AT&T, Boingo Partner to Offer 1GB of Free Access to Wi-Fi Hotspots

Sorry, I could not read the content fromt this page.Sorry, I could not read the content fromt this page.

From Laptopmagazine. Product reviews and advice for best reference

Pogoplug Series 4 Review: Remote Drive Access Made Simpler and Faster

The Pogoplug lets you turn any USB-attached drive into a network-accessible drive. The Pogoplug Series 4 is a vast improvement over previous models, starting with the upgrade of the USB ports to the 3.0 standard. In addition, series 4 offers a SATA/USM (Universal Storage Module, such as Seagate's Expansion drives use) slot on the top of the unit and an SD Card slot.

Pogoplug makes implementing your own remotely accessible storage extremely easy. Power up the unit, attach it to your network router or switch, and step through a simple online setup procedure using your browser--and you can access the unit and any attached drives from anyplace that has an Internet connection. You don't even have to enter a unit ID, as in the past. I'm one of the very few people to have experienced trouble with the Pogoplug's auto-configuration. Long story short: If the light on the front of your unit doesn't turn green as it should, put the Pogoplug in your router's DMZ until the light turns green, and then place it back behind the firewall.

The Pogoplug website portal where you upload, download, share, and view files is capable enough to get the task done. You use an email address and a password to log on. Of course, you're limited to the speed of your connection, but if you connect from the same local network, the Pogoplug is smart enough to bypass the Web portal and use the local connection for much faster uploads and downloads--a major benefit when you need to transfer large amounts of data before hitting the road.

The portal supports media streaming through your browser, and it understands a reasonable array of common music, image, and video file types, though it could use some tweaking. It misplaced an OGG Vorbis audio file in the movies section, and it doesn't visually delineate files and folders adequately. I could also argue for requiring a double-click rather than a single-click to tunnel down into folders, but that's being picky. The portal is certainly usable, but it has plenty of room for improvement. Pogoplug also provides passable remote access apps for both Android and iOS.

With Series 4, Pogoplug has finally addressed a major concern about the company's devices--that they would be useless if the company/portal ever went belly up. The company now has a PC/Mac/Linux software client that lets you directly access (restore) the files stored with the Pogoplug storage, and back up files from your PC. Portal or no, you can now use the Pogoplug for local network storage.

Since the danger that your Pogoplug might morph into an unreachable box has vanished, I can recommend it without reservation as a stress-free way to access and share files across the Internet without actually storing them online. The portal would benefit from some minor adjustments, but otherwise the Pogoplug Series 4 experience is top-notch.

From PC World. Shop computer and accessories from Amazon here

Pogoplug Series 4 Review: Remote Drive Access Made Simpler and Faster

The Pogoplug lets you turn any USB-attached drive into a network-accessible drive. The Pogoplug Series 4 is a vast improvement over previous models, starting with the upgrade of the USB ports to the 3.0 standard. In addition, series 4 offers a SATA/USM (Universal Storage Module, such as Seagate's Expansion drives use) slot on the top of the unit and an SD Card slot.

Pogoplug makes implementing your own remotely accessible storage extremely easy. Power up the unit, attach it to your network router or switch, and step through a simple online setup procedure using your browser--and you can access the unit and any attached drives from anyplace that has an Internet connection. You don't even have to enter a unit ID, as in the past. I'm one of the very few people to have experienced trouble with the Pogoplug's auto-configuration. Long story short: If the light on the front of your unit doesn't turn green as it should, put the Pogoplug in your router's DMZ until the light turns green, and then place it back behind the firewall.

The Pogoplug website portal where you upload, download, share, and view files is capable enough to get the task done. You use an email address and a password to log on. Of course, you're limited to the speed of your connection, but if you connect from the same local network, the Pogoplug is smart enough to bypass the Web portal and use the local connection for much faster uploads and downloads--a major benefit when you need to transfer large amounts of data before hitting the road.

The portal supports media streaming through your browser, and it understands a reasonable array of common music, image, and video file types, though it could use some tweaking. It misplaced an OGG Vorbis audio file in the movies section, and it doesn't visually delineate files and folders adequately. I could also argue for requiring a double-click rather than a single-click to tunnel down into folders, but that's being picky. The portal is certainly usable, but it has plenty of room for improvement. Pogoplug also provides passable remote access apps for both Android and iOS.

With Series 4, Pogoplug has finally addressed a major concern about the company's devices--that they would be useless if the company/portal ever went belly up. The company now has a PC/Mac/Linux software client that lets you directly access (restore) the files stored with the Pogoplug storage, and back up files from your PC. Portal or no, you can now use the Pogoplug for local network storage.

Since the danger that your Pogoplug might morph into an unreachable box has vanished, I can recommend it without reservation as a stress-free way to access and share files across the Internet without actually storing them online. The portal would benefit from some minor adjustments, but otherwise the Pogoplug Series 4 experience is top-notch.

From PC World. Shop computer and accessories from Amazon here

Kobo Vox Adds Google Play Access

Now, for $179.99, the Kobo Vox comes with Google Play preloaded. Existing Kobo Vox owners can also get Google Play by upgrading their software. This gives the e-reader/tablet access to more than 500,000 apps, as opposed to the 350,000 in the GetJar store that the tablet previous supported.

The company claims that the software will automatically update when the tablet is connected to the Web. But, we found with our Vox that we had to upgrade it manually by going to Settings from the Home screen. Then tapping System Update. When it found the update was available, we were able to tell it to Update Now. After restarting and downloading the files we were up and running.

While still running Android 2.3.4, the device’s upgrade does offer wider access to apps including Google Play Moves, as well as automatic integration and backup through Google. And the Vox maintains is competitive library of 2.5 million e-books, magazines and newspapers, while costing $20 less than Amazon’s Kindle Fire and Barnes & Noble’s Nook Tablet.

The Kobo CTO, Dan Leibu had this to say about the news. “Google Play is the perfect addition for the content-rich eReading environment of the Kobo Vox. This is another big step in our ability to give people an open and compelling multimedia device that can be customized to suit their needs. Having access to the thousands of games, apps and tools offered by Google Play makes the Kobo Vox an eReader and so much more.”

In other Kobo news, the company recently announced they offer an app in the Windows Store (in addition to Apple’s App Store and in Google Play). Whether access to the Google Play store from the device will boost Kobo Vox sales, however, is an open question.

From Laptopmagazine. Visit Amazon Computer and Notebook Center Here

Quickly Access Nonstandard Characters With Free Holdkey

Holdkey lets you enter characters from the Windows extended set (not shown on the keyboard) by pressing and holding a key--much as with the virtual keyboards found on mobile devices. For instance, with Holdkey running, pressing the e key generates the "e" character, but continuing to hold the key morphs it into an up arrow. When you release the key, a menu pops up displaying ten related characters in the extended set, such as "ë." Mouse to the character you want and it's entered instead.

Holdkey runs in the background and is configured via this dialog.There's also a more option in the pop-up menu that takes you to the Holdkey Web site where you'll find more related characters that you can copy to the clipboard. Obviously, you'll need an Internet connection to make use of this feature.

It's the mousing that's my issue with the free version of Holdkey. There's no way to select the character that you want from the pop-up menu using the keyboard cursor keys. Reaching for the mouse is not something I like to do when I'm writing--it disrupts the typing and creative process. (No wisecracks, please.)

Holdkey Pro (€7.5) solves this issue for most users by adding the ability to quickly enter single characters by simply using the Windows key or Ctrl-Windows and Shift-Windows key combinations. Sadly, this is useless to me. My precious-90s era IBM M-Series keyboard--the best ever made for typists--has no Windows key.

The Pro version of Holdkey also allows you to enter accented characters by pressing a standard or altered (Windows-) punctuation character once or twice, then the character to be accented--for example, typing two parentheses then e once will enter "ë."

To address both my mousing and Windows-key issues I'd like to see an option to ditch the pop-up menu and simply enter a single character with press/hold, or perhaps cycling through the extended characters as you continue to hold the key. Coupled to a facility for editing the order so you can place your most commonly-used characters first, the latter could be a very elegant entry methodology.

My minor gripes aside, Holdkey is a great idea. For people who regularly make of use the extended character set or symbols, it could prove quite useful.

--Jon L. Jacobi

From PCWorld. Visit Amazon Computer and Notebook Center here

Access Nonfiction Books and and Video With Safari Books Online

One of the biggest challenges in distributing digital content is to make it easier for people to consume legally rather than illegally. When it comes to e-books, this gets even trickier; e-book files are much smaller than video or music files, so they can be downloaded much faster. Safari Bookshelf (various subscription plans, starting at $10/month) is a bid to make it easier, faster, and more productive to consume electronic books online legally rather than download them.

Safari Books Online offers access to a staggering selection of technical books and videos, and makes it easy to find what you need.Safari Bookshelf (no relation to Apple's Web browser) is a subscription-based service, for which you can pay either monthly or yearly. When users first try to sign up, they are offered either unlimited access for $43 per month, or a 10-slot bookshelf for $20 per month. There is a third option, not shown on the page, offering a 5-slot bookshelf for $10.

"Slots" are basically places your virtual shelf has for books. Once you choose to read a book, it takes up one slot on your shelf, and must stay there for at least one month. Once that month elapses, you can swap it out for another book. Slots are a good way to offer the service at a reduced price, but they also make it much less useful.

The Unlimited Access plan does away with the concept of slots and lets you read any and all books, but you still must read them online, using a browser (Safari also offers an iPad app and a mobile-friendly version of the site). If you're more interested in downloading e-books for offline reading, both the unlimited and limited plans offer download "tokens." You get five tokens every month, which you can use to download chapters (a chapter usually costs one token). You can also buy extra tokens for $2 each.

The catalog of books offered can only be described as staggering. Safari Books Online hosts books by Apress, Adobe Press, Microsoft Publishing, O'Reilly, Sams, Wiley, and several other big-name publishers. Books span the gamut of programming, Web development, computer graphics (Photoshop and friends), and more. Not all books are computer-related: There are plenty of books about photography, for example. No fiction, though.

The search feature is well thought out, and is one of the best parts of using Safari Books Online. Imagine having to leaf through 19,000 books to find the information you need, or even to search through PDF files on your computer. Safari Books Online lets you do a simple text search, but you can then quickly refine results by category, publication year, author, and publisher. You can also search within the results, so you can search for "macro photography" first, and then search for "Photoshop" to further refine.

Safari Books Online is not only about published books, though. The Unlimited plan also provides access to many video courses, and to a section called "Rough Cuts," containing drafts of pre-published manuscripts--the bleeding edge of online publishing. When reading a Rough Cuts manuscript, a Feedback bar appears at the top of the screen letting you comment about the section you are reading. Comments are publicly visible, and cannot be edited or deleted once submitted, so weigh your words carefully.

Safari Books Online offers a great deal, but it is not a perfect service. For video courses, I still find Lynda.com superior, especially given the price ($25 per month, almost half of the Safari price). And if you are looking for pinpoint solutions to specific problems, nothing beats free tech Q&A website Stack Overflow.

The steep price Safari Books charges for the Unlimited plan only makes it worthwhile if you regularly buy more than two brand-new computer books every month--and I don't know anyone who does, really. Apart from this, Safari Books Online is an amazing service, and is probably the best way to read unlimited computer books online today. Highly recommended.

Note: The free trial lasts for ten days or 1000 page views, whichever comes first.

--Erez Zukerman

From PCWorld. Visit Amazon Computer and Notebook Center here