A few months ago I canceled my subscription to Jott. Between Reqall’s powerful voice-to-text memory system and Dragon Dictation I found that I wasn’t using it all that much. After a time however, I found that I missed being able to Jott new appointments to my Google Calendar and new tasks to Toodledo so I signed back up. This time I opted for the plan that lets you record just 15 seconds. It is much cheaper and would work fine since I only planned to use Jott for quick tasks and appointments only. But there was a problem… Jott stopped working on my iPhone as soon as I updated to iOS 4.0. I inquired as… Continue reading on Gear Diary …

It was supposed to be a great day … I had written first impressions about the original Alienware m11x and about how I was ordering the new one as soon as it became available. And while I was away on vacation my order shipped and arrived, so it was waiting for me upon my return. I was thrilled and couldn’t wait to get busy with it. After all, I loved so much about the original Alienware m11x (now called R1), including: – Near-netbook portability. – Better than netbook battery life (on integrated graphics) – True gaming laptop performance. – Better than gaming laptop battery life (on discrete graphics) My issues were few… Continue reading on Gear Diary …

Are you an amateur chef with an amazing recipe? If so, then you should enter LG’s “Taste of Something Better” cooking competition! All you have to do is “submit your best entrée or main dish recipe and you might win a trip to Beverly Hills to face off against two other contestants.” In return you’ll get a chance to win LG appliances and a chance to represent the United States in a Seoul Korea cooking competition. Finalists will go on to showcase their skills during Food & Wine’s “Taste of Beverly Hills” culinary festival this September, where they’ll compete for a suite of LG Continue reading on Gear Diary …

If you own an iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad and read books on it, hopefully you have downloaded as many free readers as possible. I mostly use iBooks, Kindle and have just started with the B&N eReader after recently grabbing the ‘Millennium Trilogy’ by Stieg Larsson from B&N with a gift card I was given. Barnes & Noble is offering an incentive for showing them you use (or at least have) their reader – free Starbucks coffee at one of their stores! According to the email and site, it is as simple as: 1. Download the FREE BN eReader App to your mobile device, and start your eBook library. 2. Visit a Barnes Continue reading on Gear Diary …

I reviewed Air Display a little over a week ago and was impressed. It is simple to set up, simple to use and does exactly what it promises… it lets your iPad become an extension of your computer. Since I’m using my 13″ MacBook Pro this month instead of my 27″ iMac I’m missing the large display that lets me keep a number of different windows side by side at the same time. The result is that Air Display has been far more useful than I would have ever expected. When I’m writing a review I can put product details on the iPad and do my writing on the MacBook. When I’m posting on… Continue reading on Gear Diary …

We end the week with a fully-loaded 15.6″ Dell Studio 15 notebook. The Dell Studio 15 has a Core i7 processor and 1GB of discrete graphics thanks to an ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5470 graphics card. It comes with a 9-cell battery and is pre-loaded with Windows 7 64-bit. Oh, and for even greater piece of mind the notebook comes with 1 year LoJack Laptops Theft Protection. This powerful notebook has an MSRP of $1,388.99 but our Gear Sponsor has found it with both $439 AND $90 off. That brings the final price down to $859.99. It will even ship for free! It is worth noting that the base specs (which are powerful… Continue reading on Gear Diary …

I recently reviewed the wonderful mind-mapping application Instaviz for iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad.  This is a great app and the developers are always hard at work bringing more features and making improvements.  If you are not one of the lucky winners of a promotional code I suggest you go spend the $9.99 and check out the app!  Here are the winners of the codes in no particular order.  Thank you to all who made comments and participated. Here are the winners.  Watch your email or Facebook messages for the codes! ocergj arvindr jewelzz ukmikep mattgibstein haesslich nomaded Chris Magnusson Melanie Lopez Congratulations!!!… Continue reading on Gear Diary …

There had been some rumors that Bioware would announce Dragon Age II today, and based on my love of the original you can safely assume I’ve been tracking those rumors closely, but I had decided to wait because frankly a rumor about a possible announcement that a game everyone knows is coming is now officially in progress and will be available at some point in the future … well, it leaves me a bit flat. Yet the unveiling of the official site along with news that pre-orders open today, THAT got my interest! The image above is from the site, which offers little information and some concept art. Here is what the… Continue reading on Gear Diary …

Most of the times a store is giving away a free prize, you have to buy something. McDonald’s doesn’t give you the toy for just contemplating a Happy Meal! But American Eagle is apparently very desperate for people to enter their stores…so if you can subject yourself to American Eagle long enough to try on a pair of jeans, they’ll give you a “free” phone! It requires a two year contract on your carrier of choice, but at least you’ll also receive a $25 gift card with it! So if this succeeds for AE, what other giveaways can we expect retailers to kick off in the future? Use the bathroom at Wal-Mart, get a free Continue reading on Gear Diary …

How would you feel if you and a group of other investors had contributed a total of $145 million into what you thought were real estate investments, only to later find out that instead a huge portion of that money had been put into the development of “Candwiches” and other equally odd and questionable products? That’s exactly what happened to a group of investors in Utah after Travis L. Wright offered them returns of up to 24% on real estate investments. Obviously promised returns that high should have been their first clue that something was fishy, but evidently Utah investors are known to be näive “to the point of losing their shirts, which makes them easy prey.” I guess… Continue reading on Gear Diary …

A few years ago I lost a good bit of weight thanks to the South Beach Diet. From a health perspective it was good. From a wardrobe perspective however… well that was a different story. Suddenly none of my suits fit. It was the same story with my dress shirts, and replacing them was going to be an expensive proposition. I happened to mention my need to go shopping to a co-worker, and she told me that her father gets all of his clothes custom-made and often for far less than he would if he were shopping “off the rack”. How did he manage this? Well his tailor came in… Continue reading on Gear Diary …

Image courtesy of Verizon If you’re in the market for a Motorola Droid X then you’re in luck, @droidlanding has officially begun the Droid X scavenger hunt. For the past few weeks we have been getting vague and nearly useless tweets about the 20 Droid X candidate phones that are scattered somewhere around the US. All that we really know for now is that you need to follow the @droidlanding Twitter account for all the latest clues and updates. The contest started yesterday on the 7th at midnight and will run until midnight on the 15th. We have yet to see any… Continue reading on Gear Diary …

The other day we were watching the news and there were three product recalls in a row and my wife mentioned hearing on the radio a report about ‘recall overload’, how so much stuff is being recalled so frequently that we become numb to it all. In fact, this week there are reports on various news sources about the issue. Well, apparently the government agencies issuing these recalls are aware of this, and have launched a mobile app called ‘Recall.gov’. It brings together data from the relevant agencies – Consumer Product Safety Commission, National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, Food and Drug Administration, and the Department of Agriculture – and displays it on your smartphone… Continue reading on Gear Diary …

This past winter I ran my first review of the new-for-2010 Ram Heavy Duty pickup line. (Notice I did not say “Dodge Ram” as the vehicle brand. Remember, Chrysler has chosen to spin its truck division apart from the Dodge world and simply call it “Ram.”) It was a Ram 3500 Crew Cab duallie 4×4 in SLT trim. Since then my driveway has been blessed with two additional Ram HD test models, each sporting some nifty accessories to help consumers further personalize their individual vehicles.… Continue reading on Gear Diary …

When I was a kid, phone design was still pretty much in its infancy–the “Princess” phone was pretty much the height of technology then.  It wasn’t bolted to the wall!  The dial lit up!  It came in colors other than black or beige!  Eventually, it even had buttons instead of a dial! In those prehistoric days, everything ran across copper, and 99% or more of the traffic was voice–ARPANET was just getting going, and all we primitive creatures did was make one-to-one phone calls.  (The concept of a many-to-many phone call–a “party call”–was almost insanely exotic to me.)  So worry about the “technological infrastructure” was, well, not on anyone’s radar. Which was good, because… Continue reading on Gear Diary …