Google Sync Now Pushes Gmail to iPhones (and Windows Mobile)

Back in February, Google launched iPhone and Windows Mobile versions of Google Sync, a service that let you sync contacts and calendar items from Google’s services to your phone. It didn’t, however sync Gmail–which would have been especially nice for iPhone users since Apple’s Gmail support doesn’t push Gmail to the phone as soon as it arrives, but rather checks for mail on a schedule you set.

Today, Google announced that Google Sync now pushes Gmail as well as contacts and appointments, using the iPhone’s Microsoft Exchange support to do the job. Here’s the company’s little explanation in comics form (looks like Scott McCloud wasn’t available this time):

My instinct is to be skeptical of anything that pushes data to the iPhone, since doing so has historically been a really good way to suck your battery dry before the day is done. (Especially if it involves as much data as a busy Gmail account does.) But I’ve been happily using Google Sync’s contact-and-calendar features, so I’ll give the new Gmail feature a try. If you check it out, let us know what you think.

Live From DEMO09

I’m at the DEMOFall conference in San Francisco Diego, the second massive launchpad for new companies and products (after last week’s TechCrunch50) in as many weeks. So far, the product-demo gremlins seem to be having more than their usual amount of fun with the companies onstage: Problems with Internet access and other glitches have bedeviled multiple demonstrators.

My favorite demos so far:

• HP kicked off the conference with SkyRoom, a $149 piece of software for conducting high-definition video conferences among up to four people. It’s aimed to simplify business collaboration, and will come bundled for free with some HP computers.
• Micello tries to be “Google Maps for the inside of buildings,” with an iPhone app that can show you where things are on the premises of locations such as shopping malls and other public places. (I could have used something along these lines yesterday–I was at the San Francisco airport and really, really wanted to find a Wells Fargo ATM.)
• Fuze Box (which used to be CallWave) launched Fuze Meeting, another HD conferencing service. This one has iPhone and BlackBerry apps.
• Digsby, a multi-client IM app that’s been around for awhile, has a new version with Twitter functionality that aims to be conversation-centric and pleasing to mainstream folks rather than Twitter geeks. (It’s got a single-column view, unlike power tools such as Seesmic and TweetDeck.)
• Waze is a sort of phone-based social network for commuters that (somewhat like the late and lamented Dash Express) aggregates info from users to identify traffic problems in real time. The company launched an Android app awhile ago, and is using DEMO to announce that it’s now available on Android, iPhone, Symbian, and Windows Mobile.

More thoughts to come as we see more demos and I get the chance to troll the aisle of the pavilion…

Netgear’s Stora: A Terabyte for Your Network and the Web

It’s been a busy few days for the whole idea of networked hard drives that provide direct Internet connections so you can get to them from everywhere. Last week, Seagate introduced DockStar, a $99 add-on for its FreeAgent Go drives that provides browser-based access to their contents. And today Netgear launched Stora, an all-in-one network drive with Web access.

It’s not a new idea–Western Digital is one of several companies that offer boxes with at least generally similar capabilities–but Stora looks like its specs and features should be appealing for the $229 price. It contains one hot-swappable 1TB drive with room for another (some competitors have no available expansion), has gigabit Ethernet, reads at 280Mbps and writes at 240Mbps, does RAID 1 disk mirroring, and comes with a three-year warranty (one year is more common). It also supports the DLNA and UPnP standards for streaming media around your network to various devices (including game consoles and phones). And Netgear says it’s particularly proud of the Web-based interface for getting at your music, photos, videos, and other files. (I got only a glimpse and haven’t done any hands-on tests, but at first blush it looks slick.)

Stora isn’t as fancy as a true home server like HP’s MediaSmart (which can, among other things, slice-and-dice digital video files for various devices in the background). But the price looks right for the capabilities–your $229 will get you more storage and more features (albeit in a larger, less portable package) than if you spend the same amount on a FreeAgent Go and a DockStar.

Geez, was it less than five years ago that a 1TB network device that had a lot fewer features and sold for $999 felt like a low-cost breakthrough?

Are Game Downloads Successful? We’ll Soon Know

Addressing what increasingly seems like a glaring omission in its sales charts, The NPD Group says it will start tracking sales of downloadable video and computer games.

That’s important if you’re at all interested in how gaming is changing. NPD finds itself in headlines every month, when it releases sales figures for games and consoles. When we want to know if games are in a recession or whether an experimental game idea worked out commercially, NPD is usually a good resource.

But lately, it seems like the group’s sales figures don’t provide the whole picture, and NPD itself knows it. NPD’s corporate marketing director David Riley told MCV that tracking game downloads will reduce “the spin, and in some cases, misleading information that often appears on the internet.”

It’s not clear who Riley was pointing that comment at, but I think game publishers shoulder at least some of the blame. We usually only hear about the performance of downloadable content when it’s wildly successful (see the popularity of Shadow Complex for the Xbox 360). Even then, the news is just a flash in the pan, and we have no way to track the performance of a downloadable game over time. I’d definitely like to see, for instance, how the shelf life of a downloadable game compares to a boxed retail title.

NPD was short on details for this plan, which seems awfully ambitious. The group plans to track console, PC and mobile games, which, as Joystiq points out, would comprise a lot of distribution channels, including small, independent outlets. No start date has been announced, and NPD didn’t say whether it will track downloadable add-ons for existing games, or just full games.

Still, I look forward to whatever NPD puts together. For understanding how digital distribution is changing video games, anything’s better than nothing.

Sony Ericsson’s Motion-Sensing Earbuds Sound Cool

Here’s a neat idea from Sony Ericsson: Put motion sensors in earbuds, so they automatically stop playback when you pop them out, and resume the music when you put them back in. As someone who hates fumbling for the play button when temporarily removing earbuds — say, to answer a question — I’m interested.

The MH907 earbuds use capacitive sensors that turn your ear into an electrical conduit, determining whether the earbuds are inserted. In addition to controlling music, the earbuds work as a cell phone headset, going into call mode when you insert only one bud.

Here’s the catch: You’ll need one of Sony Ericsson’s phones with a Fast Port connector, as opposed to a standard 3.5 mm jack.

On one hand, this makes sense, as you’re sending as well as receiving information from the headphones. Still, iPods are able to detect when you’ve removed headphones from the jack entirely, so I’m wondering if a 3.5 mm connection could at least handle the basic on and off switching from the motion sensor. In any case, I can’t fault Sony Ericsson for using a cool accessory to sell its music phones.

Before today, Sony Ericsson was teasing that this announcement would change the way we listen to music forever. That seems a little extreme, but if there’s any chance the company hasn’t locked up the idea with a patent, I’m hoping we’ll see other manufacturers follow suit.

GOP Moves to Block Net Neutrality

A Federal Communications Commission (FCC) proposal that would require Internet service providers to treat all network traffic equally was met with resistance by Republicans on Capitol Hill today.

FCC chairman, Julius Genachowski is expected to unveil a policy that advocates network neutrality this week. If the policy is implemented, providers would no longer be able to interfere with information that flows through their networks. ISPs, including Comcast, have managed peer-to-peer network traffic to alleviate network congestion, and oppose the concept.

Senate Republicans also stand in opposition to net neutrality, and moved to deny the FCC funding for developing or implementing new Internet regulations. Genachowski was appointed to the FCC by President Obama.

“I am deeply concerned by the direction the FCC appears to be heading. Even during a severe downturn, America has experienced robust investment and innovation in network performance and online content and applications,” Texas Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison said in a statement. ” She said that regulations could stifle innovation, and that the marketplace would respond to companies that exhibit questionable behavior.

Vinton Cerf, co-inventor of the Internet Protocol and Google evangalist, and Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the World Wide Web, favor network neutrality. Berners-Lee believes that ISPs seek to shift customers to a tiered pricing model, where access to information pipelines will be tightly controlled.

I agree with Berners-Lee, and would rather see preemptive regulation than for Internet users to lose the benefits of the Internet. Toll booths would impede–not encourage–innovation. What do you think?

How to Save the PC, or at Least Your Bacon

TechRepublic’s Jason Hiner has a post up with the provocative title “How to Save the PC,” including a reader petition aimed at Microsoft and Apple. From the name, I thought it involved a strategy for keeping traditional PCs relevant in an era of powerful phones and an almost-omnipresent Internet. But Jason’s crusade is both less lofty and very sensible: He thinks that Windows and OS X should invisibly partition hard disks into separate sections for the operating system, user settings, and user documents and other data, thereby helping to shield irreplaceable  stuff from damage and making it easier to get back up and running if you have an OS catastrophe.

Makes sense to me. I’ve always been surprised that operating-system companies in general haven’t put way more emphasis on features designed to protect data–Time Machine, the flagship feature of Apple’s OS X 10.5 Leopard being a notable exception. Microsoft has an amazingly long history of providing Windows backup apps that are unsatisfactory in one way or another: The one in Windows 7 is much better than Windows Vista’s, but only the version in higher-end editions of Win 7 can back up to a network drive. Which seems a little like a car company cheaping out on the airbags in its least pricey cars.

It’s not just OS companies, though. I use Photoshop more than any traditional app that isn’t a browser. The whole point of the program is to create deeply sophisticated documents, ones that can be mighty hard to recreate from scratch. And Photoshop is bursting at the seams with features–but there’s no way to auto-save your work, a simple option that would make it really, really hard to lose your work when Photoshop crashes. (Which it does, at least on my Mac.)

In the world of Web-based apps such as Google Docs and Zoho and Microsoft’s upcoming Office Web Apps, seamless, automatic backup of everything is the default way of doing things. Can anyone explain to me why it’s not that way everywhere there’s software–with versioning and unlimited undo so you can restore your documents to exactly the state you desire?

5Words: AT&T’s Dead Spot Cure

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AT&T, give customers free MicroCells.

Apple investigating iPhone battery complaints.

Dell buys Ross Perot’s company.

FCC actively boosts net neutrality.

Google loves H.G. Wells.

A history of DEMO winners.

An MP3 player for bikes.

Windows 7′s gonna make history?

High-definition Wii coming soon?

A Guide to Laptop Accessories, and the Avoidance Thereof

I’ve guestblogged again over at WePC.com–my latest topic is notebook accessories and my preference for traveling light. I try not to carry many of ‘em and have a preference for ones that are easy to tote. I also admire the thinking behind such innovations as Compaq’s built-in AC adapter, HP’s built-in mouse, and Canon’s built-in printer, even though the later two were a tad odd and none appeared to be successful.

Check out the post for more thoughts–while you’re there, leave a comment with your thoughts on notebook accessories, and check out the WePC contest. They’re giving away a bunch of gaming PCs, notebooks, and netbooks.

Mac OS Ken: Making Money from Podcasting

(This interview is part of David Spark’s (@dspark) series “Making Money from Podcasting” (read summary “9 Successful Techniques for Making Money from Podcasting”) where he interviews podcasters who are actually generating revenue from their podcasts. There are many techniques, and here’s one person’s tale of how he’s making money from podcasting.)

Give away five shows for free, make them pay for the sixth

Ken Ray is a former colleague and now host of Mac OS Ken, a daily news podcast all about Apple and Macs. For a few years Ray had been hosting the show for free and built up a substantial audience. People started emailing and asking if there was a way they could financially support his show. Could they donate to it, they asked. Ray was not comfortable putting up a begware button on his site, but he did want to figure out a way he could generate income from the show. He just didn’t want to do anything that made him feel uncomfortable.

Interview (Time: 15:48)

Download MP3 file

Continue reading this story…

A 20th Anniversary Tribute to a Misunderstood Machine

On September 20th 1989, Apple announced its first true portable computer, which it called–logically enough–the Macintosh Portable. And ever since, folks have been tearing it down: It was too big and heavy, the screen was hard to read, and it offered too little for too much money. Whenever anyone starts to list Apple’s worst flops, you can be pretty sure the Portable will come up.

Only one person I know, however, has literally torn down the Mac Portable. That would be computer historian extraordinaire Benj Edwards, who not only owns a vintage example but dissected it on his workbench. He documented the process with photographs, and I’m delighted to say that we’re celebrating the 20th anniversary of this unusual but important Apple computer with his report on what he found–from a huge honkin’ lead-acid battery to the signatures of the Mac engineering team.

View Inside the Macintosh Portable slideshow.

Macintosh Portable (1989) vs. MacBook Air (2009)

Today, September 20th, marks the twentieth anniversary of the first truly mobile Mac, the Macintosh Portable. (For 1980s computers, all the compact Macs were surprisingly portable–they even sported convenient handles–but they couldn’t run off batteries.) When you hear the Portable mentioned at all these days, it’s mostly to mock its size–rather hefty even by late 1980s standards and absurd today. But we’re celebrating its birthday with Benj Edwards’ revealing teardown.

Benj contrasts the Mac Portable to the iPhone and iPod Touch–which makes sense, since they’re both truly portable computers, ones that are vastly more powerful and less expensive than the Mac Portable. They aren’t, however, Macs. So here’s a quick comparison of the Portable with today’s most portable Mac, the MacBook Air. Like its 1989 ancestor,  it’s been criticized for being compromised and pricey–especially the original early 2008 version. But can you imagine the dropping of jaws you would have witnessed if Apple fans of 1989 had been able to peek into the future and see the Air?

Continue reading this story…

Inside the Macintosh Portable

A Misunderstood Machine

On September 20th, 1989, Apple released the Macintosh Portable, the first true mobile Mac and a much-maligned machine. It didn’t sell well and is very rare today–not due to any particular design failure, but because the original price was a whopping $6,500-$7,300 ($11,288 to $12,677 in 2009 dollars). It wasn’t the only Mac to cost that much, but others in that price range offered top-of-the-line performance. The Portable was both too expensive and too underpowered to catch on. Its large size didn’t help, either.

Apple vastly improved upon the design two years later with the PowerBook 100, the first true Mac notebook. For now, though, it’s time to honor the design achievements of Apple’s first battery-powered computer. I’ve found there’s no better way to do that than take it apart on my trusty workbench.

ZillionTV Gives Up on 2009

A Q4 2009 release has morphed into a second half of 2010 launch as, I assume, ZillionTV struggles to find distribution partners, perhaps feeling threatened by local broadcasters which don’t appreciate the studio-backed over-the-top video set-top box encroaching on their turf. I also assume their business plan of a free box streaming ad-supported content will be reevaluated… and then dropped.

Can’t say any of this is surprising, as it’s damn hard to launch a new “television” service. Just ask Sezmi and their “TV 2.0″ experience, which we first covered 5/08 and has yet to see the light of day. Or how about satellite-broadband hybrid XStreamHD, first revealed late 2007 and who canceled their 2009 CES press conference on Ben Drawbaugh (EngadgetHD) and I without announcing distribution plans or partners. (And most know that the current incarnation of TiVo, Inc has had a hard time retaining customers of what is arguably the premier DVR.)

That’s not to say there’s isn’t room for success in this space, as it sure looks like networked gaming consoles and Roku (having moved hundreds of thousands of units) are thriving as secondary sources of video content. But my money’s still on the existing, entrenched cable and satellite providers maintaining their lock on the primary television service market.

(This post republished from Zatz Not Funny.)

Good: ESRB Pre-Loads PSP Go With a Ratings Guide

Let’s just assume for a minute that it’s an ideal world, where parents keep a watchful eye on the video games their kids are playing.

If that’s the case, it’s great news that Sony plans to load a video game ratings guide directly onto the PSP, through a partnership with the Entertainment Software Ratings Board.

The guide explains the meaning behind ESRB ratings, along with movie ratings from the MPAA. It also provides a walkthrough for setting up parental controls on the PSP Go.

While it’d be great to see this functionality on all gaming consoles, it’s especially important to the PSP Go. The handheld gaming device, coming October 1, doesn’t support physical media, so every bit of content is downloaded directly onto the console.

That means no game boxes, unless you plan to buy download vouchers from Gamestop. While resources such as WhatTheyPlay, Gaming With Children and the ESRB’s own Web site are already available to parents who actively get involved with their kids’ gaming, the rating on the box remains the most convenient way of knowing what games are appropriate.

Packing a ratings guide onto the PSP Go isn’t just useful to parents, it’s a clever move by the games industry to head off inevitable criticism. Once politicians and other video game alarmists realize the box has gone away, they’ll target the PSP Go for providing easy access to explicit materials. When that happens, Sony and the ESRB can point to this ratings guide and say they did the best they could.

Stream Movies From Your PC to Your TV

This is a long article. It’s technical and at times downright complicated. [I never knew I had attention deficit disorder until I started reading about media streaming devices. --Tech Edit.]

I know some of you are going to skipit. At the same time, I get e-mail kvetching that I’m not writing enough about technology. So there it is: I ain’t gonna satisfy everyone. And in a way, that’s the pleasure in doing my own stuff: I write for myself, sharing with you what gives me a kick in the pants, and take delight when some of you enjoy coming along for the ride.

Enough editorializing. Here’s my long, tedious, sometimes boring story about the new way to watch TV.
Continue reading this story…