• 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.

“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.

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?

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.

• 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.

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.

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.

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 new app from Canon prints over Wi-Fi, in a variety of sizes. You can select multiple photos on the phone and print up to 20 copies for Grandma and the rest of the family. The app is free, so get printing.

“At this time [Motorola] feels that the Android platform gives it a richer, more consistent foundation with strong support for the ecosystem and developer community.”

Image courtesy SlashGear

That blazing-fast HTC Leo running the 1 GHz Snapdragon processor is confirmed to be heading to these shores in the first quarter of next year. The HD2, as it will be called, is the Windows Mobile 6.5 phone that burned through all the benchmarks in record time due to that fast processor. It also has a sweet 4.3-inch screen, the better to display those fast graphics.

Interestingly, even though HTC has the TouchFLO 3D interface on Windows Mobile, and the Sense interface on Android, the company claims that the Leo is running the Sense interface. Check out the video of the HD2 our friends at SlashGear grabbed. It’s ironic that the new WM browser is one of the high points of the Windows Mobile 6.5 upgrade, but HTC is going with Opera Mobile. That would be because Opera is a much better browser.

Documents To Go for iPhone is $9.99 in the iTunes store, but there’s a $14.99 version as well. For an extra $5, DataViz offers support for Microsoft Exchange attachments — both sending and receiving supported documents, spreadsheets and presentations.