A story yesterday in the Boston Globe spotlighted Cushing Academy – a New England prep school. Their library is undergoing a radical change. All 20,000 of their books are being discarded in favor of electronic editions. Instead they’ll spend $500,000 to outfit the library with a “learning center” containing three large flat-screen TVs that show Internet data, special laptop friendly study carrels, a $50,000 coffee shop that will include a $12,000 cappuccino machine. The students will have access to both Sony Reader and Amazon Kindle devices as well as be encouraged to read material via their laptops. This all sounds like a great idea. One question. When did prep schools start serving cappuccino to students? Boston Globe Continue reading on Gear Diary …

You can spend $349 at T-Mobile for an HTC Touch Pro 2 – or visit Amazon.com and purchase one for $149 with free two day shipping and yes both deals require a new 2 year activation on a compatible T-Mobile plan. The Amazon deal does not require any rebates. PS – Shopping in a carrier’s store is a guaranteed way to pay the absolute highest price for a phone – but only after you’ve waited 45 minutes behind 7 people trying to pay off their delinquent bills or asking insane amounts of questions about every freebie phone in the store. HTC Touch Pro2 Phone T-Mobile Continue reading on Gear Diary …

- Update: As of midnight CST 09/09: this giveaway is now closed, and a winner will be announced shortly. Thank you for entering!! – Update at noon CST 09/10: the first email has been sent out. The recipient has 24 hours to respond. – Update at 9:51pm 09/10: Still haven’t heard from the winner. And to the person that keeps emailing me saying that they think they won? Not likely. The real winner will have an email that I sent them first, which they will be replying directly to. Nice try, though! – Update 6:44am 09/11: Still haven’t heard from the winner; you have less than 6 hours to write back before you lose your chance and we contact the second name chosen! – Update 2:00pm 09/11: first winner has lost their shot. Ouch! The second email has just been sent – please check your spam filter people…!!! – Update 7:00pm 09/11: the winner has claimed her prize! Please join me in congratulating purplelover04! Today is day twenty-five the of HP and Microsoft’s ‘Back to School and Better Together’ Giveaway, which means that it’s finally our turn to begin our giveaway. Up for grabs is a computer combo containing an [...]

Back when I was much younger headphones were headphones – of sure there was a wide range of quality, but in general you were getting two padded speakers that clapped over your ears. Later, when the Sony Walkman and other portable products arrived around 1980, much smaller on-ear headphones arrived to support those products. The 1990′s brought us earbuds and other varieties of on-ear, around-ear, and in-ear products. Ear-canal audio products are the most recent, offering the portability of earbuds with a better frequency response range and noise isolation. There are so many products of each type that a trip to the earphone aisle of your local superstore will be a dizzying experience. In a market saturated with me-too products with decent quality sound and build, the folks at iBlink hope to expand that value proposition!… Continue reading on Gear Diary …

We have all seen the cyalume glow sticks that you snap and then shake to get a chemiluminescent glow.  Kids love them, but there is one downside: You can’t turn them off.  Imagine having a glowstick that you can not only turn off, but at the press of a button you could make that glow stick into a regular flashlight.  That is essentially what we have with the Lifegear 200 Hour Glow Sticks.… Continue reading on Gear Diary …

Last week we did not know if the N900 was coming to the US, and now we do.  I was checking my feeds at lunch and saw that Brighthand has indeed posted that the N900 is available for pre-order in the US for $650.  I assume that this is a unlocked version, as the Nokia site lists no carrier.  There are unconfirmed reports that T-Mobile may be carrying this as well, so you may be able to get it for less than $650. But only time will tell… Continue reading on Gear Diary …

If you are going to go jogging, nothing beats using the current generation iPod shuffle. It is small, light, has a built-in clip and holds a good amount of music. It works great. Sometimes, though, you just don’t want to use any device other than your iPhone or iPod touch. Sure, it is rather sizable and weighs a whole heck of a lot more than a shuffle. But then again, the shuffle won’t let you make calls or listen to internet radio the way you can from your iPhone, or carry 32GB of music or podcasts the way you can on the touch. For such times there’s the new Scosche soundKASE. Let’s take a look.… Continue reading on Gear Diary …

If you’ve been waiting for the new US CDMA version of the HTC Touch Pro2 that Clinton, Drew and I reviewed earlier this summer, then now is the time to pay attention to the Sprint network – they have their version of the Touch Pro2 out on September 8, and phonedog.com has the unboxing. $349.99 after rebates with the two year contract. It’ll cost you, but man…what a sweet unit. I would be soooooo tempted  if I didn’t dislike Sprint so much. phonedog.com via coolsmartphone Continue reading on Gear Diary …

I read a post on another site the other day about the trend away from Bluetooth headsets. As luck would have it, I had recently come across the Plantronics Voyager 855 I reviewed for Just Another Mobile Monday last summer and had started using them again. The experience was/is… well… awesome. The headset is comfortable, sounds great and offers a degree of flexibility that is all too rare. Even though I reviewed them a year ago the Voyager 855 remain in Plantronics’ catalogue. There is, however, a major difference now… Amazon has the $150 heaset for under $35. That makes it a STEAL. Let’s take a look.… Continue reading on Gear Diary …

Today is day twenty-four of HP and Microsoft’s ‘Back to School and Better Together’ Giveaway, which means that Zen College Life will begin theirs. Up for grabs is a computer combo containing an HP dv6, an HP Mini 110 and Syncables software – which allows you to keep the larger laptop at home but carry the smaller netbook (synced and carrying all of your data!) when on the go. The Winner will also get a customized Zen College Life Timbuk2 bag to carry their loot! Don’t forget that OUR contest will start tomorrow! … Continue reading on Gear Diary …

F-Secure has released the next version of their Internet Security suite, Internet Security 2010.  This version promises better performance, browsing protection with unique exploit shield, a better user experience, parental controls, a redesigned scanning technology, new statistics and Windows 7 support. To celebrate, F-Secure is having a twitter contest.  All you have to do is follow @FSecure and then tweet the following by 11:59 PM PDT on September 17, 2009: Get your chance to win a Nikon D60 from @FSecure http://bit.ly/cznad #F-Secure – Better security in every way http://www.f-secure.com Prizes include a Nikon D60, a Nikon CoolPix Video Camera or 1 of 5… Continue reading on Gear Diary …

On Tuesday of this week Gmail went down for one of the longer periods of time that I’ve noticed. It was inaccessible via web browser for over 1.5 hours although IMAP and POP accounts continued to work. This morning Google has notified their Google Apps users that they’ll be receiving a 3 day service credit as compensation for the outage. To add to what Dan has previously said, while I’m not ok with service outages I do appreciate a company that “mans up” and gives a straight explanation without hiding behind a corporate veil of superiority and secrecy. Worth noting that I lost no email during the outage. Score one Google. Full email follows.… Continue reading on Gear Diary …

Have a fetish for comics? Speak only Italian? Coming soon Android will be addressing both those issues! Android Market is adding an application category for comics – as well as sports, health and themes. Google yesterday announced the addition of screenshots, promotional icons and descriptions to the Android Market v1.6 . They’ve also added the four previously mentioned sub-categories (sports, health, themes and comics) as well as support for the Italian language. Unfortunately I didn’t see if they’ll allow us to update Android apps all at once instead of forcing a kludgy click by click to upgrade each application one by one. Android Developers Continue reading on Gear Diary …

Amazon is sending an email to Kindle owners who were impacted by their mid-July erasure of the book 1984 from Kindle devices. Apparently the book, which had been uploaded by a third party publisher through a self-service area of the Kindle site, had copyright issues and even though Amazon briefly allowed the book to be downloaded they quickly cut off sales of the book. Then, in a move that angered Kindle owners and eBook fans everywhere, they electronically erased it from all Kindles. Now Amazon is notifying those affected that they’re sorry – and you can have your book back or here’s $30 for your problems in the form of a credit. As you were one of the customers impacted by the Continue reading on Gear Diary …

I recently posted about my love/hate relationship with the Nokia E71x. It’s gotten a bit more contentious lately, due to various and mysterious software issues. Calendar entries that refuse to accept date changes, programs that freeze repeatedly, games that malfunction…it has been frustrating to say the least. Cue Nokia PC Suite and their backup suite. My first thought was that perhaps a backup and then full restore might smooth out the quirks, plus it would provide an excellent test of the backup system. If that did not fix my issues, I could reset the phone, rebuild it, and then back up my “clean” setup. I’ve done this before on Windows Mobile phones, iPhones and Palm… Continue reading on Gear Diary …