Picking the Best Mobile OS for You

When you're on the road a lot, you need to make sure your mobile phone can do all that you need it to, and in a way that fits your style.

If only picking a smartphone OS were as easy as picking a desktop platform. For many, deciding what to stick on your desktop or carry around on your shoulder is a bit of a religious experience. Your mind is made up, practically from birth. If you switch from PC to Mac (or visa versa), you know you’ve made a significant shift in your technology habits. Thankfully, switching handheld platforms is not nearly as traumatic. Still, you may be locking yourself into 2 years with the same device so the decision should be made carefully.

“Two operating systems run more than 95 percent of the world’s computers, but dozens of systems are behind the 2.5 billion mobile phones in circulation…” There are too many directions to turn for smartphones alone. Palm? Windows Mobile? S60? Blackberry? Linux? iPhone? How do you choose?

Get the whole story: Web Worker Daily

Portable Internet Radio

This is something new. Internet Radio broadcaster Slacker, has come up with a portable device which can carry your favorite radio stations with you, on its hard disk, or by WiFi or Satellite. Pretty cool.

For now, users can only get to the free streaming radio stations through a browser, but soon will be able to subscribe to a $7.50 per month plan that will eliminate advertisements and the six song per hour skip limit. Farther down the road, Slacker will release a portable device with a 4 inch display and 2 - 120GB storage capacity for between $150 and $350. The device will be able to download and store content via WiFi and USB, and play back streaming content via WiFi or through a Satellite connected docking station for your house or car.

Sounds like they've got a pretty good music library, too. I'm listening to the Classic Rock station now and haven't had to skip a song yet!

Via: Engadget

Portable Storage for a Portable Family

These days, our entire lives are on the computer. We've got digital photos, digital videos, digital music, e-mail, blogs, documents, financial records, calendars... You name it, it's on the computer. And if you are living a portable lifestyle, you've probably long since abandoned the desktop PC in favor of a laptop. But laptops are not an ideal repository for all of those precious digital keepsakes and archives. Your laptop is constantly at risk of being stolen or damaged, and unless you've got an excellent backup policy, your data is at risk as well. Although I highly recommend doing so, even storing important archives to an external disk drive or DVD doesn't solve all of your problems. They fill up, get lost, get damaged, and tend to become a hassle to lug around with you wherever you go.

A new service called Tubes may help to make your most important files more accessible to you and your contacts. According to the website, Tubes gives you 2GB of online storage space, to be divided up into "tubes" of related content. You can invite your contacts to create Tubes accounts and access your tubes, and you in turn can access tubes created by others. Using the Tubes desktop client (currently available for XP and Vista, and with a OS X and Web client in the works), you can easily add important files to your online repository, by dragging and dropping them onto a tube. They'll instantly be shared with anyone else who can see the tube, and it's always kept in sync, allowing you and your contacts to work collaboratively on any file. In addition to sharing files, you can apparently also share bookmarks, songs, and photos. I think it'd be nice if there was some sort of blogging, or chat functionality, but perhaps the creators decided it was better not to reinvent the wheel. It's also not clear from the website how you work with your files once they're in your repository, but I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt and assume it's a straightforward process. Everything else about the client looks pretty self explanatory.

Unfortunately, since I'm a Linux user, I can't test this out for myself, but I'd like to know what you think of Tubes. Is it worth it? Is there something better out there? I'd like to hear about it!