Category: Gear

  • Sprint USB Modem Smacks Down Verizon

    (Updated 3/28) As I mentioned the other day, I just passed my two year anniversary as a customer of Verizon’s wireless broadband service. I decided to try Sprint’s competing service since it costs $20 less a month (I can’t add a voice line to the same account). Well, the Sprint Novatel Ovation U720 modem arrived…

  • Time for Sprint v. Verizon for mobile net needs

    Well, it seems like only yesterday I was signing up for Verizon’s mobile broadband service with a Novatel v620 PC Card modem at $79.99 a month. But it’s been two years and in the world of cell phone contracts, two is the magic number. I’m free to consider the competition. Why bother? For one, Verizon…

  • Canon’s new hybrid camera: umm, wow?

    (Updated with further reports) Canon unveiled a hybrid still photo/video camera today at such a low price point ($500 manufacturer recommended) with such an insane feature set (7.1 megapixel camera plus high definition video recording and image stabilization) that it almost defies belief. The new Powershot TX-1 has a lot of smart features, from obvious…

  • New 24″ iMac is mondo big & mondo cool

    I stealthily updated the “tools of my trade” page recently but in case you missed it, there’s a new leader of the (computer) pack around these parts. After going back and forth and back and forth for days, I decided that the future was a desktop and not a laptop. As my brother pointed out,…

  • Mine wifi eyes doth deceive me

    Hmm…just the other day, it seemed like the installation of Netgear’s 85-megabits-per-second Powerline switches had sped up my home office link to the net. It may have been an optical illusion. Just now, at least according to Speakeasy’s broadband speed test, my wifi download speed in my home office, which used to seem so weak,…

  • Electrifying speed from Netgear’s Powerline

    I moved my home office to another part of the house recently but there was was one small problem — a chimney ran behind one of the walls, greatly diminishing my wifi signal. Running ethernet cable would have solved the problem at a mighty cost so I decided to try the latest networking over power…

  • Google hears my long-tail e-book plea

    Back in October, when Sony’s new and fairly horrific $350 e-book reader gadget came out, I blasted the company — and some of the people who reviewed the reader — for completely misunderstanding the need for such a product. We don’t need to carry around 87 different best-sellers in an electronic format that’s inferior to…

  • In-depth review of updated Nokia web pad raves

    (Updated 1/25 with additional review) Mike Arrington’s little blog neighborhood is growing, as I noticed today that in addition to the gadget-focused blog added back in the summer (CrunchGear) and his original Web 2.0-ish site (TechCrunch), there’s now one about mobile stuff, too. It’s named — wait for it — MobileCrunch. In any event, blogger…

  • A scanner, a keyboard and other Macworld goodies

    Continuing last year’s tradition, I’m listing a few things featured at the Macworld show in San Francisco that caught my attention. I didn’t attend so this is just stuff that I read about… First, solving an annoying shortcoming of most USB keyboards, Canadian peripheral maker Matias introduced some Mac keyboards with USB 2.0 ports. Most…

  • Belkin’s nifty iPod recorder — finally

    Seems like its been since, oh, forever, that I’ve been looking for a voice recorder to attach to my fifth-generation iPod but its only been a year. When last we checked in on the wait in March, there were two contenders: XtremeMac’s MicroMemo (which looked cool but was kind of pricey) and Griffin Technology’s iTalk…