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.

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.

While you could use many of Google’s services in the browser, some folks prefer actual client software. I’ve been using a Google Voice client created in Adobe AIR and today I started to use Google Tasks in a similar fashion. This too runs on Adobe’s AIR, so it’s cross-functional for use on various operating systems. Although it’s just a an AIR wrapper around the mobile Google Tasks site, having my to-do list broken out in a prominent area offers a higher likelihood that tasks have my attention.

After spending a few minutes with it, I see that it supports Google Calendar as well. Lifehacker mentions that all of the mobile Google sites and services should work with this implementation, but I’m only getting the Calendar functions to work right now. Maybe my app has a flat and ran out of AIR? Regardless, it does work for Tasks so chalk this up as an option to running tasks in a browser .

Opera today announced the beta of Opera Mobile 10 for Windows Mobile devices. The new look and feel is very much like Opera on the desktop or the newest version of Opera Mini. Here’s a listing of what the latest Opera browser brings to WinMo:

1. Intuitive new interface Opera has thrown out the clutter and is keeping it simple in terms of aesthetics. Less is more when it comes to mobile browsing.
2. Speed Dial Speed Dial serves as your personal table of contents for the Web. Your favorite sites welcome you upon launching Opera, and in one click, you are there.
3. Tabbed browsing Open new links in multiple tabs to bounce between sites easily.
4. Password manager Save those annoying passwords with Opera’s password manager, or if you are feeling vulnerable, simply and swiftly delete all.
5. Touchscreen or keypad navigation Whether your Windows Mobile smartphone is touchscreen or keypad-based, Opera Mobile 10 beta is customized for your navigation style.
6. Save images Select and save your friends’ Facebook pictures to your phone for offline viewing later.
7. Opera Turbo Offload your page rendering to one of Opera’s servers, and reduce your data costs.
8. Advanced compatibility Since Opera Mobile 10 beta is based on Opera’s browser for desktop computers, it maintains advanced Web-site compatibility and ensures that nearly any site is accessible from a mobile phone.
9. Smooth surfing Pan, zoom and smoothly scroll your way through the Web.
10. It is free! Opera Mobile 10 beta for Windows Mobile is available as a free download at www.opera.com/mobile/ or m.opera.com/mobile/ (for phone download).

The best part — aside from the Turbo function, which I still love — is that like older versions of Opera, the new beta supports Windows Mobile 5 handsets on up. Pity that I just shipped off my old Dash for a little holiday cash…

After tracking Mozilla’s Weave project since its early days, it’s nice to see the effort mature. Mozilla is now offering the first beta of the Weave Sync add-on for the Firefox browser, which can be downloaded here. In case you haven’t been watching Weave, here’s a short recap — Weave is a method to synchronize your web browsing experience across multiple devices that use Firefox. Using Weave, your bookmarks, passwords, browsing history, cookies and more are sent up to Mozilla’s servers and back down again to any other instances of Firefox you use.

New in this first beta is more speed and relevance in the Awesome Bar, a simpler approach to getting started and incremental synchronization. Although I gravitate towards the Safari and Chrome browsers on my computers, I installed Firefox this morning and then added the Weave Sync add-on. Since I haven’t used Firefox in a long while, I asked Weave to replace the old data on the server with the fresher data from my current browser. All told, I think I spent 30 seconds configuring Weave. I then started typing a URL in the Awesome Bar and immediately saw the speed of the new Weave beta — as I typed the URL, the history of my prior visits to that URL and related URLs appeared instantaneously. And this was on a completely fresh installation of Firefox — most impressive! I had to sign in to the website I was looking for and Weave handled that as well.

My first impressions are very positive and the Mozilla team should be proud of their work to this point. It was a long time coming, but Weave is looking like a very solid web synchronization platform right now — it’s simple to use from and end-user perspective, it’s fast, and it helps replicate the web experience across many devices. And by many devices, I mean mobile devices too — Weave is meant for Fennec, which is Mozilla’s mobile version of Firefox for handsets and Internet Tablets. Think about that for a second: all of your bookmarks, cookies, passwords and more from the computer will be seamlessly available on a Nokia N900, for example.

If you’re using Firefox 3.5 or greater on more than one computer, I recommend taking a look at the Weave Sync add-on. It’s blazingly fast and highly useful. I’m not sure it’s enough to get me off of Google Chrome — which I still find faster, but is far less customizable — although I may give Firefox another shot in my day-to-day web work. After all, Mozilla just made it easy for me to switch — all of my personal browsing data is already in Firefox, so there’s no transition time involved.

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)