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.

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.

You can expect to see two more netbooks on store shelves when visiting AT&T this holiday season. Later this month, both the Acer Aspire One and the Samsung Go will appear in the cellular carrier’s brick-and-mortar locations. They’ll also be available online at a netbook product page on AT&T’s web site, which is already live. Both devices run Microsoft Windows 7 Starter Edition and are configured with an Intel Atom processor, 160 GB hard drive, integrated webcams and 1 GB of memory. The price for either is $199 after a promotional card rebate and requires a new 2-year data agreement. The standard 5 GB plan is $60 a month, but AT&T is lowering the 200 MB plan cost to $35 a month from $40. Strangely, the AT&T netbook site currently shows the Acer and a Dell Mini 10 for $149, along with a Lenovo S-10 for $99.

Although it’s been said many times and many ways (GigaOM Pro, subscription required) — yes, I’m prepping for Christmas carols — that $199 netbook is really costing you much more due to the monthly data service. If you don’t plan to use the netbook outside of the home or office where you have Wi-Fi, I wouldn’t recommend the purchase. In a more stationary case, you’re better off just buying a device at full price for $350 or $400 with no monthly fee. Having said that, I’m starting to wonder about the success, or failure, of notebook subsidies. I’d love to see some breakout numbers of how many netbooks are subsidized as opposed to how many are bought outright. I know that the subsidy model is a little more prominent outside of the U.S., but I don’t expect that sales of subsidized netbooks are very high here.

Do we have any readers that have bought or considered buying a subsidized netbook?

The smartbook has been a category of devices that has been slow to appear since Qualcomm started pushing it earlier this year. The smartbook is basically the result of putting smartphone capability into a highly mobile notebook form. The idea is to have a highly mobile device with ubiquitous connectivity, at a price even cheaper than that of netbooks. The smartbook will have a smartphone processor, like the Snapdragon, and an OS optimized for light computing. Kevin recently wondered when the smartbooks would appear, and it turns out he might not have much longer to wait.

ASUS, creator of the EEE PC and thus the netbook craze, had embraced producing a smartbook at one time, only to back off from the possibility in subsequent statements. CEO Jerry Shen has ended the speculation, saying that the Taiwanese company will produce a smartbook for release in the first quarter of 2010, for a price equivalent to about $180.

The statement came during an investor conference in Taiwan, and Shen claimed that the ASUS smartbook device could be the “secret weapon” that helps ASUS recreate the peak reached with the original EEE PC release. ASUS had demonstrated a branded smartbook earlier this year at CompuTex (pictured right), but the device quickly disappeared from view and hasn’t been seen again.

Verizon has officially joined the Android party with the announcement of the Droid by Motorola. The Droid has a 3.7-inch touchscreen, delivering an unusual 854×480 resolution. The phone is jam-packed with all of the usual components that a high-end phone must have these days:

• EVDO Rev. A
• GPS- Assisted and standalone
• Removable memory- 16 GB
• System memory- 512 MB
• Removable battery
• Wi-Fi
• 5 MP Camera- DVD quality video recording supported
• Slide-out QWERTY keyboard
• Onscreen virtual keyboard
• Android 2.0

The Droid will have the standard 3-screen home screen that Android provides but will be augmented by widgets from Verizon for user customization. It will support Exchange email out of the box, in addition to POP3 and IMAP. All of the expected Google apps are present and accounted for: Maps, Latitude, Talk, Voice Search, Gmail and Calendar. Verizon is also shipping the Droid with these apps: Corporate Calendar, Amazon MP3, Gallery, Music, Visual Voice Mail, Android Market and YouTube.

Droid is the first phone to feature the new Google Maps Navigation, offering free turn-by-turn navigation in Google Maps. The phone will be available Nov. 6 for $199 with a 2-year contract. This price is after a mail-in rebate of $100.

Social networking is huge, no doubt about that. Palm ratcheted up the ability to network socially with Synergy, by pulling various networks together into a seamless heap of contacts for Pre owners. Motorola recognized this usefulness and carried it a step further with its new MotoBLUR technology. Both Synergy and MotoBLUR bring the phone owner’s Facebook, MySpace, email, Twitter and other networks together into one big social networking pot. The user can follow all their peeps in one place, all with push notifications to make sure nothing vital is missed.

A new program has launched today that attempts to bring the same capability to the Android platform. The Asurion Mobile Addressbook carries the social mix further by combining all of the popular networks with IM and bringing it right into the address book on the Android phone. It uses filtering so the user can prevent information overload. And it’s built on an open framework so developers can add their own systems into the Mobile Addressbook, allowing for additional capability.

The program is free and there’s a long presentation about Mobile Addressbook that can be viewed to get a feel for everything the app can do. Note to Asurion — put up a video demo of the program in action, not a boring presentation.

Wi-Fi is widely considered a must for smartphones, as 3G is still not as fast as a good hotspot. But not all hotspots are free to use, so services like Boingo can be leveraged to tap into Wi-Fi on the run. Boingo is available on a number of phone platforms, but notably missing on the list was always the BlackBerry. No more, as the folks at Boingo has announced that their mobile app is now available for that platform in a production release to provide one-touch access to the large network of hotspots they cover.

The application will initially be available for the BlackBerry Curve 8900, BlackBerry Curve 8320 and BlackBerry Bold smartphones, with plans to add other handsets in the future. You will need a Boingo mobile account to take advantage of the hotspots on your BlackBerry.

It seems the race is on to produce e-book readers based on the Android platform that have two screens. The enTourage eDGe has a novel book form with a 9.7-inch e-Ink screen on the left (Wacom PenEnabled) for reading e-books and a 10.1-inch color LCD touchscreen on the right. The eDGe has a special hinge in the “spine” of the book that allows the reader to be used laying flat, held like a book or even standing free. It can even be configured as a laptop.

The enTourage folks aren’t skirting around the desire users have for using such a reader for web work, and as such have chosen Android. They are touting the ability of the eDGe to surf the web, work with email, play MP3s and even check Facebook. Connectivity is done over Wi-Fi or optional EVDO/HSPA 3G. That big, color touchscreen with resistive digitizer would be nice for web work, but is likely hard on battery life. The eDGe looks a lot like that mythical Courier device on which Microsoft is reportedly working.

The eDGe will ship in February 2010, but you can pre-order one now. If you can get past that $490 price tag, that is.

The buzz may be about the Verizon Droid phone that isn’t available anywhere, but for those interested, today is the day the Motorola CLIQ is available for order through T-Mobile. Existing customers can put their name on a CLIQ for “as low as $199,” and the carrier says everyone else will have to wait until Nov. 2. CLIQ buyers will have to sign up for a 2-year voice and data plan.