Speck PortPack Shoulder Bag Review–Sp...

Speck PortPack Shoulder Bag Review–Spare and Efficient

from Mobilewhack.com by Steve Anderson

Sometimes, the problem with mobile gear carrying cases is that they can carry a whole lot more than mobile gear.  And this can, in turn, pose a serious problem with organizational issues.  It’s hard to keep all your stuff straight when your mobile bag can carry tons of papers and a few books and a large assortment of whatnot besides.  If you’ve had this problem, and wish your mobile gear bag just handled your mobile gear, then you’ll be happy to know about the Speck PortPack Shoulder Bag.

The folks at Speck sent me one to review, and I was actually pretty impressed.

The Speck PortPack is a shoulder bag designed for a fifteen inch or smaller notebook, and includes stowable shoulder strap, detachable key leash fob, media player pocket with headphone cord slot, net water bottle pocket, front flap that closes with both velcro and a plastic clasp, along with a variety of smaller storage pockets.

Unlike yesterday’s entrant, the CorePack Fly, you won’t have near the storage space with the PortPack.  You’ll have to be much more choosy about what you take with you and what you don’t on this one because you just plain old don’t have the room.  But for your mobile gear, you’ll find a great and highly compact storage option.

And at seventy dollars, it’s a better option for your wallet, too.  So if you don’t have a lot of gear to carry, or want to keep the gear you have in easy reach, then the Speck PortPack is exactly what you need.

  

Related Posts

ABI Expects 43% CAGR for Mobile Nav U...

ABI Expects 43% CAGR for Mobile Nav Until 2015

A new report by ABI Research indicates that handset-based navigation shipments are expected to grow at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 43% over the next five years, rising from 30 million in 2010 to 181 million in 2015. 

According to telematics and navigation practice director Dominique Bonte, “The handset navigation boom is largely driven by free turn-by-turn navigation solutions recently made available by Nokia and Google. During its last earnings call, Nokia announced that Ovi Maps had already been downloaded more than 10 million times. While Google Maps Navigation was initially only available on Android phones in the US, it is expected to be introduced gradually on other platforms and in other markets, as demonstrated by the recent launch in the UK.” 

ABI noticed that increasingly, navigation services are being included in packaged offers from handset vendors and carriers, subsidized by smartphone hardware or data communication revenues. 

“These new business model paradigms upset the traditional value chain in which the end user pays directly for value-added mobile services, said Bonte. “They put pressure on the smaller independent vendors which are unable to leverage market share and brand to generate new revenue streams such as advertising, to reduce costs through crowd sourcing, or to offer bundled services. Consolidation will be unavoidable.” 

Dark Horse Android now neck-and-neck with iPHONE

Android sells 100,000 smartphones per day, what does that mean?

from Communities Dominate Brands by Tomi T Ahonen

So right after I finished my Q1 total smartphone market review, Google came out with the statement that they now sell 100,000 smartphones per day. There are 61 models of Android handsets by 21 branded manufacturers (including Google itself with its Nexus One as one Android handset model).

RUN RATES

What does this tell us? Well, the quick math of course says Google is now (in May) selling smartphones at the rate of 36 million units per year. Is that big? World number 4 manufacturer of smartphones, HTC (who makes mostly Android smartphones but also makes Windows Mobile smartphones) sells currently at the rate of 18 million per year. So where HTC once was manufacturing seven out of every ten Android handsets in the world, today HTC's share is at best half of all Android phones - this bodes well for the other big Android manufacturers like Motorola, LG, SonyEricsson, Samsung etc. HTC is no longer the only game in town.

But yes, what does 100,000 per day mean? How does that compare to Apple's iPhone? Yes, the world got quite a shock two weeks ago when NPD reported that Android devices were selling more than iPhones in the USA in Q1. So yes, how is Apple doing? Well, its latest sales numbers from Q1 had Apple selling iPhones at 8.75 million per quarter which means they sell at the rate of 35 million units per year. Yes, assuming Apple's current iPhone sales have not exploded in unit sales (reasonable assumption as we await the new iPhone model due in June, and something Apple said in court documents about the Gizmodo 'stolen' iPhone case, Apple actually testified that current iPhone model sales are struggling because customers now await the new model), the family of Google Android smartphones has definitely passed iPhone unit sales globally in Q2.

So in this quarter, Q2, Android is running neck-to-neck with Apple and passing it, by Q3, Android is challenging RIM and may well pass it (meaning it will be very close for the full year sales, who ends up selling more for full year 2010, who is the second best-selling smartphone platform in the world).

What of number one? In Q1, Nokia was selling at the rate of 86 million smartphones per year (over twice the size of Android today). If measured on a daily sales rate, Nokia sells 236,000 smartphones every day. Nokia grew 3% from the previous quarter. So Nokia is not 'threatened' by the Android invasion yet, not at all. But even the boys in Espoo do take notice when a rival grows over 50% in just one quarter. It can become an unstoppable force if that continues.

Yahoo Turns to Nokia/NAVTEQ for Maps

Yahoo Turns to Nokia/NAVTEQ for Maps

from geo2web.com by geo2web

Engadget reports Nokia and Yahoo have announced a strategic partnership that includes Yahoo using Nokia’s NAVTEQ for maps and navigation. Of the major online map providers, it’s safe to say that Yahoo has been lagging the furthest behind. Engadget quotes ever-tactful Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz as saying “that Yahoo had ‘lost its focus on maps a couple years ago,’ then correcting herself, saying that they ‘chose to focus on other areas.’ The first merged services should launch in the second half of this year.”

Android Fragmentation - To B or not to B?

Entelligence: Is Android fragmented or is this the new rate of innovation?

By Michael Gartenberg  posted May 22nd 2010 8:21PM

I've written in the past about my concern that the Android platform is fragmenting much like desktop Linux has over the years, and the potential for the platform to turn into a patchwork of devices and vendor specific modifications that bear little relationship with each other. I've spent a lot of time thinking about my conversation with Andy, and I've rewritten this column more than a few times as a result.

Today, there are at least five different versions of Android on the market. Many of them are highly customized to allow for new features and device differentiation, but that same customization also makes it harder for vendors to update them to the latest versions. New releases and versions of Android are often outdated by newer versions in the span of just a few weeks. For example, the Nexus One when released was capable of running apps like Google Earth that devices such as the Droid could not, because it ran Android 2.0, not 2.1.Tablet vendors complain their Android offerings lack features such as Android Market because Google forbids them to install the marketplace app, forcing them to create proprietary alternatives. It would appear Android is indeed fragmenting -- but perhaps there are other forces at work..... 

The net result? A pace of innovation that shows no sign of slowing combined with even more reference hardware that keeps raising the stakes of what's possible. Keep up or don't -- what appears to be a fragmented market is merely the result of shortened cycles of innovation. Older devices seem obsolete faster than before, but this pace also brings speed new innovations to market faster. Google argues that the reason it doesn't permit tablet vendors access to Android Market just yet is to prevent devices that fail comparability tests from actually fragmenting the platform. The message? Keep up -- but don't try to jump ahead. 

I'd argue perhaps Android isn't fragmented, at least according to the classical definition, but that the practical result is the same. Devices going obsolete in months and new operating systems released on weekly cycles make it difficult for even Google's best partners to keep pace. Worse, users care onfronted with a dizzying array of devices, many of which are out of sync from a software perspective at the time of purchase -- causing some to delay purchases in fear of buyer's remorse or purchase a competing platform. 

The open nature of Android is what allows this to happen. Google won't control what partners do with Android, but by constantly raising the bar it controls the platform's pace as well as the vision. As with most things, in the end it will be Google's partners and their customers that will determine whether that pace is acceptable, and that will either become a competitive advantage or provide an opportunity for other platforms to succeed.

WebM's royalty-free HTML5 video raise...

WebM's royalty-free HTML5 video raises patent issues

Google, Mozilla, Opera may be in trouble with WebM

updated 03:00 pm EDT, Wed May 19, 2010

The new WebM codec shown at the analysis. Although pitched as a royalty-free HTML5 video standard using a combination of VP8 video and Ogg Vorbis, x264 developer Jason Garrett-Glaser notes that some of the implementations in the now Google-supported format are copied not just from On2's original creation but appear to be directly patterned after H.264, making it entirely possible that WebM violates patents. It resembles an only slightly improved version of the H.264 Baseline Profile and so could invite lawsuits from the MPEG-LA standards group for anyone that uses it.

"Though I am not a lawyer, I simply cannot believe that they will be able to get away with this, especially in today's overly litigious day and age," Garret-Glaser said. "Even VC-1 [used in HD DVD] differed more from H.264 than VP8 does, and even VC-1 didn't manage to escape the clutches of software patents. Until we get some hard evidence that VP8 is safe, I would be extremely cautious. Since Google is not indemnifying users of VP8 from patent lawsuits, this is even more of a potential problem."
The programmer's remarks support statements by Apple CEO Steve Jobs that hiscompany was embracing H.264 over Ogg Theora (which users Ogg Vorbis) because of possible patent issues. Although he publicly supports the concept of open web platforms, Jobs warned that open-sourcing formats didn't guarantee they would be patent-free. H.264 often involves royalties for the companies that implement it but is currently free for users and, as a result, lets Apple and others implement it for HTML5 video knowing neither they nor customers will be sued.
Garrett-Glaser added that the format may be technically inferior to higher-quality versions of H.264. It's technically superior to Ogg Theora and other open-source standards but is slow to encode and lacks many of the compression techniques used to boost quality and efficiency in H.264's Main and High Profiles. The efficiency and image quality are "not even close to competitive" with higher-bitrate H.264, the developer said.
At present, WebM also doesn't have hardware acceleration and could be much less efficient on mobile devices, although Google is talking with companies to get it built-in. Jobs cited the weak state of hardware acceleration as a key reason behind rejecting Flash for the iPhone.
Neither Google nor its WebM partners Mozilla and Opera have commented on the accusations; they may already encounter patent issues as the YouTube HTML5 beta and an Opera beta both implement the codec.

Read more: Electonista

Invasion of the Market Share Snatcher...

Invasion of the Market Share Snatchers: BlackBerry Losing Share to Android? [Digital Daily]

from All Things Digital by John Paczkowski

Research in Motion’s BlackBerry is the leading smartphone brand in the United States thanks to its vast core demographic of enterprise power users. But as the smartphone evolves into the standard for the broader consumer market, RIM (RIMM) may see that lead eroded by rivals with sexier devices.

In a research note to clients today, Piper Jaffray analyst T. Michael Walkley says his checks this month and last suggest the BlackBerry is losing momentum at the country’s largest wireless carriers, mostly to handsets running Google’s (GOOG) Android OS.

“While BlackBerry remains a leading smartphone brand, our checks indicate potential sell-through share losses at AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile,” Walkley writes. “In fact, we believe the Bold 9700 continued to lose smartphone share at AT&T following a price increase last month to $199.”

There’s worse. “In addition, our checks indicated further share losses to Android products at T-Mobile and Verizon. At Verizon, our checks indicated slowing RIM sales, as sales managers continue to push Android products such as the HTC Incredible and Motorola Droid. At T-Mobile, our checks indicate weaker BlackBerry sales due to strong sales of Android products such as the HTC MyTouch and the Windows based HTC HD2.”

Adobe shows Flash running on Android 2.2

Electronista

Adobe in a new video demo (see below) has shown not only Flash 10.1 for mobile but a teaser of the next version of Android. The plugin now appears to run smoothly on a Nexus Oneand can handle most common use cases for Flash, including 3D, gaming, video and simply dynamic web content. Adobe's Ryan Stewart also explained some of how certain elements work: users tap-and-hold on an interactive Flash component to switch away from manipulating the browser.

The demo isn't flawless as it reveals that Flash may have some trouble with large videos; although it plays videos properly, some sites will quickly warn that their clips are "not optimized for mobile." The Nexus One phone is also plugged in and masks any battery life. Adobe has claimed Flash doesn't drain energy quickly, but Apple CEO Steve Jobs and others have asserted that the greater dependence on software decoding in Flash over hardware hurts battery life when playing video. Flash 10.1 should use some level of hardware acceleration but still needs extra processing to handle the plugin layer.

Android 2.2, better known to many as Froyo, only gets a brief teaser at the end of the clip but appears to have a somewhat redesigned home screen that puts the dialer and web browser (and possibly other favorites) near the app launcher on a permanent basis. Also new are a search bar that allows choosing the search type and a tutorial for newcomers to Android.

Most expect Android 2.2 to get a formal unveiling on May 19th, at the start of the Google I/O conference. It may similarly serve as an opportunity to show Flash 10.1 in greater detail. Adobe's plugin may be ready before the end of June, but devices shipping with Flash aren't due until the second half of the year and will center on Android and webOS at first.

Churn at Yahoo Geo Engineeering

Yahoo’s Director Of Geo Engineering Locates The Exit

from TechCrunch by MG Siegler

1 person liked this

Yahoo has seen etter days. I can’t remember when, but they’ve seen them. And today seems like a particularly bad one.

We just reported about Jonathan Trevor, one of the key figures behind Yahoo Pipes and YQL, is leaving the company for Polyvore. And now we have another one to report. Gary Gale, the Director of Engineering for Yahoo’s Geo team is out as well.

Gale tweeted out the news earlier today, saying, “Just told the team that I’ll be leaving Geo and Yahoo! at the end of the month; stunned silence and some pointed questions followed.” That’s an interesting way to put the news out there. Clearly, not everyone is happy about his move.

And they shouldn’t be. The location space is exploding with popularity right now both in the startup sphere (Foursquare, Gowalla, Twitter, etc) and within larger tech companies (Google, Facebook, etc). Yahoo is losing the man in charge of their movement at a pivotal time.

Yahoo was actual one of the first major companies on the geo scene when it unveiled Fire Eagle in 2007. But that project, along with so many others, fell to the back burner as Yahoo had to deal with things like Microsoft’s attempted takeover. Now small startups like SimpleGeo are taking over the space.

So where’s Gale off to? He won’t say just yet, but hinted that he already has a job “running a location group and that’s it’s not Google.” Judging from his tweets, he’s interested in our Facebook location scoop from yesterday. Of course, he also just tweeted about the “(d)evolution of privacy on Facebook,” so that seems an unlikely candidate as well.

[thanks Andrei]

Smart phone sales boom, Android and A...

Smart phone sales boom, Android and Apple prove themselves as prominent players

from Mobilewhack.com by Jeff

When you think of smartphone sales who do you think are the two players that are really coming to light? Sure,Nokia and RIM are making strides with their ridiculously high sales numbers but Apple, with their iPhone, and Google’s Android operating system are really pulling their weight.

According to recent reports, Apple saw their smartphone sales increase 131% year over year while Motorola and HTC saw their smartphone sales increase 91% and 71%, respectively.

Will Apple and/or Android ever topple Nokia and RIM for the top stop? If current trends continue it seem very likely.

via bgr

UTC Time needs careful use...

Not all time is created equally.... 

Left: UTC Time from Android Market FREE,  Red time is the Nexus One internal clock time off by 12+/- seconds from UTC, Blue time is Internet Clock time

Center Upper: National Standard UTC Time from http://www.time.gov/timezone.cgi?UTC/s/0/java

Center Lower: free Blog widget that is off by a couple of seconds... almost UTC... 

Right: UTC time on Oregon 400 via Trip Computer

Nokia chairman Jorma Ollila said the ...

Nokia - canary in the mine?  

 Nokia might have really blown it?

Nokia chairman Jorma Ollila said the company's management is fully supported by the board in focusing on offering services and slowly shying away from hardware, according to a Thursday report. Nokia has began offering Internet services that include musicdownloads, e-mail and maps. A chief executive at the company admits there is plenty of work left to do, but a solid foundation has been laid down.

The company is under pressure to compete with a smartphone ecosystem such as Apple's, which includes a comprehensive app store and music delivery service. Nokia's Ovi Store and its music counterpart were formed partly as a response but haven't been enough to stop a decline in smartphone market share as the iPhone, as well as the BlackBerry range, continue to gain ground. 

The company's recently unveiled N8 smartphone running the company's latest Symbian^3 operating system was given a poor review and was said to have failed to challenge the iPhone

 Nokia PR...

Nokia has started to build a new business by offering Internet services ranging from music downloads to e-mail, but these have gained little traction so far.

"We support management in this," Chairman Jorma Ollila told shareholders on Thursday.

Nokia has 82.7 million users for its Internet services, and aims to generate revenues of 2 billion euros ($2.68 billion) from services in 2011. Most of this will be paid by phone business, which has to pay for installing services into phones.

"It's a bit like a dog eating its own tail," said John Strand, chief executive of telecoms consultancy Strand Consult.

Chief Executive Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, who has been with the company more than half of his life, has been under increasing criticism from analysts and shareholders as Nokia's share price has missed the market's recovery.

At the end of his speech he thanked shareholders for continuing support, and sighed deeply.

"The numbers are shocking; the sales fall, the operating profit crash. I wouldn't say operating profit was catastrophic, but the direction clearly was," shareholder Pekka Jaakkola said at the meeting.

Nokia's revenues fell 19 percent last year, while operating profit dropped 76 percent. The value of company's brand -- one of its key assets -- dropped 58 percent in just one year, according to a global study by Millward Brown.

The company will also be one of the few to miss profit growth in 2010, the year of economic recovery, and software problems continue to haunt its smartphones.

"In a few years our shares' value has dropped 60 percent, our pain threshold has been breached," said shareholder Kari Vainio.

Last month, Nokia delayed the rollout of phones using Symbian 3, its software platform revamp seen as a first step to making its smartphones competitive again, triggering a sell-off in its shares.

Kallasvuo said Nokia expected its new generation of devices to significantly close the gap with the competition in high-end smartphones.

Nokia has not been able to make a serious challenge to Apple's iPhone in the three years since it was introduced. Its last hit smartphone model, the N95, was unveiled in 2006, the year Kallasvuo, a long-time company lawyer, took over at the helm of the Finnish company.

Nokia's board chose Jorma Ollila, its long-time chief executive, to continue as its chairman.

Nokia shares closed 1.6 percent lower in Helsinki, lagging a 1 percent softer European technology shares index. In New York Nokia ADRs were 2 percent lower at 1730 GMT.

For a TIMELINE-Nokia's shift to services from hardware, click on ($1=.7453 Euro)

(Reporting by Tarmo Virki; Editing by Dan Lalor and Jon Loades-Carter)

Less than a third of Android phones a...

Android equally split between three versions - Electronista

Only third of Android phones up to date

Less than a third of Android phones are using the most recent version of the OS, Google has revealed in its latest platform versions data. About 32.4 percent are using Android 2.1, but an even larger 37.2 percent are still using Android 1.5. Another 29.4 percent are still using Android 1.6, and exactly 1 percent are using older or in-between versions like Android 1.1 and 2.0.

The split contrasts sharply with iPhone OS distribution, where 90 percent use iPhone 3.1and just 5 percent use a significantly older OS version.

Android's distribution has been a regular problem for Google as it has locked a significant portion of devices out of newer apps and features, such as Google Maps Navigation and theofficial Twitter app. Much of the stratification comes from companies like HTC and Motorola customizing the interface and making it difficult to implement new OS updates on time. The phones quickest to move to Android 2.1 have been those using the stock Android interface, such as the Droid and Nexus One.

Google is aiming to unify updates in the future by allowing component updates outside of the OS, but the current environment has created "orphan" phones such as the Samsung Galaxy that may never get updates even though they are less than a year old. Apple has only just begun dropping support for certain iPhones after three years with news that iPhone 4.0 won't recognize first-generation models due to hardware limits.

Slowly knowledge reveals itself...

Great blog and informed responses... 

H.264 Is A Codec; Flash Is A Platform.  One Can Not Kill Off The Other

Dan Rayburn | Monday May 3, 2010 | 11:17 AM | Comments (8)

Over the weekend I read another few dozen articles on the whole Apple and Adobe debate and probably read through a thousand comments. Some of the posts I read were really good, but far too many people are comparing codecs (H.264, VP8), platforms (Flash) and languages (HTML5) as if they are all the same thing.

There are lots of posts talking about open standards and making statements on how H.264 is going to kill off Flash. The problem with these statements is that H.264 is a video codec. That's it. It's not a platform of any kind like Flash is. H.264 video has to be played back in a wrapper or by a web browser. The Flash player supports playback of H.264 as long as it has the proper wrapper, which most people either don't know, or simply aren't mentioning. H.264 is not going to put Flash out of business because it can't. It's not a substitute for Flash and is not a platform like Flash. The Flash video platform includes an entire ecosystem for video that includes a player, server and technology for things like content protection (DRM).

If we want to debate the relevance of H.264 to Adobe, then the debate should only be about what H.264 is, a codec. The codec discussion involves H.264, VP6, VP8 and Ogg Theora, the four main video codecs that exist today.....

Pocket GIS for Android

gvSIG Mini is a free viewer  of free aceess maps based on tiles (OpenStreetMap, YahooMaps, Microsoft Bing, ...), with a WMS, WMS-C client, address and POI search, routes, hybrid location and many more things.

Main Features

• Multiple Map Layers (satellite images and standard maps).
• Low bandwidth usage and offline usage
• Maps downloader
• Support for WMS and WMS-C layers
• Layer configuration downloader
• Address and Points Of Interest search
• Route finder
• Compass support and Navigation Mode
• GPS, Cell and Network GeoLocation positioning
• Share your location: Twitter, SMS, Email, Facebook...
• Street View integration
• QuickZoom: SlideBar or DoubleTap
• Compatible with Low and High Screen Resolutions. Portrait and Lansdcape orientation.
• Versions for: Android phones, Standard Java mobile phones (JavaME), Blackberry
• Free to use (GNU/GPL)
• Tileset generator. Phone Cache is a tile generator for gvSIG Mini

More videos here 

Flickr's Metadata - yours/mine and theirs?

Flickr - one way is the highway?

Back in 2006 when Flickr's geotagging first was starting, I discovered that if you geotag your images using Flickr or actually other tags as well, on simple export none of this content that I added was passed back.  Essentially all "my" metadata was captured by Flickr?  FYI...

 Rev Dan Catt said...

[disclaimer: I work for Flickr :) ]

Just thought I'd add a note. If you're downloading the *original* photo from flickr, all it's original EXIF info should be there.

We have a policy of not touching your original photo in any way (it's your photo after all), the scaled versions do have EXIF stripped out, but that's more a function of the image scaler than anything.

Because we'll not modify the original and not remove anything from the it, the flip side also applies, we'll not add anything to your photo, so the tags don't get pushed into the EXIF.

This *may* possibly change in the future with YACBO (Yet Another Check Box Option), but the Do Not Alter The Users Original, is a pretty paramount rule.

Hope that makes some kind of sense.

From a geotagging point of view. If you have the location lat/long information in the EXIF when you upload it, then you can tell flickr to use that. Even if you move the photo on the map afterward, your original EXIF info is still there when you download the original.

If you use the organizer tool to drop photos on the map. Then the location isn't pushed into the EXIF, and won't be in the photo when you download it.

But you can use the API to grab your photos, grab the tags (and location) for them, and do what you want with them when you have them. We're starting to see 3rd party download tools appearing that do that for you.

There's really no intentional lock in going on.

Oh and glad to have found your blog too :)

Dan

11/27/2006 2:56 AM

Internet Explorer drops below 60% web...

Internet Explorer drops below 60% web share

from Electronista | The Macintosh News Network

1 person liked this

Internet Explorer has dropped below a 60 percent share of web traffic for the first time, Net Applications found in its latest study. Microsoft's browser dropped to 59.95 percent of web use in April after Google Chrome leapt half a point ahead to 6.73 percent in the same timeframe. Firefox and Safari also ate into Internet Explorer's share with small gains that put them at 24.59 percent and 4.72 percent each

The Cerevellum, which is a medical te...

NaviGaget: cerevellum GPS for bikes and rear view camera

The Cerevellum, which is a medical term for the brain, is a prototype GPS for bikes. Its main feature is the rear view camera it integrates so you’ll always know what’s happening on the road behind you – which is really valuable for people on their bikes. It seems like an ideal gadget for the city cyclist who can not only see what happens behind them but also record it in 30 second loops.

The Cerevellum is now only a prototype; it is scheduled to hit the market in 2011. It will have a 3.5″ screen, full color, heart rate monitor with other cyclometer functions and a battery life of four hours…