Motorola Droid Lands at Verizon Wireless

You've seen the dark and stormy TV commercial teasing us about the device that's going to do all sorts of nifty things that Apple's iPhone can't. Now it's here--almost.

Motorola's Droid smartphone , the first with version 2.0 of Google's Android operating system, won't arrive at Verizon Wireless stores until November 6, but the press received a preview this week at special events in New York and elsewhere.

My first look and complete review of the Droid are up at PC World .

Let me know what you think.

Text Copyright 2009 Stadium Circle Features. Photo courtesy of Verizon Wireless.

Booklet 3G netbook: Nokia turns a page

A notebook from Nokia? What is the netbook world coming to? Maybe to a Best Buy near you ... or at least Nokia hopes so.

At a splashy press event in New York this week, Nokia introduced the Nokia Booklet 3G, its first foray into the already crowded notebook market. Not surprisingly, the 2.76-pound netbook focuses not on top-shelf processor power or on graphics muscle, but on connectivity and uptime, and in these respects it may succeed.

"It was a decision to start with what we know," said John Hwang, head of the Nokia product team which developed the ultrathin netbook. "And that's mobility."

The Booklet 3G ($299 with a 2-year data service contract) includes Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 2.1 support, but also includes a 3G HSPA wireless data modem for the AT&T Wireless network. A slot is provided for the necessary AT&T Wireless SIM card. The unit also promises 12 hours of battery life per charge.

"It's not 12 hours in the brochure, it's 12 hours true battery life," said Lars Boesen, senior director for OEM emerging market business development for Microsoft Corp.

He noted that the Booklet 3G comes with Microsoft's upcoming Windows 7 operating system, which is optimized for the 1.6-gigahertz Intel Atom Z530 processor at the heart of the unit. Windows 7 will go on sale Oct. 22.

He said the unit comes with just a small suite of preinstalled software, thus allowing the user maximum use of the Booklet 3G's 120-gigabyte (GB) hard disk and 1GB of RAM. Also missing is a fan, he noted; the Booklet 3G doesn't need one.

The 10.1-inch, 1280-by-720 pixel display was bright and sharp, but that resolution proved too low for some Web sites, like the newest version of Yahoo! Web mail. The site bumps users who come in at too low a screen resolution back to the less-glitzy "classic" version.

As small as the 0.8-inch thin unit is, it still has room for three USB ports, an HDMI port, a combination microphone/headphone jack and an SD Card slot. Just above the screen is a 1.3-megapixel webcam.

You can access the 3G data network directly with the Booklet 3G or via a Bluetooth connection with a cell phone. You can also synchronize your contacts, calendar entries, tasks, photos and other data between a cell phone and the unit via a Bluetooth connection. Boesen noted that the unit could move smoothly from a 3G data connection to a Wi-Fi connection without interupting the user's Internet experience.

The Booklet 3G, available in black, white or blue, will be sold exclusively at Best Buy until the first week of January 2010, when other stores will offer it, said a Best Buy representative. He said demonstration units would begin appearing in stores Oct. 25, at which time pre-orders would be taken. The units will ship about Nov. 15, he said.

The AT&T Wireless Web site will begin selling the unit Oct. 22. The Booklet 3G is $599 if purchased without a data plan.

Entering the PC space is something very unique," said Boesen. "We think this product is very, very good."

But a notebook from Nokia? Can it succeed in a market already laden with nifty low-priced netbooks? It certainly will be tough.

Then again, many of us gurgled and laughed a few years ago when Apple announced it was entering the cell phone market with something called an iPhone.

Text and lower photo Copyright 2009 Stadium Circle Features

Top photo courtesy of Nokia

IREX DR800SG Challenges Amazon's Kindle

You can't have too many digital book readers. At least that what IREX Technologies is banking on as it rolled out the IREX DR800SG at a well-attended press conference at the New-York Historical Society in Manhattan.

The new $399 unit, with a crisp 8.1-inch display and an very simple interface, seeks to take bite out of a market already crowded with Amazon's Kindles, the Sony Readers and other devices. It will be available in Best Buy by the end of October.

What do I think? See my piece in PC World. Then let me know what you think.

Copyright 2009 Stadium Circle Features

NYPL Wi-Fi: No Power for the People?

Patience and Fortitude are the nicknames of the marble lions that guard the Fifth Ave. entrance to the famous New York Public Library building on 42nd St., but you may need a little of both if you want to use the free wireless Internet there for more than a couple hours at a time.

The NYPL recently opened a Wi-Fi Reading Room and Laptop Loan center in the elegant confines of the Edna Barnes Salomon Room, which has been the site of many art and book exhibitions and other special events. Aside from the classic paintings on the wall and the high ceilings, the room offers 16 long tables, each with eight comfortable chairs, thus providing seating for 128 Wi-Fi users. If you don't have your own laptop, you can borrow one for use in the room at no charge.

So what's missing from this picture? Power.

None of the tables here offer an AC power outlet. Thus you're at the mercy of your laptop's battery, which of course drains a little quicker when you're using its Wi-Fi adapter.

So what can you do if your device's low-power warning starts flashing? You could walk across the third floor to the southern half of the equally elegant Rose Main Reading Room, where all of the desks offer AC outlets. The room is covered by Wi-Fi and some of the desks also offer working Ethernet jacks for wired Internet access. Unfortunately, both the wired and wireless Internet access were down when I attempted to use them Tuesday afternoon.

From there you could have walked downstairs to the DeWitt Wallace Periodicals Room, another excellent working space also covered by Wi-Fi, but there are no AC outlets there either.

Kudos to the Fifth Ave. NYPL building for providing free public Internet access in an area where hotels and convention centers charge steep fees for the same. However, sometimes less is more.

Many of the smaller NYPL branches offer free Wi-Fi and dinky tables for laptop use--but they provide AC power strips, thus making them more useful, albeit less comfortable, than the august Wi-Fi Reading Room.

No, I'm not suggesting that the floor in the Edna Barnes Salomon Room be sawed up to accommodate floor AC outlets, but a powerless Wi-Fi Reading Room just misses the point.

What do you think?

Photo and text Copyright 2009 Stadium Circle Features

Samsung's DualView Cameras: About Face

Maybe it's a response to an epidemic of digital narcissism or maybe it's just a tip of the hat to the explosive growth of me-centric social networking sites. Either way, Samsung's new DualView digital cameras--the first ever with a second LCD screen on the front--seem to beg the question, "Now why didn't I think of that?"

The point is simple: The LCD on the front lets you frame self-portraits correctly instead of using the old "point-and-pray" method.

At a press event at New York's Time Warner Center, Samsung introduced its first two 12.2-megapixel DualView cameras, both of which feature 1.5-inch displays on the front in addition to larger touchscreens on the back. The TL 220 ($300) and TL225 ($350) come with 4.6X optical zoom lenses and 3.5-inch (TL225) or 3-inch (TL220) rear touchscreens.

Aside from being larger, the rear display of the TL225 is also sharper, with a resolution of 1.1 megapixels as opposed to the 230,000-pixel resolution of the rear display on the TL220.

As you frame the shot, the front LCD indicates whether the camera's face-recognition technology has locked onto your face and the smile-detection feature will snap your photo as soon as it detects an upside-down frown and your pearly whites.

Tim Baxter, co-president of Samsung Electronics America, said that instead of just taking photos of others, today's American camera user is more likely to put himself into his photos and share them.

"The role of the photographer has shifted," said Baxter, who added that camera makers "... cannot get by with selling a box that just takes pictures."

The front display turns on by tapping it and most camera adjustments are handled by the rear touchscreen, which vibrates to give tactile feedback when a button is touched. The camera also has a Gravity Sensor that lets you select functions by tilting the camera in the direction of the icon you want to activate.

Some of the functions of the camera's Smart Gesture user interface are truly intuitive. For example, to delete a photo, you simply draw an invisible "X" through it with your fingertip. The camera remembers up to 20 faces and will give exposure preference to the most frequently photographed faces.

If you engage the self timer, the front LCD will display a digital countdown. The front LCD can also be switched to a "child mode" in which it will display a cheerful, colorful cartoon designed to get children to look at the camera and smile.

"It's kind of a modern adaptation of 'look at the birdie,' " said Reid Sullivan, senior vice president of Samsung Electronics America.

The units, which will go on sale in September, are available in red, blue, silver, orange and purple.

Does a second LCD make sense to you?

Text Copyright 2009 Stadium Circle Features

Photo courtesy of Samsung Electronics America

Sprint's Samsung Reclaim: Lean & Green

Are you eco-conscious? Do you care what your cell phone is made of? Sprint certainly hopes so.

Last week, at a well-attended press event at the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum in Manhattan, Sprint introduced the Samsung Reclaim, a phone made of 80 per cent recyclable material. Two dollars from each purchase goes to the Nature Conservancy's Adopt an Acre program.

How does it rate? Read my review at PCWorld.com.

T-Mobile myTouch 3G: Google Android Take 2

Make it work, make it mine, make it easy: Those are the three customer wishes T-Mobile aims to fulfill with its new flagship smartphone: the myTouch 3G .

The touchscreen smartphone, manufactured by HTC and based on the same Google Android operating system software as the T-Mobile G1, offers a slimmer profile than the G1 thanks to its lack of a slide-out keyboard.

Highlights of the new unit include its large library of Android applications and the multitude of ways in which it can be personalized.

"It's a very sleek device," said T-Mobile Chief Marketing Officer Denny Marie Post (above, left), who readily admitted that her 15-year-old son was instrumental in helping her set up her phone. "You feel very bold to experiment with it.... It becomes 100% you."

"This is our first, and our real big bet for 2009," said Cole Brodman, T-Mobile's chief technology and innovation officer (above, right) at the July 8 press event in New York. "The myTouch 3G is unique through and through."

Brodman said there were already 5,000 Android applications available for the myTouch 3G and the G1, including many location-aware utilities that take advantage of the GPS receivers built into the phones.

For example, Sherpa, from Geodelic Systems, can locate points of interest close to you as you move around. Clicking a restaurant button will generate icons for the closest eateries, complete with the addresses and the distances from where you are. Click on an icon and the phone searches for relevant information on the restaurant, such as menus, travel directions, cuisine and reviews.

Rahul Sonnad, founder and CEO of Geodelic, said Sherpa was first developed for PCs, but was ported to Android as the software platform gained traction.

Brodman described Sherpa as a "really unique recommendation and discovery engine. He noted that it remembers the user's preferences as it processes requests. "The more you use it, the smarter it becomes," he said.

Brodman said T-Mobile's sales force had been trained to help users set up and personalize their myTouch 3G phones. "Make it work, make it mine and make it easy," said Brodman, taking the role of a prospective customer.

Current T-Mobile customers can pre-order the myTouch 3G for $199 with a 2-year service plan. Those who order by July 28 will receive their units by Aug. 3. The unit will be available in T-Mobile stores Aug. 5. The myTouch 3G offers a 3.2-inch touchscreen, aWi-Fi adapter, a 3.2-megapixel digital camera, a digital music player with a preinstalled four-gigabyte microSD memory card and support for T-Mobile's fast 3G data network.

After few minutes of testing, the phone worked well. The touchscreen was responsive and the Web browser rendered pages fairly quickly. The on-screen keyboard, which can be set up to give tactile feedback when a key is touched, flips over to the side when the phone is held in landscape orientation.

Post said the myTouch 3G was poised to be a viable challenger to Apple's iPhone to date. Time will tell.

Text and photos Copyright 2009 Stadium Circle Features

CompuServe Classic: So Long, Old Friend

No, your monitor won't blank out, your Internet connection won't stall and your PC won't crash, but a major event is about to ripple across the Internet today: CompuServe Classic is closing.

After 30 years the plug will be pulled on what was once the finest online service on the globe. (CompuServe 2000, a newer iteration of CompuServe will continue.)

And the saddest part is that it ends not with a bang, but with a whimper. Ask anyone about CompuServe today and the response will probably be "Are they still around?"

And that's not fair for a service that once meant so much to cyberspace--long before we started calling it cyberspace. It dates to a time when most home PCs didn't even have hard disks, just floppy disk drives, and when most PC users never went online.

CompuServe, the corporate entity, dates to 1969 but the CompuServe Classic online service for consumers debuted in 1979. In 1987 it was the flagship of online services with 380,000 users. A 1991 TV commercial trumpets CompuServe as the only online service with more than a half-million members.

Unfortunately time, and its acquisition by AOL, has not been kind to CompuServe. In recent years it has barely been marketed. Its Web site looks like a throwback to the (gasp!) 20th century. The "build" date on version 4.0.2 of CompuServe for Windows NT, the latest version of the access software for CompuServe Classic, is January 11, 1999.

CompuServe Classic's demise will come six years to the day after MCI Mail, another once-dominant online service, went dark. The text-only service had a Spartan interface but was terribly reliable. Many major corporations used it as their default e-mail service.

CompuServe Classic was home to forums for every profession and special interest imaginable. For example, the old Journalism Forum attracted journalists from around the world and was a hotbed for some of the most lively flaming sessions (that means trading insults, young folks) as well as many intelligent debates.

CompuServe Classic introduced many of us cyberdinosaurs to services we now take for granted.

Online shopping? Stock quotes? Worldwide weather forecasts? CompuServe was providing all of that in the 1980s. Who needs color graphics, music and streaming videos? CompuServe could provide users with what they needed with plain text on a slow dial-up connection.

Today there's Orbitz, Expedia, Travelocity and dozens of other travel sites on the Web, but in the 1980s it was the American Airlines EAASY SABRE service on CompuServe that introduced many of us to online airline ticket booking.

I still remember the joy of watching those first characters crawl slowly across the screen of my Tandy 100 laptop at 300 baud when I opened my CompuServe account in December 1985. How slow is that? Most of us can type faster than a 300-baud connection can send characters.

Even as newer services like America Online began to attract more users and overtake it, CompuServe managed to maintain an air of dignity. Its forums were more professional, its users were more cyber-savvy and the depth of its services and software libraries were far deeper than those of other services.

For example, when AOL started offering unlimited dial-up access in 1996, it didn't have enough modems in service to keep up with the spike in traffic. The result? Constant busy signals. Some users would go to sleep with their AOL connections on so they would have access to it in the morning.

CompuServe, on the other hand, always had the data capacity it needed. AOL's woes led to a memorable CompuServe TV commercial which ended with the punch line: "CompuServe: Get On with It." That bit of cockiness was short-lived, however, as AOL absorbed CompuServe in 1997.

So who will care when when CompuServe Classic goes dark today? I will as I retire my 23-year-old user ID : 72407,3343.

So long, old friend. And thanks.

NOTE: If you're a CompuServe Classic member and you haven't converted your e-mail address to the new system, put this blog down and do it now. You won't be able to do so after today.

Copyright 2009 Stadium Circle Features

Jitterbug J: Phone for Seniors Graduates

Just days after some Jitterbug phones were recalled due to a problem with making some 911 calls, Great Call Inc. is back with the Jitterbug J, its newest easy-to-use phone for older adults.

Jitterbug and Samsung recalled some phones sold after March 1, 2008 after they had problems making 911 calls when outside of Jitterbug's network. The problem is being repaired with a software patch.

The new Jitterbug J is sleeker, but still simple and has none of the 911 problems.

For more information, see my piece on the PC World Web site: Jitterbug J: Keeping it Simple

Copyright 2009 Stadium Circle Features

CompuServe Classic E-Mail: The Next Generation

As CompuServe Classic readies for its final log off on June 30, CompuServe Member Services has thrown the switch on a migration utility that allows Classic members to keep their e-mail accounts alive.

Gone will be CompuServe Classic's old number-comma-number e-mail address format and in its place will be a standard POP3 e-mail address with the familiar "@" sign. Many CompuServe Classic users already have alternate POP3 addresses for their accounts. Those addresses will be preserved in the transition. Just don't expect to connect to the Internet through a CompuServe dial-up number after June 30--those are on their way out too.

CompuServe Classic members must convert to the new e-mail system by going to the CompuServe Mail Center by June 30. Here's what happens once they get there:

You can start the conversion process by logging in with a Classic numerical e-mail address or with the alternate POP3 access information.

Once you click "continue" on the screen above, the next one asks for some basic demographic information and offers you a chance to pick a new password.

From there you need to agree to the Terms of Service by typing in the letters that appear in the image box.

If everything goes well, you'll get the following welcome screen.

Finally, clicking the right button takes you to your new inbox.

As for accessing the new e-mail service with Outlook or another e-mail client, you'll need the new server settings. You can retrieve your e-mail as a POP3 or IMAP account with or without a secure connection (SSL). The port setting is found in the advanced settings section of Outlook and other e-mail clients.

The POP3 settings are:

POP: pop.csi.com port 110 (SSL = port 995)

SMTP: smtp.csi.com port 587

The IMAP settings are:

IMAP: imap.csi.com port 143 (SSL = port 993)

SMTP: smtp.csi.com port 587

So how did it work on my CompuServe Classic account? So far so good, but other users have reported some problems.

What about you?

Copyright 2009 Stadium Circle Features