Living near Philadelphia, I often miss out on the newest tech happenings in places like San Francisco. But I’ve bided my time and now I finally get to try out new tech before Silicon Valley. T-Mobile is in the process of upgrading their 3G network to offer 7.2 Mbps HSPA speeds and they asked me if I wanted to take it for a test drive. To say that my reaction time was faster than the latency of my home FiOS connection would be an understatement– absolutely, I said! I just received their webConnect USB adapter (shown below), so on my next out-and-about work session, I’ll be driving from the farms to the city to give this a run though.

My expectation is to use the connection for my typical work habits of browsing the web, responding to email and creating content. But I know that 3G customers do far more than that, so I’ll watch some streaming video, move some large files around and get a general feel for the bandwidth and latency of the connection. I realize that our readers outside of the U.S. are probably wondering what the big deal is — after all, some of them have had wireless connections of 7.2 Mbps or faster for some time now. Putting this in perspective for you folks — no U.S. carrier is offering theoretical speeds faster than 3.6 Mbps at the moment. Exciting for us… you, not so much.

T-Mobile is working on the network upgrades now on a nationwide basis and currently offers 170 million POPs for 3G access. The expectation is that the 7.2 Mbps upgrade will be readily available by the end of this year. Why the rush? T-Mo is already planning to move towards HSPA+ with theoretical speeds of 21 Mbps in 2010, which is far more aggressive that AT&T’s known plans and competes well with Verizon’s move towards LTE next year. The best part of the current T-Mobile upgrade is that most of the devices they’ve launched in 2009 are already capable of using the faster 7.2 Mpbs network. Based on a call I had with the company, devices like the Cliq, MyTouch, Touch Pro 2, Dash 3G and even the year-old G1 should enjoy faster speeds once the network upgrades are competed.

I’ll have an update on my experience with the tests and will try to get some video of the experience. Since I have a Verizon 3G adapter, I’ll see if can get a side-by-side comparsion too.

Courtesy Clicky

What happens when a phone like the Droid, that is focused on web integration, launches on the U.S. network widely recognized as the best 3G network (Verizon)? Statistics released by Clicky, a web analytics firm, show that the Droid has made an impact on usage in the U. S. from the very launch of the phone. The Droid on Verizon has accounted for over two percent of total mobile browsers accessing the 150,000 web sites that Clicky tracks, starting on Nov. 11, the launch date for the Droid.

This is significant, not only for demonstrating the immediate impact the Droid has exhibited on the mobile web, but for the fact that it is accounting for almost a third of usage of all Android phones in the U.S. There are other Android phones that are in the wild, and some have been for quite some time, yet the Droid is already climbing the usage charts tracking them all, after just a few days. Of course, reliability of statistics depend on a lot of factors, but this big chunk of browsing share is attention grabbing.

(via Geek.com)

We don’t often cover much non-mobile tech, but I had to make an exception for the new Chumby One. Besides, the device now has a rechargable battery option, so theoretically, you could take it on the run — for an hour. The Chumby folks asked if I’d like to take a loaner unit for a spin, so I said sure. I was surprised to see the device show up this morning though — the new Chumby One doesn’t actually ship for another two weeks or so. You can pre-order one now at the new lower price of $99.

Like the original Chumby, the new device runs widgets, widgets and more widgets. These range from Twitter and Facebook to CBS Sports, Late Night with David Letterman and more. Using built in Wi-Fi, Chumby One is constantly connected to the web, where it can pull down info to its 3.5″ color touchscreen. There’s a built-in speaker, USB port, headphone jack and power port, plus a control knob and snooze-like control button on the top.

Right now my desktop is cluttered with bits of the Internet, which is why I wanted to see the Chumby One. I’m curious how much data and entertainment I can offload from my main workspace onto a widget-based device like the Chumby. I’ll use the li’l fella for a days and then report back on my findings. For now, here’s a quick look at the Chumby One that arrived today followed by a full list of the specs.

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The folks behind Firefox are still hard at work on Fennec, the mobile version of the popular browser. A new beta version 1.0b5, known officially as Firefox for Maemo, is out for the Nokia N810 and N900, and our buddy Matt Miller is taking it for a test spin. It sounds like the most significant change with this beta is it now has official Firefox branding, hinting that the full version can’t be far behind.

Matt found the browser to be a little “slow and buggy,” but that’s to be expected from a beta version. The Mozilla Fennec team has added lots of tweaks as development progresses, including:

• Enabled official branding, with Firefox name and logo
• Support for localizations, currently including Spanish, German, French, Italian, Dutch and Russian
• Enabled plugins
• Viewport meta tag support
• Fixed a number of sites that resize their content after the page is loaded
• Added a form assistant to make filling forms easier
• Improved panning performance and behavior
• Zooming doesn’t jump around anymore
• Numerous other bugs and polish issues addressed

Can you believe that five years ago today, Mozilla launched Firefox 1.0? Since then, the company says that 330 million users choose Firefox — Mozilla claims that it’s one-fourth of the Internet population using their browser. I can’t verify that, but I can validate that just over 40% of our visitors see us through a version of Firefox at last check. Clearly, the vast array of browser extensions — a big differentiator — have much to do with Firefox’s popularity. Maybe we should have seen the rise of the app store as we watched browser extensions add value to Mozilla’s platform.

Probably the most memorable bit I have of Firefox is the large New York Times advertisement in December of 2004. But through the years, Firefox has provided plenty of other memories and new features. Here’s a stroll down memory lane with some of them:

• Firefox 1.0 — Tabbed browsing, RSS / Atom support
• Firefox 2.0 — Session restores after a browser crash, suggested search, web feed previews
• Firefox 3.0 — Smart location bar, improved download manager, increased performance. This version also set a world record for most downloads in a day with 8,002,530 downloads

Related to Firefox’s birthday is a new official emblem for mobile versions of Firefox. “Pocketfox” was chosen to represent Fennec through a contest held by Mozilla. I like the image — Firefox in your pocket is exactly what mobile users are looking for.

When I saw a version of Google Maps in HTML 5 earlier this year, I was impressed. I simply couldn’t tell the difference between it and a Maps version coded in some true programming language. Next up on the list is YouTube viewer in HTML 5 that works without using Adobe Flash. NeoSmart wrote up a YouTube viewer in HTML 5 and although it might not work on every browser, it does work on Google Chrome on Mac — I was able to watch one of our latest videos directly in my browser without any plug-ins. Here’s what the NeoSmart folks say:

“HTML5 poses the answer providing a way for browsers to use the native implementations to render videos directly in the browser without resorting to ActiveX and 3rd-party browser plugins… it just has yet to be embraced. But now you can uninstall Flash and enjoy your online videos in peace. Just go to http://neosmart.net/YouTube5/ and enter the URL of a video to watch it in the embedded HTML5 viewer. Yes, you can skip, skim, pause, resume away to your heart’s content.”

Of course, I tried this on mobile browsers but they’re simply not there yet. The iPhone 3GS, Palm Pre and T-Mobile G1 all rendered a message saying “You must have an HTML 5 capable browser.” We know that HTML 5 is coming soon — as is Flash for most handsets — but it can’t come soon enough for me on the mobile side. I’d rather not use a dedicated YouTube application to view vids if I can simply watch them more efficiently in a native browser.

So is anyone else besides me using the new bookmark sync feature in Google Chrome? I’m using it with the beta version of Chrome for Windows and also on my Mac. On OS X, the latest version Chrome itself doesn’t support the bookmark sync feature, but the latest build of Chromium does, so that’s what I’m using. But what if you’re using a computer that doesn’t have Chrome and you can’t install it? How then can you get your precious bookmarks from the cloud? It’s actually quite easy when you notice that your Chrome bookmarks also get synchronized over to Google Docs.

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OK, you really can’t sell something that’s free, but customers can get Google Mobile in a retail brick-and-mortar now. Best Buy Mobile, which sells handsets throughout the U.S., will offer to install Google Mobile on new phones. Customers who aren’t familiar with the software can even get an overview of what it offers. Interestingly, Google says installation is for BlackBerry, Windows Mobile and S60 devices only. I would have expected that Android devices would be in the mix as well. More than likely, it is, even if not specifically mentioned.

In any case, this is the first noticeable push to get the Google name and services in a retail setting. Sure, you could say that Android devices were truly the first, which is accurate. But this is a little different in that the focus is on Google services and software on non-Google devices. With the majority of the search market, Google is certainly a familiar brand name. What consumers may not know of in detail though are the services like Gmail, Google Talk, and Google Docs, for example. Raising awareness through in-store marketing and free software installs could expand consumer knowledge on the offerings, gain more customers and add more search revenues to Google’s coffers.

Our tech-savvy audience probably isn’t likely to be affected by the Best Buy Mobile deal, but do you think it could have benefits to Google in the long run? I’m even wondering if folks come away with an impression that the Google experience is better on Android devices than on others.

I have demonstrated Parallels Desktop on the Mac that I use to run Windows 7 alongside OS X. A new version of Parallels Desktop, version 5, was released yesterday and among many new features offers better Snow Leopard and Windows 7 support. One of the new features of Parallels Desktop for Mac v.5 is the Crystal mode, which allows the Windows 7 environment to be “hidden” while running. In the video I demonstrate how this works, and show the ability to run Windows programs like Windows Media Player and Internet Explorer on the Mac desktop.

One of my mobile mantras — No. 4, actually — is to turn off wireless radios and work offline when I can. Solutions like Google’s Gears allows for that approach, but sometimes you don’t need your entire mailbox with you when you’re offline. Starting today, you get a little more control.

Google has now implemented a way to choose which mail you want to use offline with Gmail. Now you can tell Gears to only pull down mail from specific labels and from certain time periods. Only want your Inbox and two other labels from the past week? No problem. Once you have Gmail setup for offline use, just hit the Offline tab in Settings to pick and choose.