Dave’s Answer:

That’s definitely possible and the AT&T personal hotspot capability gives you three different ways to connect, actually: wifi, bluetooth or USB. I have definitely heard that bluetooth takes a toll on the phone battery and that it’s recommended for you to disable bluetooth if you’re not actually using bluetooth devices, but I haven’t heard anything about the power demands of wifi mode on the iPhone.

(actually, a bit of Google searching suggests that it might drain as much as 5% of your battery life per hour when compared to the same phone running in standby mode without wifi enabled. That’s significant, especially if you’re really focused on minimizing your battery drain. [Reference])

Whether it’s going to drain your battery or not, if you have your computer adjacent to you, note that you can have it in wifi mode as a personal hotspot and plug it in for a quick battery boost without affecting that connection.

But that’s not what you asked me, so let’s look at how to use your personal hotspot via USB.

The answer is surprisingly simple: turn on your hotspot, then plug your phone into your computer. But let’s look at it in a bit more detail…

First off, open up your iPhone and enable the Personal Hotspot:

You have it turned ON, right? Just scroll down to the bottom and it actually explains how to use it as a USB Internet connection:

Next step is to plug the iPhone into your computer, which will automatically cause the following pop-up to appear:

Looks good. Click on “Network Preferences…” and you’ll see your iPhone shows up as one of the many ways you can get onto the Internet from your computer:

You might want to have them in a different order than what I have: to do that, just drag the iPhone connection “iPhone USB” higher up…

Note that the connection has been successful: the little green icon appears next to that particular interface. In the above screenshot Airport is also working (a different network, not my iPhone) and bluetooth is configured, but not present. The ones with red lights are simply unavailable (e.g., Ethernet but no wire plugged in). “PAN” is a personal area network, btw, while “DUN” is dialup networking. From what I can glean, you can use them interchangeably if you want to use bluetooth to connect to the Internet.

Peek at your phone when you’re using the AT&T personal hotspot via USB and you’ll see the blue status bar on top of the screen indicating that you have an active connection:

Cool. Now, one last thing. Want to be able to plug in the phone, even if it’s running as a personal hotspot, and never have it connect via USB? Then choose that particular interface in Network Preferences… and deactivate it:

There ya go. That should get you going with your iPhone 4′s Personal Hotspot.

Comments

“Get Pandora,” he told me. Heheh. My son telling me something I’ve known for years (I was one of the first people to cover Pandora, years ago). But his insight was deep. No longer are kids storing music, or copying it from each other.

They are using streaming systems. And further they want new kinds of music discovery apps. I showed him one new app, Soundtracking, that I came back home from SXSW with. It’s awesome. Here CEO Steve Jang shows it to me. Great app, lots of fun for music lovers, get it on the iTunes store.

Comments

So, how good is it?

Well, for +me+ it actually is better than Flipboard in one sizeable way: it built me a table of contents of different sections automatically after I added my Twitter and Google Reader accounts into it. The sections read: Gadgets, Mac, Programming, Social Media, Technology, Palm, Python, which match the major interests of many of the 32,000 people I’m following on Twitter and the hundreds of feeds I’m following on Google Reader.

It built an attractive magazine and the articles it picked seemed pretty good. I’ve been reading the press on it and it supposedly learns about you as you read and brings you even better content after you use it. In the hour or so that I used it I didn’t see this happening, but that’s probably because it started out with a very good dataset to start with.

OK, that’s what’s good about it compared to Flipboard, but now there’s some massive things it doesn’t do as well.

First, it assumes you are a heavy Twitter or Google Reader user. What if you’re not? My dad, for instance, just joined Twitter. His experience starting out won’t be like mine. In this way Flipboard is a far better designed product because it has ready-made sections that he can choose from without even adding any of his social networks into the product. Things about Fashion, Movies, Sports, and hundreds of other content choices.

That’s a +huge+ difference. Remember, Flipboard has already been featured on Oprah. Most of those users aren’t very heavy users of social networks and if you don’t present them with ready-made curated content they will be lost and won’t figure out what to do.

But there is one other interesting difference too: Flipboard’s fit and finish is FAR superior to Zite’s.

Flipboard caches web pages in the background before you click on them, so when you click they pop up much faster than they did on Zite. It also showed me the original tweet above the article, which I didn’t see with Zite.

Finally, there are tons of little things in Flipboard that just are better done than in Zite. Spin the iPad in both and you’ll see Flipboard actually has very subtle animations that move the page around as it switches between horizontal and vertical. Zite’s just switches without the animation. Now geeks amongst you might say “who cares?” But to me those small fit and finish details show me the care that’s gone into making Flipboard, which is why Apple picked it as its favorite.

Sorry, Zite, not there yet, but nice try!

UPDATE: The Zite app is currently having trouble with scaling up. People are reporting to me on Twitter that the app won’t start and the servers are too busy. This happened on the first few days with Flipboard, too, but Flipboard doesn’t have these scaling problems anymore and Zite app should have been designed with those scaling problems in consideration. Plus it’s 3 a.m. and the San Francisco crowd is sleeping as we’re seeing these problems. If you can’t scale while San Francisco sleeps you haven’t really done a good job there.

Comments

The Jabra Extreme Bluetooth Headset for PC’s with Skype Certificationis a two-piece set including the ear piece and a USB adapter that plugs into your Windows XP/Vista/7 PC. It is Skype Certified and includes up to two hours of SkypeOut talk time (depending on where you call), which is a nice bonus.

Set up was a breeze. After charging the headset for a bit, I plugged in the USB adapter into my laptop, pushed a button on the adapter, turned the headset on and, boom, automatically paired.

This was such a HUGE relief! I work remotely and use a VOIP client on my laptop as an extension on my company network, so my laptop IS my phone. The laptop has bluetooth built in and I have a drawer full of headsets and dongles that I have tried to get to work. Most would connect (with a bit of effort), but I got nothing but complaints from folks on the other end of the line regarding call quality – lots of static, garbled audio, etc. I had given up and was using a corded headset as it was the only thing that seemed to work well, but is a pain to wrestle with constantly.

I’ve yet to have a complaint with the Jabra Extreme Bluetooth Headset. The headset itself is comfortable and comes with a detachable and bendable USB charger. Audio quality is very clear.

And, you can connect to up to eight devices, meaning my iPhone and laptop can both be connected to the headset at the same time!

What more can I say? I love this bluetooth headset!

Comments

Motorola is really looking to break Apple’s hold on the tablet market. While iPad reigned pretty much unchallenged in 2010, this new year will really test the iPad’s Stay power. With that said, let’s take a look at the technology specification comparison of both products.

Looking strictly at the specs, the iPad is going to have some stiff competition in 2011. With a larger screen, faster display, and flash support only might sway most of the tech savvy and tech geeks, like myself, to move away from apple’s grasp.

Motorola has still not officially dropped a price point or release date for the Xoom, but it looks like BestBuy may have done that for them. A Recent leak pinpointed the Release date, February 17th, as well as the price of $799.99. Verizon also had an information leak regarding the Xoom and their price is set at $699,99. Still a hundred dollars cheaper than BestBuy’s quote it is a pretty steep price for a portable device. The iPad Starts at $629 for the 16GB and up to $829 for the 64GB.

I will give a full hands on update when the product is released and I actually get my hands on one!

We started hearing about the new music application way back in May, when it was first presented at a developer conference put on by Google. The first hints at some of the more appealing functions — like pushing music purchases straight to the phone or streaming your entire non-encoded music library straight to your phone — were revealed here.

But we’ve learned a lot more since. The Android music player, thanks to an inside source who leaked lots of information, photos, and videos, will be sporting a very attractive new user interface, accompanied by a huge number of new features. While neither perfect nor complete, what we’ve seen shows that Android may just work as an MP3 player platform.

However, it doesn’t stop there. The actual application itself has been leaked to the more savvy Android users. Those who know how to backup, root, and install external apps onto their phone will be able to play around with the app to their heart’s content. Of course, given that this is the “debugger” rendition, it’s still bound to be riddled with holes and errors.

For those who don’t intend to tamper with their device just to get a look at this leaked release, it’s expected for an official release within the next few months. While it may be timed to coincide with the release of Honeycomb (Android 3.0) in March, other sources indicate that it may even be available earlier via an OTA update to Gingerbread (Android 2.3) enabled phones.

Comments

According to the surveys conducted in United States, Android and Apple iphone OS are the only cutthroat contenders in the stratum of ameliorated mobile technology whereas Blackberry OS occupies the third place. The research concluded that 29.7 of U.S. mobile subscribers own Smartphones that completely run on fulltime OS. Taking into account the whole OS market share of the U.S., Apple iOS rules the market share just by couple of points as against Blackberry, with 27.9 and 27.4% respectively. The third place is occupied by the Android OS by 22.7% share, which has seen an eye-popping rise of 14% since January.

As questions for the respondents were narrowed down and made specific about which OS they are most likely to upgrade to in the future, iphones and Android OS were voted highest compared to Blackberry OS with 30%, 28% and 13% of votes received by respective Smartphone players. The numbers between Apple’s iOS and Android has meagre difference which personifies that the competition between these 2 looks tough.

That’s all about the U.S. mobile market share and ‘most desired’ Operating System. What about the scenario in India? Is there any competition between OS or Smartphone players? NO and YES. Confused!? Well as far as the OS goes Android OS rules the Indian mobile subscriber market as it is available on the feature-led mobiles too. In India, there is a large variety of Smartphones available in the market with economical price tags. After U.S., India has emerged as the second-biggest user of Mobile Internet, according to data from 15,000 mobile websites checked by Google.

From a couple of recent stories that I came across in The Economic Times too, suggested the following points :

• Canalys gauged the Indian Smartphone market in 2009 at ~ 2.1 Million pieces.
• Permeation of Smartphones is estimated to have risen from 1% at the end of 2009 to above 4% by Nov 2010.
• The standard selling price of Smartphones has slumped from Rs. 19,000 in Q3 of the year 2009 to Rs. 13,000 in Q1 of the year 2010 to about Rs 10,000 by Nov 2010, according to Analysis Mason.

Clearly, India is not falling behind when it comes to using technology, though some consider viewing and using internet on mobile phones as a ‘pain-stacking process’. In contrast to other countries where the eminent usage of internet happens via Smartphones, in India, mobile companies like Nokia, Motorola, Samsung and more rule the market.

Moreover, why is it that Smartphones like Apple iPhones come with a tag of Rs. 30,000 and even higher whereas Smartphones from Nokia, Samsung, Sony Ericsson come at a far lesser price. There are obviously several prices-related reasons like brand-name, no. of apps in a Smartphone, and still more nitty-grittial issues.

All said and done, there finally seems to be some real competition in the Smartphone market specifically against Apple iPhones and its iOS.

Comments

3G has been in India for the past several months, but owned by MTNL and BSNL, the PSU duo. Let’s not get into a debate of performance and service they offer!

We’ve had iPhone 3G and iPhone 3GS phones in India, much before we had 3G. To some, that may sound astonishing! But that’s the fact. A phone which is supposedly one of the most powerful phones in the Indian market was handicapped over 2G networks!

But does that mean 3G network is just about speed? No. Hence I gave an example of iPhone. The sheer beauty this device has and which makes it a smartphone is the OS and the ability to enhance the device using numerous applications, which range from being available for free to several thousand dollars!

3G technology is more about the experience it brings in, rather than the speed. Speed may just be an enabler. The services, applications, possibilities, emerging devices and reliability is what comes as a bundle.

A few days ago, I got a chance to visit the land of 3G – Japan and experience the 3G and the next generation technologies! Thanks to TATA Docomo for sponsoring the trip! Japan is not only the land of rising sun, but a land where the first commercial 3G was launched! Japan has experienced 3G for a few years already and are shortly moving to the next generation mobile technology called LTE (Long-Term-Evolution) which has far more capabilities and speed!

Let’s check out some of the interesting things we did using the 3G phones we had at our disposal for the entire duration of our stay!

More Videos:

• How about watching and controlling a virtual 3D museum?
• How about accessing your paid lockers at subways?
• You can buy stuff from vending machines!

Apart from these, there was a lot of exciting stuff we did using the 3G technology. For example, the wireless wifi router we had worked seamlessly on 3G and could host as many as 5 devices for over 6 hours!

To summarize, what we experienced was not just about speed, but the experience that 3G shall bring along. Staying in India, where 3G has just hit the shore, I am looking forward to some of the best use of 3G technology on the lines of what I experienced in a 3 day trip to NTT DOCOMO, in Tokyo, Japan

Comments

The firmware update due next month, iOS 4.2 will make some necessary changes and some nice-to-haves:

Multitasking

The most important decision Apple has made, other than adding Flash support, is to allow multitasking. The biggest fire the iPad has come under is its inability to multitask. The iOS 4.2 firmware update will finally allow users to run multiple applications at one time. This critical issue will be solved; so the iPad will multitask—to fit our multitasking our lives.

Widget-Based Control

Not mission-critical, but very important is a fix to change the accidental input created by the misplacement of the screen-control button. The new widget-based control for screen brightness and orientation will centralize controls into one convenient place. With this update the iPad will stop accepting accidental input from the misplaced toggle.

Wifi-Based HD Video Uploading

Yup, exactly what it sounds like.

Highly Dynamic Photos

The new photo software will allow techno-weenies to see high-definition photos in a whole new light. This software takes a picture, at three different exposure levels and integrates them into one perfect photo. This program will simplify the process of digitally remastering photos into child’s play.

AirPlay

This rebranded name for iTunes now streamlines users ability to manage and use their media. iTunes deals exclusively with music, whereas the newly named AirPlay will work with video, Apple TV streaming and photos; essentially combining iTunes, iPhoto and a video-streaming program, into one. This is the perfect harmonization for the iPad, which has been dubbed the entertainment tablet.

AirPrint

The ability to print through the iPad’s Bluetooth will mean a world of difference to the users. With this upgrade the iPad might be able to break into the enterprise space, and steal market share from the RIM‘s Playbook.

Enterprise Support

In addition to being able to print wirelessly, the iOS will be brought further into the enterprise space through stronger security features, new device management capabilities, and improved enterprise integration.

Improved Mail

Now through your iPad or iPhone you can better control your inbox through a unified inbox, message threading, and by opening attachments in third-party apps.

New Gaming Center

Apple is releasing a gaming center for iPhones and iPads that will improve social gaming. This new technology allows you to you’re your friends for gaming, or use their automatic-match service to find multiplayer game partners. Through the game center users can track their scores and compare them with others.

Comments

Dave’s Answer:

You’re in luck! A few weeks ago I was lucky to have Chevrolet loan me a Chevy Equinox for a road trip (Memphis, TN to Atlanta, GA, and if you’re curious, you can read about my experiences and thoughts here: A Week With a Chevy Equinox) and the first thing I did when I got into the car was pull into a local parking lot and both figure out the navigational system and pair my own Apple iPhone 4 with the Equinox GPS system.

I suppose it’s lucky that I like to experiment with things, actually, because I more or less randomly pushed buttons on the Chevy nav system console until I started to find interesting areas to explore. I could have read the manual, but really, does anyone actually read user guides for electronics, especially car computer systems?

Back to task, though!

First step is to ensure that you have Bluetooth enabled on your iPhone. If you don’t use it to connect headphones or a hands-free system, by the way, I would strongly advice that you leave Bluetooth turned off to help extend your phone’s battery life. That’s true of any cell phone, actually.

This is done by going to “Settings”…

Tap on “General”…

As you can see, I have Bluetooth turned on. If yours says “Off”, tap on it and power it up.

Now let’s switch to the Chevy Equinox navigational system panel in the car: you can leave your iPhone on the passenger seat while this proceeds…

Push on the “Config” button on the console and pay attention to the display. You’ll see along the top that there are a number of different configuration options. Tap on “Phone” and you’ll see this:

Tap on “Bluetooth” (have I said how much I like touch screens in cars? A huge step forward for the usability of automotive devices)…

You can probably guess: tap on “Add New Phone” and the Equinox is ready to pair:

Now pick up your iPhone (or any other Bluetooth-enabled cell phone you seek to pair with the Chevy Equinox, of course) and tap on the Bluetooth entry in Settings. You did leave it there when you put the phone down, right?

You should see something like this:

Give it a few seconds and the Chevy Bluetooth receiver will appear as a new device:

Tap on it, you’re almost done!

To ensure that you really want to pair the phone and base device (e.g., the car) there’s a four-digit password required. If you look at the Chevy nav screen, however, you’ll see what needs to be entered here. In my case, it was 6 2 9 2.

I enter those four digits and the phone confirms it worked:

The car nav system also confirms that the devices are now paired:

That’s all there is to it. Next time you’re using your iPhone and are in the car, you’ll find that you can initiate the call directly with the Chevy nav system, or on the phone you can select “General Motors” as a source, as shown in this example call:

I’m not a huge fan of Bluetooth stereo — too many drop-outs and hiccups — but for phone calls, a hands-free system like the one in the Chevy Equinox is incredibly cool for while driving. It’s much better than holding the phone and safer too.

Comments