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Adventures in Global Smartphone Travel – Call for Feedback

For use on the English Wikipedia page LG Ally
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Recently, we started making plans to travel out of the country for the first time since most of us here at the Weneca Media Group got a smartphone.

Since that time, the advice given about smartphones(once you get one, it is hard to go back), has rung true. The idea of being without one and its instant data access wherever we go seems a strange one.

However, most of us have selected a CDMA carrier. Mostly Verizon, but Jere over at Android Buffet has a Sprint phone. The majority of the world uses GSM as its standard, rendering these phones useless. However, Verizon offers a limited series of global phones, including the Droid 2 Global and the Droid 3, both available in the Gadget Wisdom collection.

So, our conversation started with Verizon. Despite the fact Vodafone owns nearly half of Verizon, they do not offer a good deal on data. Signing up for a 50MB plan is $30.

Looking around at prepaidgsm.net, which summarizes rates around the world for prepaid gsm, there are better deals to be had. The downside is that you can’t keep your U.S. number, but we’ll get to that in a moment.

As a Verizon customer, we would need to unlock our Global phones. Verizon Global Tech Support advised they would unlock one phone every ten months for a customer in good standing. The phone would have had to have been on the account at some point. So, time to decide which phone is going overseas. Perhaps the one not being used in daily life…

If we wanted to chuck all data concerns out the window, Telestial offers inexpensive prepaid world SIM and prepaid phones, and can be purchased through Amazon. They offer both a U.S. and a U.K. phone number, with cards starting at $5. We may get one of these as a backup.

Our plan is to go for something decoupled from the phone for the U.S. issue, Skype. Skype offers a service called Skype-To-Go numbers. They will assign a number that will forward to an overseas number at your expense, which is significantly less than the cost of having same done by a phone company. You can even forward your normal or Google Voice number to this number, making it seamless for friends and business associates. It would also, if we set it up after arriving and purchasing a prepaid SIM card, allow us to use the cheap local plans, instead of other options.

What do you think? We haven’t done any of this yet, but what do you suggest?

Published on October 18, 2011
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Are Bookshelves No Longer for Books?

MUNICH, GERMANY - APRIL 02: Lars Dafnas, hea...
Image by Getty Images via @daylife

The LA Times questioned the future of paper books, based on the information that the classic Billy Bookcase is being redesigned. Next month, the shelf will be rereleased as a deeper shelf, meant to display decorative items, and is already pushing glass doors as an add-on.

Our perspective is probably interesting, as a previous Ikea redesign on the Billy Bookcase, which is over thirty years old, halted our expansion plans. We had invested in Billy with the idea we could gradually add to it. Unfortunately, they discontinued the color, if not the bookcase.

As for the fact that over ten percent of the population now has an E-Reader, we addressed the issue of gradually decluttering your space with an E-Reader. When we first brought in the Billy Bookcases some years ago, there were three of them. We’ve since eliminated one by gradually going digital. But there are some books that we will never get rid of.

For most people, while e-readers may mean a slowdown in the purchase of paper books, it does not mean a complete elimination. For one, too many materials aren’t available electronically. E-Books are not transferable, nor can you buy them cheap used. Thus there are limits to their utility and we doubt they’ll ever completely go away, and we don’t want them to. Our prediction is that the publishing industry will migrate to a print-on-demand model. There may still be trade paperbacks printed, but if you want a copy of the majority of books, they will print it on request.

As we write this, we paused at this moment to turn around and look at the Billy behind and wonder about the future. The Billy we got rid of, we did add in a smaller bookcase which is filled with movies. Is the future visual and audio entertainment, over the written word? Maybe books of all kinds are on the way out.

If they aren’t, will we read on e-ink screens? Tablets?

Many people prefer a dedicated e-reader not just because e-ink screens tend to be less harsh on the eyes than LCDs, but because they have the same distraction-free nature as books. They aren’t designed for multiple streams of information. They allow you to focus on the book.

There are many kinds of people in this world. We all have different needs. Some are better with audio, some better visually…the newest generation has been conditioned to learn best with multimedia. There will always be demand for printed material, even as things change.

But that’s us. What do you think?

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Published on September 11, 2011
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Making a Decision on Music

Music guitar
Image by doug88888 via Flickr

Recently, Google, Apple, and Amazon all got into the Cloud Music business. We tried Google and Amazon out, and decided on a lesser known service called Moozone. Moozone natively supports Ogg Vorbis, a format we use, and it even supports true Ogg streaming at up to 500kbps.

Lesser known companies often have the chance to offer features that would not work in the mainstream. Google Music supports Ogg, but it encodes it to MP3.

It offers the same advantage as Amazon…namely that you can buy songs and the storage will be provided for them at no extra charge. But unlike Amazon’s service, which is rental based, Moozone allows you to buy storage at a flat rate.

Moozone has problems though. It was launched in beta in 2009, released an Android app in January of 2010. At the same time, Moozone signed with MediaNet in order to provide additional music sales. In the last year, there has been little change though, and Amazon, Google, Apple, etc have all launched cloud music storage.

While we appreciate the resources that a large corporation can put behind a service, smaller companies can offer attractive niche features. Take MP3tunes, started by the man behind MP3.com, which got sued out of existence. It offers an open API, support on a variety of hardware devices, etc.

We love to support the underdog, and we’re hoping we didn’t gamble on the wrong company. Either way, never put all your horses in one basket.

 

 

Published on July 31, 2011
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Amazon Partners with AT&T to Offer Kindle 3G for $139

Kindles at The Unquiet Library
Image by theunquietlibrary via Flickr

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We love the Kindle. And it continues to get less expensive. There have been predictions that a new Kindle will come before the end of the year, that the Kindle will go sub $100, that Kindles will come free with Amazon Prime, etc.

But Amazon launched the Kindle 3G with Special Offers, sponsored by AT&T for $139. That is the same price we paid for a Kindle Wi-Fi last year, so we bought one.

Many have complained about the Special Offers, but they are nonobtrusive. And, global 3G data for life is a useful thing to have. Of course, we have a smartphone, but it has a monthly fee for data. Any tablet would have a monthly fee for data. The Kindle is not for games(although it has some great simple ones). The Kindle is for reading. But some reading, for example, news, is best delivered whereever you happen to be without need to hunt for an internet connection.

Conversely, there is a value to disconnecting and focusing on one thing, rather than switching. Multitasking, some say, is preventing us from giving proper focus to any one item.

Argue as you might, but the Kindle has a place in our society. And we’ve already taken advantage of our first special offer…a book for a buck.

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Published on July 15, 2011
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Switching From Dropbox to Wuala

Image representing Wuala as depicted in CrunchBase
Image via CrunchBase

We were once a big booster of Dropbox. But recent events have caused us to doubt them. On July 1st, Dropbox revised their policies. This was in response to a well publicized authentication breach where, for several hours, access to accounts was permitted without valid passwords. This followed the realization that despite assurances, Dropbox employees can access your data, but only to the extent that they need to(or so they say).

Does this mean we doubt the sincerity of the company? No more than any other company. But we’ve decided to move on…to Wuala. Wuala is a secure online storage service that provides many more features than Dropbox, if less supported.

There are three core principles of Wuala:

  1. Security and privacy
  2. Bridging web and desktop
  3. Economic technology

In terms of security, Wuala offers client-side encryption, which means that the encryption is performed on one’s one computer. During the upload, data is split and stored in multiple locations. They promise that because your password is never transmitted, no one, including their employees, can see private files.

Wuala offers a desktop app for Windows, Mac and Linux, and mobile apps for iOS and Android. There is even a web version. You get 1GB for free, and you can gain additional storage by paying for it, trading your local storage for extra storage(more on that in a moment), or inviting friends to join Wuala.

Wuala offers both backup and synchronization options. Backup saves local files regularly into the Wuala Drive, at an interval of your choosing. The backup are read-only. Sync allows you to sync files and folders across multiple computers. Dropbox provides sync only.

If you want to pay for storage above the free 1GB, it is $29 a year for 10GB, $49 for 25GB, and so on. You can also trade for storage. You can trade up to 100GB on your computer in exchange for 100GB in the cloud. You get whatever you provide multiplied by your online time. You must be on for at least 4 hours a day. As they put it, this doesn’t give you extra storage, but you give up storage locally to gain it elsewhere, which has its advantages.

We’ve set up the Wuala client on our headless server to trade storage. It also resides on our desktop systems to sync our files. We have plans to expand the headless part, to generate backups of the entire Wuala sync and send it to a secondary backup site as well, but that is for the future. The Wuala client allows it to be mounted as an NFS partition for that purpose.

There is an Android client we have tested. It lacks many features of the Dropbox app, including directory download/sync/upload and support for the Android sharing functionality. Of course, the Wuala developers have acknowledge this as a desired feature, but there is no timetable for its implementation. If they are slow in doing so, there would be hope of a third-party app, however, the Wuala API is in Alpha and only supports GET requests. It has been in this state for over a year.

When it comes down to it, Wuala is not perfect. But it offers a more complete feature set than Dropbox, if a less mature API and Android client. But, like many things, it is a matter of what is more important to you.

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Published on July 5, 2011
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Barnes and Noble offers new Nook and Amazon Kindle 3G with Special Offers

Cover of "Kindle Wireless Reading Device,...
Cover via Amazon

 

Amazon has launched a Kindle 3G with Special Offers. The Kindle Wi-Fi with Special Offers has been their best-selling Kindle so far. The same discount of $25 off will be offered off of the regular Kindle 3G.

Barnes and Noble, meantime, released its new wi-fi only Nook, which will compete with the Kindle Wi-Fi. Unlike the Kindle, the Nook will offer a touch screen, a two month battery. It only offers one button, compared to the Kindle’s 38, with full mini keyboard.The device runs Android 2.1.

Barnes and Noble’s basic improvement over the Kindle 3, the current king of e-ink, is to eliminate the hardware keyboard in favor of a touchscreen to allow for a smaller device with the same screen. We look forward to seeing Amazon’s response, but this is a worthy competitor to the Kindle 3.

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Published on May 24, 2011
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Product Review: Charging High Amp USB devices

When we first started with the Motorola Droid, we discovered early on that despite it using a USB based charger, not every USB AC adapter would charge it. The Droid wants 0.85A and not every charger puts that out. The Nook Color we own is even worse, at 1.9A and a special USB cable with extra pins to carry the charge.

At home and on the go, we most often will bring more than one device, and were looking for a single device that had everything. We’d previously recommended the Belkin Travel USB surge protector, but it only supported .5A on each USB port…not enough for the demands of modern hardware. It is still a good design, but needs to be updated. The competive items we found have the same delivery problem.

Finally, we found an item that offers travel portability and delivers the 2A power needs for our devices. It is the IPAD-2USB High Power Slim AC Wall Plug, offering two USB ports with the charge levels we need.

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The power plug rotates and folds flat into the unit, making it perfect for travel and will allow it to be flush with a wall in the event you want to permanently mount it behind a piece of furniture. If you pair it with a small travel surge protector and/or a short extension cord, it will be usable in a variety of narrow or limited situations. It supports 220V, so it can be paired with a plug adapter to make it truly international.

Not everything is overly complicated. Sometimes, you just want something that works as advertised. This does everything we need it to.

Published on May 22, 2011
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Decluttering Your Life with an E-Reader

Stack of books in Gould's Book Arcade, Newtown...
Image via Wikipedia

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We’ve continued to grow more and more enamoured with the Kindle as an e-reading device, especially now that it has become so comparatively inexpensive. Business Insider reported today that the Kindle with Special Offers is the bestselling Kindle.

But, how can you, as is our title, declutter your life with an E-Reader, kindle or otherwise? Start by reducing your book collection with a few simple tips.

  • Replace all your books that are in the public domain with free electronic editions.
  • If you have a shelf of O’Reilly reference books, take advantage of their $4.99 EBook upgrade. Get the e-book version of any book you own for only $4.99. They don’t specify you have to keep the book after that.
  • Identify beloved books in your collection that are falling apart. If they are worth keeping for your love of them, it may be worth repurchasing them in e-book form.
  • If you want to go to the extreme, go a step further and sell your paper books in favor of a complete digital library. You will lose money on this deal, but think of the space you’ll gain

We asked Len Edgerly of The Kindle Chronicles podcast to solicit feedback from his users, asking how many of them had actually repurchased a book they’d owned in paper form in electronic form. We recommend the podcast, even if you aren’t a Kindle owner, for his excellent and informative interviews.

What other papers other than books can you save? Well, magazines and newspapers are not quite all there yet. A big part of this is that the layout of these, when offered on e-readers, leaves much to be desired. Many pieces are omitted, or substandard. Many titles are not digitally available(More on this in the future).

What about article reading? Many people print/clip articles to take with them. There are services that will send articles to your reader. To name a few, popular service Instapaper, which we’ve mentioned before, will send you the last 20 articles you saved in it on a time schedule. You have Send to Kindle extensions and sites. There are similiar ones for other formats. An we’ve mentioned Calibre as a way of sending even more content to an E-Reader

So, what is left? Simple Note taking?

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There’s a decent app for that that might eliminate a basic notepad.

Ultimately, you can’t do everything with every device. But, imagining how much stuff we could get rid of if we moved our written materials digital is a very interesting and compelling idea. There are many things we will never part with, many books in particular. But there are plenty that our attachment is to the words, not to the form, snd would not mind compressing our collection.

What do you think?

Published on May 13, 2011
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Moving Back to RSS from Twitter

This icon, known as the "feed icon" ...
Image via Wikipedia

It is amazing that we would come full circle from where we were when we started with Twitter in January of 2009. When we began using Twitter, part of the appeal was as a real-time replacement for RSS reading. But, recently, we’ve returned to RSS feed reading as a much more reliable manner of ensuring we get our news.

That does not mean Twitter is not still a big part of our news delivery, but it has become overwhelming. But if your feed consists of nothing but your news feed piped into Twitter, then we will now go back to following you in Google Reader. We will now take advantage of the greatest benefit of Twitter to someone looking to get news and information…curation. The most valuable stories will float to the top as people tweet them.This will make Twitter much more social for us.

In January, an article made the rounds, maintaining that RSS was being ignored, and we should be worried. Google Chrome has no native RSS support built in, Mozilla is killing off the RSS icon in Firefox 4.0. How RSS integrated into systems may need to be rethought. Google Reader is all well and good, but that is a website, not a browser. That same article has some good suggestions.

  • Why can’t, when you visit a blog article, the browser reads the comments RSS, and when you next come back to that article, it can tell you that there have been new comments since, and highlight them on the page?
  • Why do we go through the same daily routine of checking certain sites over and over again? Can’t our computers be more intelligent here? Isn’t the purpose of the computer / browser to save us time!? Why doesn’t the browser, when you open it, tell you how many new items there are, on what sites you commonly visit, without you having ever configured this?

Dan Frommer, on Business Insider, countered that RSS is not dying, normal people never used it. In his opinion, RSS is a fine backend technology. In fact, many who moved to Twitter are reading feeds pumped to Twitter from RSS. That using RSS in an RSS reader has never been mainstream, which is valid. O’Reilly points out, as a backend technology, RSS never blocks you or goes down.

We wanted there to be a Twitter alternative, and there very well might be. Twitter is a stream. Twitter Lists would allow everything to be neatly organized in an intuitive way,  but the issue is that there is no adequate solution to reading longer and in-depth on your desired sources for Twitter. There is paper.li and the Twitter Times. There are social feed readers. We will be exploring these at some future point for discussion. But magazine/newspaper like feed readers seem to be the rage right now.

What do you think?

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Published on May 2, 2011
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Review: Kindle with Special Offers

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Update: The $114 Kindle has been deprecated, please try the new $79 Kindle linked above

The Gadget Wisdom labs got in the $114 Kindle with Special Offers today, on launch day for the item. As previously mentioned, the Kindle with Special Offers is, hardware-wise, identical to the Kindle Wi-Fi, currently listed at $139.

So, what do you get for your $25 savings? You get ads on the bottom of the home screen and as the screen saver, instead of random images of authors and such, you get ads. Ironically, you will likely have more dynamic screensaver options on this Kindle with Special Offers than you will on the more expensive Kindles, which do not let you customize your screensaver at all, unless you hack it.

Aside from that, the Kindle, no matter what version, has its place. Even Joe Wikert, who shuttered his Kindleville blog when he went out and bought an iPad, came back a year later, declaring the Kindle the perfect iPad accessory. We’re not quite so sure about that, but a lightweight reading device at $114, while not the magic $99 price people speak of, is inexpensive enough to feel comfortable taking it anywhere.

With Whispersync, even if the Kindle is stolen, it can be deregistered and nothing(save the device) is lost. You cannot say that about an iPad. While e-readers may change over the years, and get cheaper, we cannot say, like some pundits, that the tablet computer will make the e-reader obsolete any time soon.

That said, buy the Kindle with Special Offers. Save yourself $25. You aren’t losing anything by having ads.

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Published on April 29, 2011
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