• 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:

• Every application in Chrome OS will be a web-based application — there won’t be any local apps installed
• You can pin shortcuts to apps in the browser
• Fast boot times (under 7 seconds) will be partially due to the light environment, but also due to the requirement for Solid State Disk storage
• No mention of smartbooks; Chrome OS looks targeted solely for netbooks
• Support for X86 and ARM, so there’s still hope for smartbooks running Chrome OS
• All Google apps you see today will look and behave exactly the same in Chrome OS
• Android apps will not be compatible — remember, no local apps installed.
• Google will actually sell the netbook hardware work with partners on the hardware that runs the operating system
• Main use case for Chrome OS requires connectivity, such as Wi-Fi. Google is planning for 802.11n support
• Chrome OS devices aren’t intended to be your primary machine. Google assumes you have a second computer at home or work
• Google was coy on device pricing but said to expect prices that customers are used to today. I take that to be around $300 to $400
• Local user data is simply stored in a cache. The book of record for your data will be on Google’s servers
• You won’t need a Chrome OS machine to use it. Most all of the Chrome OS features will be baked into the Chrome browser.
• Interesting approach to security: “Chrome OS barely trusts itself. Every time you restart your computer the operating system verifies the integrity of its code. If your system has been compromised, it is designed to fix itself with a reboot.”

There’s more info to digest, which I’ll be doing over the afternoon. Suffice it to say, Chrome OS isn’t an “operating system” by traditional standards. This is more of a paradigm shift to determine what an OS is and a way to get consumers more reliant on the web where possible. In some sense, I feel that this is more bare-bones than I wanted to see. But that feeling comes from how we’ve defined an operating system up to now. I’m planning to step back and re-think my point of view because I’ve always felt that I can live in a browser. I did it before for 60-days with a safety net — the question now is: can I do it without the net?

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.

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.

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 .

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…

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.

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.