Firefox 4 promises to let users better control relationships with websites

NEW YORK  The next version of the Firefox browser, set for release by the end of the year, will pare down the software’s menus and certain user options while giving Web surfers more control over privacy. Firefox 4 promises to let users better control relationships with websites by describing more simply what information is gathered by cookies, which are files that store data on website visits.

In Firefox’s current version, determining which websites are peering into users’ Internet habits is a complex process involving many menus and submenus. With the change, users will be able to see from a single menu what information websites are gathering. Users will then have the option of deciding which cookies to allow and which to disable. But Mozilla, the browser’s creator, will also take away some user controls to make Firefox sleeker. That means taking out buttons and menus that Mozilla says few people use anyway. Mozilla says the change won’t just make websites load faster, it will make them feel faster. “The simpler an interface looks, the faster it will seem,” Mike Beltzner, Firefox director of development, said in a video presentation posted to its website this week. Firefox said the browser will be made more stable, by requiring fewer add-on programs for additional functionality.

The program will use the new Web programming language, HTML5, which will allow videos and other multimedia content to play in the browser without needing companion software such as Adobe System Inc.’s Flash. Firefox is second to Microsoft Corp.’s market-dominant Internet Explorer browser in usage. Microsoft is also working on an update. Internet Explorer 9, Microsoft’s latest browser offering, will also support HTML5. An early version is already out for testing.(AP)

Pogoplug only supports USB 2.0

pogoplug

Pogoplug was a PCMag Editors’ Choice in its first version. Now CloudEngine’s latest iteration of its multimedia sharing device has been updated with several new features including a lurid purple-pink cable stand. It does what it did before: give you fast access, locally or remotely, to your USB storage devices—up to four of them, instead of just one. There are multimedia enhancements: you can stream almost any video file, do automatic media synching, and perform improved contact management. All of which helps make up for the $30 price increase from the original.

Although it does have more USB ports as well as a 1 GB Ethernet port, this little, Linux-based device isn’t significantly larger than the first-generation. Its presence certainly wouldn’t overwhelm a small, home office. Maybe the sheer number of external devices you can connect to it will. Also nice: the price includes the fee for cloud-based sharing service for the life of the device.

Already own the first generation Pogoplug? No worries, as you can get the new software features as a free upgrade. You’re just stuck with the 1 USB port.Pogoplug doesn’t do anything much differently than other NAS devices except it doesn’t come with on-board storage.However, it does allow you to easily setup content and device sharing. A reader asked how Pogoplug differs from a service like LogMeIn Hamachi which provides hosted VPN and requires no specialized hardware. Both PogoPlug and LogMeIn can achieve remote access to your computer. However, for non-IT folks and home users, the idea of a VPN can be daunting. PogoPlug is effortless sharing, and is ideal for a home or small business where there is no IT presence.

Pogoplug only supports USB 2.0 and older devices and the following disk drive file systems: NTFS, FAT32, Mac OS Extended Journaled and Non-Journaled (HFS+) and EXT-2/EXT-3. The Web-based management console can be accessed via any modern browser.

Setup
The folks at Pogoplug tout how fast it is to get the device setup and they are not joking. The time to connect the device to a router, then to a 150 GB USB Verbatim external drive, powering it all up, to seeing my drive’s files on mypoloplug.com (the device’s Web-based console) took a scant 2 minutes and 19 seconds. The longest part of the setup was getting up off my chair and walking to the router.

What’s New
There really aren’t any noticeable changes in the Web-based interface since the last version. There is improved contact management. Anytime you type in an email address to send an invite to share a file, that name is automatically remembered. Such addresses make up your address book within the system. There’s no way currently to import contacts, like from Hotmail or Gmail, but perhaps that will be on Pogoplug’s roadmap.

Pogoplug next gen supports a wider range of video file types that can be streamed to other users as well as to iPhones and Android phones. Blackberry isn’t supported but Pogoplug says it’s in the works.

Pogoplug now supports automatic medic synch. You can setup one-way synch from any media source to folders on the storage devices attached to Pogoplug. It offers location independent, global search; search across any drives connected to any of your Pogoplugs—that’s right, you can run multiples Pogoplugs on your network, so you could have more than four USB storage devices to access.

A new fun, feature is the ability to create slideshows. You don’t get the bells and whistles of Microsoft PowerPoint, but creating business presentations isn’t the purpose. I quickly put together a slideshow of pictures and a video by dragging and dropping them into the slideshow creation screen and added accompanying music. Note—Pogoplug doesn’t support all media files. I had no problem with .MP3s, but could not drag and drop a Windows Media Audio (.WMA) file into my slideshow. There’s also no way to control slideshow speed.

You can opt to use the free, downloadable client to access Pogoplug rather than a Web browser. The client treats the Pogoplug as another local hard drive on your machine, accessed via Windows Explorer, even when remote. Clients are available for Windows 32- and 64-bit desktops, Mac OS X and there’s a beta version available for Linux. Of course, as mentioned in the last review, there’s a terrific client for accessing files (not just video) from your iPhone.

Security
One thing I was concerned about was security. It was a bit disconcerting to fire a device up and see my personal files pop up via the Internet, even though I had to login to the Web-based client first. There is under-the-hood security, though. Both the Web-based and desktop clients use 256-AES encryption—security that is very difficult to crack. To ensure the highest security, it’s a good idea to access the web client using https://my.pogoplug.com rather than through HTTP.

Testing
This device is really peppy. Of course, much of the performance relies on Internet connection speed, but if this were sloppily-engineered, it could slow even the fastest broadband. When I disconnected the Verbatim drive and added a USB stick, I saw the contents of the memory stick online in under 3 minutes. I got this while connected to a DSL line that’s not the fastest broadband available, either.

I reconnected the Verbatim drive and three USB memory sticks to the Pogoplug simultaneously. The device does a nice job of scanning each newly connected device and I nimbly switched back and forth between each device’s libraries in the Web client.

Big warning—make sure you eject any drive you want to physically disconnect from Pogoplug using the eject command in the interface (it’s the same eject symbol you see on DVD and Blu-Ray Players.) I pulled the Verbatim drive while “hot,” that is, without clicking the eject button and the drive got hosed. It was inaccessible through Pogoplug and through Windows Explorer. No big loss for my test equipment, and this isn’t the norm for USB devices, of course, so your mileage may vary. But consider yourself warned.

Bottom Line
This really is a neat little device. It innovates by harnessing the power and flexibility of the cloud, without having your data actually reside in the cloud. With Pogoplug, you can access and share files over the Internet but the actual data remains in your control on your storage devices. The second-generation Pogoplug performs even better than the first, and the multimedia enhancements make it of even greater value, especially if you want to share. This version is as heartily recommended as the previous, despite the ghastly colored cable stand.

The LG Shine II

LG Shine II

The LG Shine II doesn’t mess with success. The first LG Shine was a best-seller on AT&T thanks to its high-end metallic body and solid call quality. Aside from a few minor improvements, the Shine II is virtually the same as the first model, with the same main benefit—it looks and feels good. It’s a good choice for AT&T subscribers looking for a basic, reliable, and classy voice phone.

Design and Call Quality
The Shine II measures 4.2 by 2.0 by 0.5 inches and weighs 4.4 ounces. The Shine’s brushed-aluminum housing makes it heavy but durable. Just like my old RAZR V3, I’d expect the Shine II to hold up nicely over time. It also looks great, and the cool blue backlighting enhanced the look further. The slider mechanism felt smooth and satisfying.

The 2.2-inch LCD has 240-by-320-pixel resolution. A new five-way control pad features a prominent, raised center button. The button, left, and right keys were fine, but the up and down keys were very small and stiff. Large-enough Send, End, and Back keys sit above an otherwise cramped, recessed keypad. Dialing numbers was tough with one hand.

As a quad-band EDGE (850/900/1800/1900 MHz) and dual-band HSDPA (850/1900 MHz) phone, the Shine II works on AT&T’s 3G network and on 2G EDGE networks overseas. Voice calls sounded loud, clear, and crisp, with a slightly trebly tone in the earpiece. Callers on the other end couldn’t distinguish between the Shine II and a BlackBerry Bold 9700 (also on AT&T); both sounded excellent. Calls sounded fine through a Plantronics Voyager Pro Bluetooth headset. The speakerphone went pretty loud, but sounded harsh and distorted at top volume. Battery life was on the short side, at 3 hours and 46 minutes of talk time.

User Interface, Apps, and Multimedia
The Shine II’s UI looks sharp and is well designed. The Shine II was very responsive to key presses. The stiff control pad wasn’t ideal for gaming, and the Shine II’s sluggish Java benchmark results mean you should stick to 2D titles. The Opera-powered Web browser was surprisingly good, offering mobile and landscape views. The browser delivers accurate renderings of desktop HTML pages, but the tiny screen is an impediment.

The Shine hooks into AT&T Mobile e-mail for Yahoo, Windows Live, and AOL accounts, but not Gmail. A basic IM client offers AIM, Yahoo, and Windows Live support but not Google Talk. Either way, with only a numeric keypad, this isn’t a messaging phone. (If you want a keyboard, the excellent Pantech Impact beckons, and even costs $20 less.) It also works with AT&T Navigator (powered by TeleNav) for voice-enabled, turn-by-turn GPS directions.

The Shine II’s music player includes an adjustable EQ, ringtone creator, and music recognition software. There’s 102MB of free onboard storage. A microSD card slot sits underneath the battery cover, but not under the battery; my 16GB SanDisk card worked fine. The proprietary headphone jack is a disappointment, and there are no wired earbuds in the box. Thankfully, the Shine II now supports stereo Bluetooth. Music tracks sounded very bassy over Motorola S9-HDs, even with the Shine II’s custom EQ off; LG seems to have hardwired in a bass boost. Tiny album art thumbnails displayed when available. Standalone 3GP and MP4 videos played very smoothly in landscape mode, though the video player was sluggish and clumsy to operate. Streamed CNN videos played smoothly for about 10 seconds before freezing and timing out on several attempts.

Camera and Conclusions
The 2-megapixel camera includes an LED flash and auto-focus. A built-in image editor resizes, crops, and rotates photos, and features some basic effects. Test photos looked OK, with a little noise but decent resolution in shadowy areas, and a slightly soft, grayish focus outdoors. Shutter speeds were just under one second. Recorded 320-by-240 videos had good color balance, but were too jerky at 10 frames per second.

The LG Shine II is a good handset, but I’d like to see its price come down. Otherwise, it runs into headwinds on AT&T’s lineup as better phones get discounted. The $99 Sony Ericsson c905a is a vertical slider like the LG Shine II, but it has a vastly more powerful 8.1-megapixel camera with face detection. The $149 Samsung Mythic SGH-a897, our current Editors’ Choice for AT&T feature phones, offers mobile TV, a high-resolution touch screen, and plenty of music and video features.

Neither of those phones have the Shine II’s aluminum-chic design, though. For thousands of folks to date, that has been enough to seal the deal—and it likely will be enough once again with the Shine II.

Tech blog, Singapore startup feud by tablet PC

Fujitsu P1610 tablet

About 18 months ago, a technology blogger got fed up with the industry and forged an alliance with a start up to make his dream computer. It almost worked.The touch-screen “tablet” device will be available for pre-order Saturday – from the start up. The blogger is out of the picture, back to producing posts rather than PCs.But this is Michael Arrington, the often caustic front man of the Tech Crunch blog, and he’s determined not to let the story end there. He filed suit in federal court on Thursday, saying the $500 JooJoo tablet is the fruit of his Crunch Pad project.

For its part, start up Fusion Garage says Arrington’s contribution was minimal, and he didn’t manage to fulfill his commitments to the project. Tired of waiting for him to come through, the start up went ahead on its own.
The story begins in July 2008, when Arrington, one of Silicon Valley’s best-connected bloggers, posted a manifesto on Tech Crunch.”I’m tired of waiting – I want a dead simple and dirt cheap touch screen Web tablet to surf the Web,” wrote Arrington, calling for collaborators to step forward.

The post caught the attention of Chandrasekhar Rathakrishnan, the young founder of Fusion Garage, which had been working for a few months on software that might power such a tablet. Like Arrington, Rathakrishnan envisioned a system that was based on a Web browser rather than a desktop operating system such as Windows. That would allow the tablet to start up quickly and would keep hardware requirements – and thus costs – down.

In September 2008, Rathakrishnan tracked Arrington down after a conference. Arrington agreed that Fusion Garage’s software might solve part of his tablet puzzle, and said he’d want to acquire Fusion Garage. Arrington said they settled on Fusion Garage owning 35 percent of a joint Crunch Pad venture.

“I thought that was exciting. Here we had the guy who had a blog with a lot of reach, suggesting we’re something exciting,” said Rathakrishnan, now 29 years old. “I know how hard building hardware is, how much money you need for that. Having Arrington by our side (would) help us get there faster.”

Between September 2008 and February 2009, the new partners worked on a prototype designed by Crunch Pad’s small team and a circle of consultants, running Fusion Garage’s software.

From here, the stories diverge and the partnership of two scrappy entrepreneurs sours.

Rathakrishnan said in an interview that looking at the February CrunchPad prototype made him think twice about the project.

“It looks like a tablet built in 2000. It is huge, it doesn’t look like it could go to market,” he said. “That’s when we realized this is not going to go where he thought it would go.”

Rathakrishnan said Fusion Garage went back to the drawing board and designed a new prototype with a better touch screen and new software, and brought it to Arrington in April.

By Arrington’s account, for the next three months Rathakrishnan worked out of TechCrunch’s office. Arrington said his team was working on the hardware, talking to potential suppliers, and working directly with Rathakrishnan’s team on the software and user interface. There was no formal contract in place, despite Arrington’s past career as a lawyer, but he was comfortable with the arrangements worked out verbally and over e-mail.

“Did his team do most of the work? Sure. But we were paying a lot of the bills,” Arrington said, estimating Crunch Pad spent between $300,000 and $400,000 for parts and to help build prototypes.

Crunch Pad employees also went to Singapore and Taiwan to work with Fusion Garage and the manufacturers working on the tablet, Arrington said.Arrington had also been in touch with Ron Conway, a seasoned angel investor in the valley who made early bets on companies like Google, Facebook and Twitter.

In an interview, Conway said he put together a small group of investors ready to raise $1 million to $2 million to be used for the first manufacturing run of the CrunchPad. He said was on call all summer, just waiting for Arrington to say the product was ready to go.

Rathakrishnan remembers these months much differently. He said Crunch Pad’s team didn’t contribute a line of code or a dollar of funding. There was never agreement on the terms of an acquisition. Rathakrishnan said he was bewildered that neither the funding nor the buyout deal Arrington promised were materializing, and so he and Fusion Garage were the ones out raising money and finding manufacturing partners.

In late November, the tablet computer was almost ready to make its debut when the project dramatically imploded. It’s impossible to say now what, exactly, went down between the two sides, but Arrington wrote in a Nov. 30 post on TechCrunch that Fusion Garage and its investors had suddenly decided to dump the Crunch Pad team and sell the product on their own, even though Arrington believed neither side owned rights to the product.

Rathakrishnan gave a live press conference by Web video Monday to refute Arrington’s version of the story and to introduce the JooJoo.

Since then, he’s taken the device on a whirlwind tour to show it off to gadget bloggers and technology journalists. The 12.1-inch tablet-style computer boots up into a screen of shortcuts to popular Web services like Facebook and Twitter, boasts a 5-hour battery life and faithfully plays back high-definition video.The device is reminiscent of a giant iPod Touch – something Apple Inc. itself is rumored to be working on.

While Rathakrishnan was showing off the JooJoo, Arrington’s lawyers filed suit in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California to keep Fusion Garage from ever selling it. Arrington says he doesn’t think Fusion Garage has enough money to build the device; Rathakrishnan said he’s on the verge of closing a round of funding not just for the JooJoo, but for follow-up devices.

The drama has cast a pall over what Rathakrishnan had hoped would be a successful launch. But the relationship with the blog, particularly now that it’s turned into a high-tech divorce case, has generated far more buzz than Fusion Garage could have hoped for had it tried to build and launch such a gadget on its own.