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)

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.

• 3.5″ LCD color touchscreen
• Uses rechargeable lithium-ion battery (not included); about one hour on a full charge
• 4″ wide x 4″ tall x 3.5″ deep
• 1 USB 2.0 high-speed port
• 454 MHz ARM processor
• 64 MB DDR SDRAM
• 2 GB internal microSD card
• 2W mono speaker
• Stereo headphone output
• Volume knob
• FM radio tuner
• Accelerometer (motion sensor)
• ABS plastic housing
• AC adapter included
• Wi-fi connectivity (802.11 b/g)
• USB ethernet compatible
• Dimmable backlight
• One-click control panel access
• Access to free chumby content
• Over-the-air software updates

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

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.

I noticed the Google Docs function when the sync feature launched, but it didn’t hit me that it might be useful. And it is useful when you need to get at your bookmarks in the sky — as long as you can get to your Google Docs, you can grab your favorite bookmarks and import them to nearly any browser. Here’s how:

1. Log in to Google Docs and look for your Google Chrome folder.

2. Select the folders or subfolders you want to get at. In my case, I selected the Bookmark Bar folder, which will grab all of the contents within it.

3. Once you’ve selected the folder, choose More Actions, Export. Leave all of the default settings and continue. Google will zip the contents and your computer should automatically download the compressed file called bookmarks.html.

4. Now that you have all of your Chrome bookmarks from the cloud, simply import the bookmarks.html file in your browser. Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Opera and most other browsers support HTML importing of bookmarks. Here’s my end result in Safari.

Of course, this is just a one-way deal — you’re not actually synchronizing bookmarks back-and-forth between Chrome and another browser. But it can be handy if you’re on a different device that’s not running Chrome and need to get at those bookmarks.

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.

“It is twice as fast as the previous Opera Mobile released for Symbian/S60, and users will discover significant speed improvement when downloading pages, zooming and panning. Opera Turbo is also integrated, saving end users both time and money with its server-side compression technology.”

On an inconsistent mobile broadband connection, I think that Opera Turbo is one of those “killer features” (see why in this video), provided you don’t mind passing your browsing data through the Opera servers. Turbo compresses the data on the server side, making the web page load faster on the client. Have at it on your Symbian S60 device with a free download right here.

Google Chrome’s bookmark sync has come a long way since I last looked at it. The latest Windows beta build now offers bookmark sync, which by itself may not sound glamorous. But at the tail end of the video demonstration it gets a bit more interesting. If you have multiple computers signed in to Google, adding a bookmark on one computer adds it to the other in a near-real-time fashion. Google is leveraging the XMPP servers it uses for Google Talk to make the magic happen. That’s pretty clever since the first word in IM is “instant.”

While the new bookmark sync feature is welcome, it’s only part of the puzzle. Cookies, passwords, and more is what users will expect. Browser and search history are likely desirable bits of data too, but Google offers the option to provide the search history, regardless of browser.

I’d expect most of these additional sync points to be worked out in time for the Chrome OS — the platform is meant to power companion computers, and what better devices would benefit from an immersive browser sync experience?

Although Google didn’t mention this in their blog post, I noticed something interesting when I performed an initial sync: Google is also leveraging Google Docs for the bookmark data. The sync completion screen tipped me off, so of course I had to go look in my Google Docs account. Sure enough, there’s a folder structure there, complete with my shortcuts.

I can’t seem to do much with the bookmarks there — other than click them to go to a favorite site, that is. But I’m wondering if there will be a way to manage or add bookmarks from within Google Docs. It would be a simple way to get at or manipulate bookmarks on a computer that doesn’t have Chrome installed.

Want to use the bookmark sync feature? Grab the latest Windows beta of Chrome and get syncing!

RDM+ does indeed work with certain BlackBerry models (Storm included), but there are clients for other phones too. There are client apps for the iPhone/ iPod Touch, Windows Mobile, Java phones and the old Palm OS. There is no Android nor WebOS version that I could find. There is also a client to allow remotely connecting via another web-connected computer.

The program consists of one of the clients, and a host application for the computer to be remotely accessed. The host can work with any flavor of Windows, 7 included, and there is a Mac version. This means you can effectively work with any Mac or Windows computer, from almost any phone. That is a very powerful combination, and it looks to be a viable utility for those needing remote access from anywhere. I have not used it myself, but would love to hear from those who are using RDM+. The program is an expensive $40, but there is no subscription and this price includes all future upgrades.

With all of my looks at web-based storage, I overlook Microsoft’s SkyDrive every now and again. It’s definitely worth the look due to the generous 25 GB of free storage. While you can download an ActiveX control to integrate your SkyDrive into Windows Explorer, but there’s another option pointed out by gHacks: SkyDrive Explorer, which just got an updated beta version yesterday.

The free download of SkyDrive Explorer adds some features that the ActiveX control currently doesn’t offer when using SkyDrive in a browser, namely: renaming objects, deleting groups of object and copying folders with subfolders and files from SkyDrive. And it makes it easier to take basic file or folder actions on your SkyDrive:

• View the structure and contents of folders in SkyDrive
• View files information (type, size, creation date in GMT format)
• Create new root folders and subfolders
• Copy files into storage
• Delete files and folders
• Copy files from storage to the computer
• Copy folders and subfolders from the storage to the computer keeping their structure
• Use Drag & Drop for files operations
• Rename files and folders
• Create links to SkyDrive folders on your computer

While I tend to work in a browser, there are plenty of folks that want to access files with in Windows Explorer. If you’re one of them, SkyDrive Explorer is worth the look. My installation in Windows 7 went without a hitch and the program integrated my SkyDrive in Windows Explorer as if it were a local system folder. Clicking the “local” SkyDrive does prompt you for your Windows Live credentials, but you can allow the app to remember them for quicker access. Now if I could only get my SkyDrive mounted as a drive so I could easily integrate cloud tunes with a local music player, I’d be really happy. Aside from Windows 7, SkyDrive Explorer works with Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Windows Server 2003 / 2008.

Up to now, I’d access Google Voice on my Mac or netbook right through my web browser. But over the weekend, I started using a nice Adobe AIR implementation of Google Voice called GVoice. Even cooler is the fact that one of our own readers created it! RStoeber is a regular here at jkOnTheRun, and he pinged me to share the app. I’ve been running it nonstop ever since he told me about it — you can find it here, along with a few other projects.

In this early version, the app is exactly like the mobile version I see on my iPhone. Voicemails even play within GVoice — I tested it with a message James left me because Google’s translation went awry in a few spots. Since GVoice runs on Adobe AIR, it’s cross-platform so I can run it on either my Mac, my PC or a Linux box. While I could just leave a tab open in my browser for Google Voice, I like this standalone implementation better. It refreshes the Inbox every minute, so I’m always up to date on my voicemails and text messages without having to look at my phone. Of course, I can send texts from it or initiate a call to a contact from one of my two phones, as well. Developers started to add Growl support to Adobe AIR last November, so a future version of GVoice could support instant notifications of messages, too.

RadarSync has opened up its driver database for free access to the public and offers searches by device manufacturer or device name. I hit it up to look for my Toshiba netbook’s Alps Touchpad Drivers and found them easily. I probably should have checked sooner because I was missing the scrolling capability on my netbook after installing Windows 7. RadarSync gets updated every other day, and the Windows 7 repository was started up back in March of this year, so it’s fairly extensive. Links to all drivers are pointing directly to the manufacturer’s servers, so you’re downloading the real deal. Obviously, I can’t guarantee that RadarSync will have the driver you’re looking for, but it’s worth a try if you need to easily track one down and Windows Update isn’t cutting it.