Wouldn’t it be awesome if you could just point your mobile phone’s camera at something or someone, press a single button, and without any further action on your part a picture — complete with GPS coördinates — would be snapped and instantly emailed to yourself, your spouse, a parent, your best friend, or … well, you get the idea. I can think of times where a feature such as this might be handy — like sharing the names and locations of newly discovered dive bars or hole in the wall restaurants with friends when you find them, or creating a travelogue of photos and locations for friends and family when on… Continue reading on Gear Diary …

One of the reasons Steve Jobs came for the late arrival of any form of Apple-supported multitasking was the battery hit that occurs when multiple apps are running even after the user has moved away from that particular screen. The result is that only in the 4th iteration of Apple’s mobile operating system has any form of multitasking emerged and even with it there are strict limitations. As Larry and I discussed in last weeks Gear Chat, there are only a certain number of functions that can run in the background and, even then, developers have to retool their apps to include this functionality. Yes, if you want true “App Backgrounding” you’ll still… Continue reading on Gear Diary …

The iPhone 4 is out and despite the issues some are experiencing it is pretty amazing. The screen is gorgeous (so long as you avoided the ones with the yellowish issues), the speed is great, the battery life is impressive and the whole device just feels awesome in your hand. It is everything Apple promised it would be- with one glaring exception. Despite what Jobs said you WILL want to protect your new iPhone 4 with a case. The screen scratches, the glass shatters and that is just the initial reports. Yes, it is a great phone but in its own way it, like the 3G and 3GS before it, can be a bit delicate… Continue reading on Gear Diary …

Herbie Hancock learned a lot from his time with Miles Davis, musically and also about being restlessly creative. After leaving Miles band before the earth-shaking Bitches Brew era, he headed off to release his own series of classics. He had already carved a great space in modal music with his Blue Note recordings Maiden Voyage and Speak Like a Child, but then went on to record Fat Albert Rotunda and the classic Headhunters which solidified him as an all-time great in pretty much every aspect of the music. He was there at the start of MTV with the techno-funk-hip-hop-dance song Rockit, and the video (with Hancock barely visible) serves as a reminder of the stark… Continue reading on Gear Diary …

I’ve never been all that pleased with the various mobile blogging apps currently available for the iPhone. But with iOS 4 out and a new iPhone I thought I would give it a go once more. The image above is a screen capture from my iPhone. This picture is not…. It was just taken with the iPhone 4′s camera. This video was too, and the new version of the Blogpress app lets you directly upload and embed video via YouTube. How does it look? We’ll know soon enough.… Continue reading on Gear Diary …

You know you are of a certain age if the acronym WORM immediately evokes CD-R in your brain. WORM stands for ‘Write Once Ready Many times’. In the early days of commercially available recordable CD media the drives were used as back-up devices competitive with 8mm DAT. Consumer systems lost the WORM name and became CD-R in around 1990, with the first rewritable CD-RW systems only introduced in 1997 and commercially viable in 1999! Since then every sort of Flash memory storage has been rewritable to the point where it is hard to even think about a ‘write once’ architecture. Of course, there are inherent issues with such an insecure format – what if you… Continue reading on Gear Diary …

booq makes some of the most thoughtfully designed and rugged notebook bags I have seen. The saying goes that the “devil is in the details”. Well booq pays exceptionally close attention to those details. As a result, they come up with some designs that look a bit different from other bags and include features that won’t be found anywhere else. For example their bags include a Terralinq Serial Number to safeguard your bag in the event of loss and a top-mounted handle that all but disappears when not being used. Well booq has just introduced a new back that takes the age-old design of the messenger bag and brings it into the 21st century in… Continue reading on Gear Diary …

When Judie, Kevin, Larry and I were at CES in January one of the “big things” was the oncoming rush of 3D televisions. Well the first ones have been rolling out and Samsung has gotten with the program. Their new 55″ 1080p 240Hz 3D LED HDTV is today’s Gear Deal. Samsung UN55C7000 provides 55″ of 1080p High Definition TV. It features 4 HDMI inputs and has built-in Internet TV for watching YouTube, Flickr, Amazon Video on Demand, FaceBook. It features an ultra-slim design with ConnectShare movie so you can connect a USB flash drive or digital camera and view movies or photos right on it. It even has Skype-built-in. And if all this weren’t enough… Continue reading on Gear Diary …

Well it seems that the folks at Slacker Radio aren’t living up to their name all that well. Nope, they’ve been busy bees in recent days. It only a few weeks ago that Slacker’s iPhone app added the ability to cache music for offline listening. Now comes word that the Slacker app has been updated yet again, this time to support iOS 4.0. And you know what that means boys and girls… that’s right if your iPhone 3GS or current generation iPod touch is running iOS 4.0 or you have a shiny new iPhone 4 you’ll be able to keep Slacker running even as you go to use other apps on your iDevice… Continue reading on Gear Diary …

The new iPhone officially launched today.  A few, ok a lot, of folks who preordered their phones directly from Apple though were lucky enough to receive their phones yesterday, a day early. Are you stuck in line waiting for you new iPhone 4 right now? We’re seeing a lot of different “issues” pop up on some of these devices.  It seems to me many more so than with previous iPhones.  That’s not to say that more iPhones are having problems but that there seems to be a larger amount of different issues with the new phones. Getting a new iPhone 4?  Here’s a round-up of what to check for. Yellowing screen: Many users are reporting a yellowing tint in certain areas of the iPhone 4′s retina… Continue reading on Gear Diary …

Before you head out to buy your next car, you might want to find out if your bank will float you a loan for your very own jetpack. Businessweek reported recently that Martin Aircraft has developed a viable jetpack that runs on premium gasoline! All we need is the FAA to clear commuters to use these instead of cars, and the roads will be far, far clearer. Even more amazing, Martin Aircraft is hoping to sell the jetpacks for $86,000! Yes, that’s a completely insane price for a jetpack, but it makes them potentially marketable, instead of “so expensive they’re just a concept”. Being a child of the ’80s, I am still a little bitter that we’re five years away from the flying cars of… Continue reading on Gear Diary …

I love the Skyfire browser. If you aren’t fortunate enough to be running Android 2.2 (aka Froyo), Skyfire is your best bet for web video on the go, and your only option for flash video. It’s also a very handy browser to have around in general, with the ability to swap between mobile, desktop and iPhone browsing. Best of all, it’s remarkably flexible, and runs equally well on my Droid and on the Camangi Webstation. If you’re familiar with Skyfire from the Windows Mobile days, you may remember that everything went through their servers. With the Android version, only the flash content uses Skyfire’s servers, the rest is rendered natively on your phone (for anyone who has some privacy concerns about proxy servers.) Well, with the… Continue reading on Gear Diary …

My kids finally are out of school. Believe it or not their last day was June 22nd. With all of the snow we got here on the East Coast this past winter, extra days had to be made up resulting in an additional week+ for them. What’s the first thing my kids wanted to do when they got home yesterday? See Toy Story 3. I obliged and we enjoyed the third offering from Pixar. When we got home I treated the girls to the Toy Story 3 application on my iPad. Disney had been kind enough to send me a copy of the application for review and I’d been saving it on my… Continue reading on Gear Diary …

The Camangi Webstation has been updated again! I’m starting to think I might be one of five people still using this device, but it is steadily improving with each software release. I have been using the update for the last few days, so read on for my thoughts so far! The Good: The biggest change here is that (finally!) Camangi has given users the option of a plain homescreen. You can finally turn off the skin they were using with scrolling icons, which is great. I was using home replacements, which suck down valuable (and scarce) memory. Being able to use the… Continue reading on Gear Diary …

Let’s face it, technology has finally gotten to the point where some of the gadgets we lusted after in cartoons and science fiction programs as children are now becoming a reality. I mean, the iPhone does even more than a Star Trek communicator (well everything but communicate intergalactically but I’m sure that is coming). The iPad looks like one of the tablet information devices that were so common in scifi shows 30 years ago. And Dick Tracy’s 2-Way Wrist Radio (first introduced on January 13th, 1946 and then upgraded to a 2-Way Wrist TV in 1964) how cool was that?!?!? Well you may not be able to get the 2-Way Wrist TV yet (well actually… Continue reading on Gear Diary …