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

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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.

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.

Did you buy one of those geeky Smartpens from Livescribe and are now looking for more things to do with it? There’s an app store for that. The Smartpen is a digital pen that captures handwritten notes in a format that can be used in a variety of ways. The new store has apps that range from simple games like Hangman to foreign language dictionaries. A quick look around the store shows quite a few apps for 99 cents, and others ranging up to $30.

Travel phrasebooks seem to be all over the store, a smart application for the Smartpen. I see phrasebooks in Japanese, French, German and Spanish, to name a few. Note that apps can be purchased only by customers in the U.S., UK, Australia and Canada only, according to Livescribe. Livescribe is actively looking for developers to build apps for the store. The Smartpen and supplies can only be shipped to the U.S.

The U.S. Thanksgiving holiday is drawing nigh, and the folks at Truphone are giving free calls for the day in celebration of the giving spirit. The promotion runs on Thanksgiving day, Nov. 26, from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. EST. All calls to a U.S. mobile or landline will be free to any caller if made with the Truphone application.

“Thanksgiving is a day when family and friends come together to celebrate and catch up across the U.S.”, said Geraldine Wilson, CEO of Truphone. “For those people who can’t get home for the holidays, often because distance is too much, a telephone call to let them know how they are is the next best thing. With this initiative, we are allowing people who can’t be together to catch up on this special day.”

Image Credit: Digitimes

Yet another e-book device is coming to market — if you live in Taiwan, Japan or China, that is. Digitimes says BenQ is joining the ranks of Sony, Amazon and Barnes & Noble, to name a few, by offering its own branded electronic book reader. Dubbed the nReader, it uses eInk technology for the 6″ display, offers 2 GB of internal storage and can handle up to a 16 GB expansion card.

But “content is king,” as they say — and by content, I mean “supported formats.” The nReader is pretty bland in that regard: PDF, HTML and TXT are what’s expected to appear on that screen. Pics are viewable through standard formats and you can listen to MP3 tunes as well. Without wireless support or compatibility with ePub or any other major book-specific format, I don’t envision the 300,000 units sold in 2010 that BenQ sees. Watch for it to hit in January for around $280.

There is a big work force that works out of their cars, driving from meeting to meeting and trying to keep up with stuff in between. I did that for years and more than once I longed for a simple, cheap way to use my laptop for quick work sessions from the driver’s seat of my car. The Laptop Steering Wheel Desk spotted on Gearlog would have been just the ticket for me, and may be for those in a similar situation.

The Laptop Steering Wheel Desk is a simple platform that hooks easily onto the steering wheel, providing a small desk to support the notebook for work sessions. It puts the laptop at about the right height for comfortable typing, and is easily removed when it’s time to hit the road again. It looks to be able to handle netbooks, but bigger notebooks might create a problem. Of course, users know better than to use the laptop while driving, right?

This is firmly in the unverified rumor department, but a Chinese source is claiming that netbook maker ASUS is in talks to buy the notebook division of Toshiba. The source of the rumor is reported to be none other than ASUS CEO Jonney Shih, so there may be some truth in this. ASUS has done well in the netbook business since starting the phenomenon with the Eee PC, but its notebooks have yet to catch on with the buying public.

Toshiba is the No. 5 seller in the world, so ASUS would be looking to move up the ladder with an acquisition. Toshiba sells netbooks as does ASUS, but the lion’s share of Toshiba’s sales involve larger notebooks. A deal would definitely give ASUS some credibility in the notebook business. ASUS has stated it wants to be in the top three notebook vendors by 2011, and a deal with Toshiba would go a long way to reaching that goal.

Adobe Labs has released beta versions of Air and Flash, bringing new features and opening up both for better developer support. Both Air 2 and Flash 10.1 now have support for multitouch and gestures, and Flash can use hardware to better handle H.264 video.

The new betas are available for Windows, Mac and Linux, so the much-anticipated mobile Flash is not part of this beta release. Adobe says WebOS will get Flash 10.1 later this year, and Android “next year.”

Adobe Air 2 is said to be more memory friendly and allows Air programs to use flash memory for the first time. Flash 10.1 should provide better video playing, even on systems with low-end graphics systems. Early reports say the beta does not support hardware support using Intel-integrated graphics yet, meaning most netbooks may not see improvements.

Both programs can be downloaded from the Adobe Labs web site. These are beta versions, so install at your own risk and expect that problems could crop up.

The smartphone sector is one of the fastest moving sectors in the mobile tech space. New phones appear almost daily, and the resultant race for the latest and greatest is a hectic one. Savvy consumers may be the only ones concerned about technical details such as OS version installed on a given phone, but it can make a big difference when it comes time to make a purchase. It is not always a given that smartphone X will get the next big OS upgrade, and even if it does the timing of said upgrade is not always fast. That leads to the question — how fast is fast enough for smartphone upgrades?

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