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By Andrew Liszewski

Buffalo just upped the capacity of their itty-bitty 5mm Thumbkey USB flash drives from 8GB to 16GB, making them the perfect way to easily lose a big chunk of data. The drives should be available from Geek Stuff 4 U in black, red or white sometime near the end of June with a price tag of about $136. Expensive yes, but a ridiculously easy way to increase the storage space on your netbook.

[ Buffalo 16GB 5mm Thumbkey ] VIA [ Akihabara News ]

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Judging by recent PC shipment reports, HP’s had a pretty good run in Q1, and we fully suspect that a good chunk of those sales are in the netbook category. The outfit’s Mini 1000 Mi was highly anticipated and chock full of promise, though we’re not totally convinced the whole Mi interface lived up to the mile-high hype. So, now’s your chance to tell us — did it? Are you pleased with the software? Do you feel the user interface attracts or detracts? Could the hardware use a retooling? Are you totally looking forward to the 2000 Mi (or 1000 Mii, whatever HP settles on)? Feel free to blast our your really real opinions in comments below — we’ll be listening.

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By Chris Scott Barr

I’m more than happy to admit that I have three Star Wars posters in my office, as well as an autographed picture of Chewbacca. What can I say, I’m a Star Wars geek. Even I have to draw the line somewhere. I really don’t think I could turn an entire wall into the cockpit of the Millennium Falcon, that would just be too much. However, if you’re a Star Trek fan and don’t mind going a bit over the top, then you might be interested in this wall mural.

For the low price of just $187 you can turn a 6′x10′ chunk of your wall into the cockpit of the original USS Enterprise. Now all you need is a replica of Kirk’s chair and the ladies will be lining up outside your door.

[ Urban Collector ] VIA [ The Awesomer ]

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By Evan Ackerman

Hey. Hi there. How’re you doing, good? Good. So, when’s the last time you backed up your computer? I only bring this up because last Friday, someone broke into my apartment and stole my laptop. This, to put it mildly, really sucks for me. But luckily, I had backed up most of my data, which downgraded this whole experience from utterly catastrophic to a serious inconvenience. With this in mind, I would like to spend just a little bit of time suggesting ways in which you can prepare yourself for something happening to your computer which, if you’re anything like me, probably has stuff on it that represents a significant chunk of your life and sanity.

Now, I realize that many (if not most) of you probably have never had to deal with serious data loss. Yeah, maybe some file gets misplaced or eaten every once in a while, but that’s about it. I won’t belabor the multitude of ways in which totally unexpected and really bad stuff can happen to your computer, but you should just spend a minute thinking about what exactly is stored on your hard drive and what the implications would be if you were to come home one day and find that it had just disappeared. Never mind the actual physical computer, that’s replaceable. But think about your music. Your documents. Your email. Your pictures. A lot of that stuff is just not recoverable, and some of it (pictures especially) are priceless. I’m not saying you should be super paranoid all the time, but I am saying that you should recognize what some of the data on your computer is worth, and treat it accordingly. Some suggestions, after the jump.

-Don’t keep things on your computer at all

This is one of the easiest and most reliable ways to keep your data backed up. Take email, for example. If you just use webmail, you’re all set, since no email is stored on your computer. Or, you might have a program like Outlook or Thunderbird that does download email to your computer. You can go into your account settings in these programs and select something like “leave messages on server,” which will put a copy of all incoming messages on your computer without deleting them from your webmail account, giving you a backup archive of your email. This means that messages build up in your webmail, but odds are you have way more webmail space than you’re using anyway, and if you get tight, just go into your webmail and delete a few big messages to clear out some space.

Another way to keep things off of your computer is by using a service like Google Docs to do your work. You can make documents and spreadsheets and stuff, and Google keeps them for you. Another advantage of this is that whatever you’re working on is accessible from your Google account, no matter where you are or what computer you’re using.

-Back stuff up online

The safest place to have things backed up (IMO) is on someone else’s servers, which (if they’re a big company) means that your data is stored on multiple redundant drives in multiple redundant locations. The cheapest and easiest way of backing things up online is by emailing them to yourself, but sometimes this can be an annoyance to keep doing, so there are a multitude of services which will sync things with an online backup server for you. Some are free, some are not, but if you have a good or bad experience with a particular company, let us know in the comments.

When it comes to online backups of your files, media becomes a big problem, because it takes up huuuuge amounts of disk space and bandwidth if you have a lot of it. For pictures, I personally like Flickr Pro. Unlike anybody else I could find, Flickr will store an unlimited number of full resolution JPGs for $25 a year. You have to upload them yourself, but I’ve gotten into the habit of just doing it when I download images from my camera. Even with the 10 megapixel images that I usually take, it’s a pretty fast process. When it comes to video, YouTube is a viable option now that they accept videos in 720p. It’s not a perfect solution, and you have to find some clever ways of downloading the video, but it’s free. The additional benefit of services like YouTube and Flickr is, of course, that your media is now online and much easier to share with other people.

As far as music goes, I don’t have a good solution to suggest, primarily (I imagine) because of DRM issues. Instead of online backup, I’d just recommend some good old fashioned physical backup.

-Back stuff up physically

This is how most people back up their data, and it involves simply copying files onto multiple disks. It’s fast, it’s easy, it’s usually pretty cheap, and your data is right there when you want it. I carry around a little USB flash drive (this one) with really important stuff (like my thesis) in my wallet. It’s also a place where I store files that I’m actively working on. Longer term, I have a big USB hard drive, and every so often I just copy my entire C: drive on there. It takes a while, but I just let it run overnight. What I should have but don’t is an external RAID 1 drive, which is actually two drives that mirror each other. This way, if one of the drives dies, you don’t lose any data, you replace the dead drive, and remirror them.

Of course, the problem with external drives is that even though they’re external, they’re usually sitting right next to your computer. You’re protected against drive failure, but not someone breaking into your apartment and stealing your stuff (or fires, etc.). So if you take the external drive route, it’s a good idea to keep one somewhere else. Take it to work. Give it to a friend. If you only want to do it every six months or whatever, that’s fine, but it could be the difference between losing ALL of your data and just the last six months of your data. Stuff like your music collection and your pictures should be mostly intact, and if you just went on a trip or something and have a couple thousand new pictures, well, time to update your backup drive.

Like I said, all of this stuff may seem paranoid to you. But if you know anyone who has lost important things like pictures, you know that they ended up kicking themselves for not backing things up. Yes, it’s a bit of pain. Yes, it might cost some money. Consider the alternative, however, and think about how much better you’ll feel knowing that no matter what may happen to your computer, all of the stuff you care about, the data, is safe and sound somewhere else.

Oh, and one more thing: having something happen to your hardware sucks as well. If you have homeowner’s insurance or renter’s insurance, you can often separately insure things like laptops against loss or damage, even if you’re the one who does the losing or damaging. It’s called a personal articles policy, and it’s probably much cheaper than you think… For example, Apple won’t insure iPhones at all, but if they did, they’d probably charge the going rate of $5 a month, which I don’t think even covers losing the phone completely. My insurance company happily covers my iPhone against anything I could conceivably do to it for something like $5 a year. It’s a good deal, and definitely worth doing for anything you carry around with you a bunch like laptops and cameras.

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By Andrew Liszewski

Yeah, I know, it’s not the most drool-worthy of gadgets, but since I’ve been asked a couple of times over the past few months to convert a cassette tape to MP3s, I figure it would be of interest to a handful of our readers. The rest of you can just move on.

The Tape2USB converter is a pretty basic device that allows you to convert an old-timey audio cassette to a digital audio file, presumably WAV, which can then be transferred to your PC via a USB connection. From there you can use the included Audacity software to edit the audio files, or even convert them to MP3s. What I find particularly interesting is that the Tape2USB even looks like the type of cassette player you’d find in the late 80’s, with the large ‘ka-chunk’ playback buttons and even a rolling analog counter with a reset button. Classic! But at $129.99 from Grace Digital Audio, you’re probably better off just wiring an old Walkman directly into your PC.

[ Grace Tape2USB ] VIA [ Gear Live ]

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With Nokia 5800 NAM hitting the stores this week, and releases in other parts of the world planned soon, many of you must be eager to buy one, and spend a good chunk of your hard earned money on it.

Don’t. Not until you read this:

All Nokia 5800 XM handsets made before February have a major defect! They have a defective speaker that WILL die within a few months and will have to be replaced.

This fact was discovered by Mobile-review.com after spending $4500 just to buy phones, breaking 10 handsets and spending countless hours  figuring out the details. Including checking out the defective speakers under electron microscope

Nokia itself acknowledged it, but said the problem is solved now. It was a problem with the speaker supplier, which Nokia eventually replaced.

Here’s an official statement (well, a translation from Russian) from Nokia, by Vitoria Eremena, head of Nokia PR for Eurasia, to Mobile-Review:

The problematic speakers were replaced with speakers from another supplier, both in production and warehouses. I’d like to emphasize that we have replaced not only the speakers but also their supplier, i.e. at the moment we use speakers from the new supplier at our manufacturing plants, as well as in our service centers. It is very easy to confirm this, because the new speakers are visually different (see the picture above.)

Service centers started receiving the new speakers during the last decade of January, so all users who replaced the speakers since then shouldn’t face this problem.

It should be also noted that Nokia 5800 XpressMusic is one of our focus products, so its sales were watched carefully by our R&D department from the beginning; and, as soon as we heard about this matter, an R&D rep was dispatched to Russia to work on the problem on site.

The secondary replacement issues reported by Mobile-Review were related to the first phones and, at that moment, there was no solution to the problem, so the defective speakers were replaced with speakers from the same (at that time)  supplier. When the problem was studied more carefully and it became clear that the new speakers (from the same supplier) do not solve the problem, the supplier was changed, the plants started putting new speakers in, and service centers started getting speakers from the new supplier too. I can not name the supplier of the defective speakers, but it is a very respected company with a world-known name, whose  quality of products nobody doubted. But, unfortunately, these things happen, most likely, to everyone.

It should be emphasized that, for these kinds of quantities, and for a global company like Nokia, to solve a problem within a month is a very short time. Sure, a record number of devices were sold during December, and fewer buyers would have been faced with this problem if the sales had been lower. But please believe me, we have been seriously working on the speaker quality problem and we think that, for the moment, the problem is solved.

So, the 5800 XpressMusic can now be bought without any fears. And if you had to replace your speakers, from the end of January – everything should be all right;  if you bought the phone earlier and you have problems, now they can truly be solved in service centers by replacing the speakers.

Well, that’s about it.

And it is really an admirable case of how a vendor should solve its production problems, to which no one is immune.

Well, almost. Eldar, who originally figured all this out and is part of Mobile-Review.com, says that Nokia acknowledged the defect  at the end of January and was ready to provide the statement above to any media outlet that requested it  (why didn’t you? Probably though nobody’ll notice.)

Still, the question remains how many of the Nokia 5800 XM models, e.g. in the 5800 NAM version, are affected by the problem.

Meanwhile, here’s some advice on what to do:

• Refrain from buying your Nokia 5800 until until Nokia clarifies the shipments to which countries are affected (it’s known that more than 1 million Nokia 5800XMs were shipped before Jan. 23d.)
• If you had this problem with Nokia 5800 in Spain, Russia or some other countries, and replaced your speaker in  January, do it again.
• The only way to know when your phone was made and if it’s affected, is by its IMEI number. Service centers can tell you that, or Nokia might establish a hotline.
• With the current sales volumes, all the defective phones should be gone by April.
• Before that,  we hope Nokia will issue an official statement for those markets that are not affected

We’ll be contacting Nokia about this issue soon and report when we hear something. So stay tuned.

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It was but days ago that we first caught wind of Big Cable’s plans to bite a chunk out of the online TV pie, and now we’re already hearing that things could be ready to roll by summer. According to undisclosed sources quoted by Reuters, both Comcast and Time Warner Cable are heading up talks with major content providers like Viacom and Discovery Communications. We’re told that their plans are at “different stages,” but pay-TV subscribers could be tuning into bonus coverage on the web or via smartphone “as soon as this summer.” Tick, tock…
Source

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As much as we adore this concept, we’re not even remotely hopeful something like this will become a reality within the next score or so. That said, we’d love to be proven wrong, as the Conduit is quite possibly the most fantastic phone design to ever be conceived. With a hint of steampunk, a dash of Star Trek and a splash of ergonomic appreciation, this here mobile can be collapsed into a pocket-friendly form or expanded into a bona fide video phone. Hit up the read link for a few more looks, and feel free to give these designers a chunk of capital to make our dreams come true.

[Via kanYeWestBlog]
Source

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As we’ve seen in the decidedly botched digital TV transition, nothing involving government and technology is ever straightforward. With that in mind, let us present to you the most germane portion of the recently passed economic stimulus package with respect to gadgets and the overall nerd kingdom: $7.2 billion. That amount is what President Obama has set aside for “broadband grant and loan programs,” though things get confusing right from the start. $4.7 billion will be distributed through a program run by the Commerce Department, while $2.5 billion is handed out by the Agriculture Department. In theory, at least, that latter chunk would go specifically to rural and underserved areas, but having one goal with two masters just seems like trouble waiting to happen. Oh, and then there’s the mandate to the FCC that instructs it to create (within one year, mind you) a “national broadband plan to ensure that everyone in the US has broadband access.” Granted, these aren’t entirely unheard of — Britain just did the same sort of thing a few weeks ago, and South Korea’s already aiming at 1Gbps for all. We appreciate that the money’s there, but only time will tell if leads to anything meaningful.