Mobile & Wireless

The first installment of a long-term review, in which your author tries out the product and finds that he's willing to put up with some inconveniences for the MBA's surrealistic and luxurious thinness.

See pic of an 11-foot 8-inch bus that tried to go through a 9-foot tunnel because driver's GPS unit told him to.

ATHENS, GREECE -- When it comes to PCs, GPS devices, gaming consoles, and in general the computerization of just about everything, Americans as a group tend to be active users on the "cutting edge" and quick to embrace all of it. But when it comes to cell phones, we suddenly turn into neo-Luddites.

ATHENS, GREECE -- The Taiwan-based digital camera OEM Altek unveiled an 8-megapixel consumer digital camera with built-in GPS and automatic geotagging. The camera is expected to ship by June, and will be the world's first, according to the company.

Beyond the GPS functionality, the camera is pretty standard, and sports a 3-inch touch screen.

One of the holy grails of communications has just happened. Fring is on the iPhone. I just made my first Skype call on my iPhone (over WiFi). It sounded great. I am waiting for a Google Talk friend to come online to try that....

ATHENS, GREECE -- A company called BigString Corporation today rolled out a new plug-in for AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) that lets you send messages that self-destruct and are impossible to copy or capture, according to the company. Users can also send IMs from the company's web site without using AIM.

With speech recognition practically a commodity today, IT should start treating it as they would a keyboard or mouse.

It's IT Blogwatch: in which Seagate protects its intellectual property portfolio against a flash drive maker. Not to mention how not to fix a leak of personal information...

ATHENS, GREECE -- Before flying here last week, I considered a wide variety of options for constant data connectivity and cell phone access. Buy a Greek phone and use a Greek carrier? Live in a cyber café and use VoIP? Satellite phone? Much to my surprise, it turns out that my BlackBerry Pearl and AT&T work just fine, thank you.

Virtual machine software and new hardware may be the breakthrough thin client advocates have been waiting for.

ATHENS, GREECE -- This ancient city is a metropolis of contradictions and surprises. For us "extreme telecommuters," one of them is this: Starbucks in Greece charges you $660 for a month of Wi-Fi access. But right next door is a better coffee joint where a month of Wi-Fi costs you zero. Hmmmm. Which to choose….

Virtualization is heading for cell phones, predicts one vendor.

For $399, a company called Psystar, will sell you a solid, mid-level Macintosh compatible computer that runs OSX Leopard. Is this the beginning of another Clone era in Macintosh history?

Little clues in the latest iPhone SDK reveal that the iPhone will soon be set for input use from the following languages: Swedish, Danish, Finnish, Norwegian, Polish, Korean and Portuguese (Brazil). This is in addition to the English, French, German, Italian and Russian which the current iPhones have.

It's the late 1990s, and wireless LANs are installed at this manufacturing plant. Everything runs smoothly for two months — then, suddenly, complaints start coming in.