your mail. Don’t forget that Google recently added a feature allowing you to tame your offline email — you can specify which folders appear offline and how much of that mail you really want to tote around. Also included in this release is support for multiple rich text email signatures.

Mailplane is $24.95, although this upgrade is free to all Mailplane 2.0 users and there is a free 30-day trial available. Still not sure what this setup adds over Gmail in a browser? Have a look at the two-minute walk-through for a better idea. Although I prefer a browser over most third-party apps, Mailplane is one of the few exceptions in my personal toolbox.