Wireless sharing start-up, FON is offering a $5 wireless router, as long as you are willing to become a Fonero and share your broadband access. Check it out, it might save you some dollars. Full review to follow soon. Just posted about this on GigaOM as well.
Email has become the necessary evil of modern communication – damn if you use it, and damn if you don’t. Like most modern virtual workers, I am swamped by an unending stream of email, which pours like torrential monsoon in downtown Bombay.
With over 500 emails a day, I have used every tip and trick, including fancy email add-ons such as superlative Mail Tags and Mail Act On, but I still find going a bit rough. As an Apple Mail user, I have optimized the client with smart folders, but still it is hard to keep up with the steady stream of messages. Result – I spend precious weekend answering emails, and missing out on fun in the sun.
Maybe I am missing something, or perhaps using the wrong email client. How do you manage your email life, and what client do you use. Are there any special tips and tricks you can share with us?
With CTIA having just concluded, why not kick off the week with a new mobile application: Flurry, an email client that allows you to download and view email on any mobile phone that is Java capable. Most if not all phones can! Flurry is the flagship offering of San Francisco-based Flurry Inc. What essentially the company is offering an email client that allows you to check and reply to email from any email account. GMail users have to follow some special instructions.
The company is officially supposed to launch at DEMO Fall’ 06 in San Diego, but the service is already available for sign-ups. The sign-up process is pretty simple and straightforward, and once you sign-up, you get a text message with an embedded link, which lets you download and install the application. It is is a pretty painless process, and I was up and running on my E61 Nokia within a few minutes. It took a while for the email inboxes to synchronize.
Flurry is very similar to MovaMail, a mobile email application I am quite fond of. One thing that is quite cool about Flurry is that it allows you to set-up rules and limit the emails forwarded to your inbox. This could be helpful for many of us who use IMAP servers and are constantly fighting a losing battle with spam. It is not a slam-dunk service.
Despite being brisk, Flurry could use some interface polish, but that’s a minor quibble. Flurry doesn’t sync the status or the sent messages to your servers. That is one of the reasons why I don’t use Movamail and instead opt for other solutions such as Good.
If you don’t want to spend money on an Exchange/Blackberry combination or Exchange/Good combo, this could be a low cost solution for you. The software makers also have a mobile RSS reader functionality, though I have not tried it as yet. Nokia E61’s built in RSS readers does the job quite admirably!
John Dvorak, a fellow Cranky Geek, all around rabble-rouser and a veteran scribe is one of the original virtual workers, traveling around the country look for stories (or non stories.) Since he is good friend of ours (we have been invited to his web show often enough), we asked him what was his favorite laptop and why he used it? He dropped us an email, which goes something like this …..
Over the years I’ve always gravitated towards the most lightweight full function laptops available for personal use. Over the past five years or so I’ve gone from the Toshiba R-100 Protégé to the R-200 and that’s the machine I now use and recommend for people who want the most technologically advanced and lightest computer available. I like it because it looks hot and always gets compliments.
It’s fast. And it only weighs a little over 2 pounds. It’s also loaded with gigabit Ethernet, 1280×1024 display, 802.11g and everything else you need. And if you add a special lightweight add-on battery you get up to 7 hours of battery life.
The drawback to the machine is that all this engineering does come at a cost. The machine is not cheap. But nothing great is ever cheap. It rocks. If you do a lot of international travel you’ll know that weight restrictions and other issues complicate matters.
A lightweight notebook like this saves two or more pounds on your allowance and that can be a big deal. Until someone shows me a better product, this is the only laptop I recommend. And as a bonus it has an excellent built-in microphone and speaker setup making it a great tool as a Skype client when traveling.
Sometimes there’s just no other option — no RJ-45 outlet, no WiFi, not even EVDO or3G.
The only way to get online is with a modem. For instance, right now I’m the town of Silverton, Washington (Population: 15 on a good day), and I’m posting this at 21 kbps. And that’s twice as fast as the old solution, which was through a Globalstar satellite phone. And I still have to charge the laptop battery while the generator is running.
When the town finally got phones a couple of months ago, the running joke was “Welcome to the 20th century, Silverton!” So what do I do to get the most out of the experience, short of installing the Lynx text browser?
Gentle readers, quite a few of you have requested additional features such as SWAT Wiki, more interactivity and greater involvement with the site. So we are ask you what would you like to see in terms of community features? Would you rather have ability to blog here or should we simply get a forum board going? Again Wiki vs Forums… you decide and we will take a cue from you.
By Jonathan Hirshon
Is Apple the perfect mobile computer? Sometimes I have asked myself that question, and have used some puissant tools available under OS X to bring it as close to perfection. I am a public relations and marketing professional who also happens to be a card-carrying member of the IEEE as well as a pro-bono Mac evangelist for the last 20 years. As such, I’m in a (hopefully) unique position to be able to offer you a clear and concise series of recommendations based on both personal experience and technical superiority. Now, let’s dive in:
Kotaku poured some water on a rumor from an industry analyst that Sony’s Playstation Portable could soon drop in price to an eminently affordable $150. And while I’d love a PSP just to kill some time while stuck on the bus, it made me wonder about the viability of some of the portable gaming platforms as something to integrate into your work life. With a little brain grease, you can hack and modify iPods, PSPs, Nintendo DS and other handhelds to do much more than just play Tetris or the latest Christina Aguilera hit.
With such a tiny form factor, it’s certainly tempting to figure out how to use such a device as something that you can carry around instead of a laptop to quickly check email, lookup web info and the like. Does anyone use a gaming device to actually keep tabs on their work? And at what price, or with what features, do you think would make it practical?
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Web Work 101: How To Escape The Cubicle
