If you have a Droid, iPhone or Pre (the "cool" phones these days), tech news aggregator Techmeme has an updated mobile friendly web view for you...

Droid, iPhone, and Pre: meet the new Techmeme Mobile

Fortunately for me, the new Techmeme Mobile web view supplements the older and still available Techmeme Mini web view. The newer Techmeme Mobile view has a slicker look and lets you read the first bits of text associated with a tech news item. However, the older Techmeme Mini view lets you see more news headlines on a single screen and even provides the age (in minutes) of some of the newer items. Both views have the problem of leading you to news items with non-mobile friendly web pages. But, the Droid, iPhone and Pre all do a good job of rendering non-mobile friendly websites.

I'm still trying to decide which views to use. You can find Techmeme Mini at...

http://techmeme.com/mini

And, Techmeme Mobile is found at:

http://techmeme.com/m/

The simplest ideas are often the best and most useful. Case in point: American Airlines' WiFi Widget web page found at...

http://www.aawifiwidget.com/

...that helps you find American Airlines flights with in-flight WiFi service. All you have to do is enter a flight number or identify a departure airport and tap the Find WiFi button. You are then shown a list of flights with WiFi service departing from that airport. What could be easier? Nice...

Via the Dallas News Airline Biz Blog: American offers tool to find if your flight will have Wi-Fi

We got inklings of Google's master plan to rule the universe. The first volley was the Google Chrome browser so they could deal with web services their way. Next came Android because they wanted to deal with mobile devices their way. Google also made a tiny detour to try to fix Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser by providing a plugin to embed a Chrome browser in IE when IE wasn't up to the task of doing what they wanted. Google showed its full hand (I think) yesterday by formally announcing and showing Google Chrome OS.

This super-focus on web pages will, I think, become a problem for Google shortly. The interesting, but somewhat oddball update...

New Google News for mobile

You know the saying, "If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail?" Well, if all you have is a web browser, everything looks like a web page. And, this just ain't gonna work in the long run. The situation we're in now is similar to what we saw in the early 1990s when the computer world was in a painful in-between stage between single tasking MS-DOS and the fully GUI (or mostly so) multi-tasking (kind of sort of) Windows 95. There were some really wild attempts in between DOS and Windows to shoehorn character-based windows and memory managers that simulated multitasking or at least trying to allow multiple applications to be loaded at the same time in DOS. The tiny UNIX/Linux/X11 world had mostly figured this out even then. But, the vast majority of people struggled without looking to that solution.

We're going to muddle through all this confusion for the next few years. Hang on for a rough ride.

Image courtesy of TomTom

When TomTom pre-announced its iPhone turn-by-turn app and cradle accessory, a lot of people (including me) assumed it would let iPod touch users become first class GPS citizens. This appeared to be an incorrect assumption after TomTom released the first version of its $99.99 iPhone app...

TomTom U.S. & Canada (iTunes App Store)

However, this has all changed in favor of iPod touch owners according to this AppleInsider article...

TomTom app updated to support iPod touch, first-gen iPhone

The TomTom GPS cradle kit is priced at $119.95. This means this is all quite a pricey combo if you don't already have an iPod touch.

8GB iPod touch + TomTom app + TomTom cradle kit = $418.94

Even the app + kit combo comes to $219.94 which is quite a bit more than many of the low-priced dedicated GPS units.

TomTom for iPhone (product page)

I've spent a lot of years fussing with servers and networks. So, this item in CNET...

Cisco launches iPhone security app

...with Cisco, security, and iPhone in a single subject line is interesting (ironically, Cisco sued Apple over the iPhone name before the Apple iPhone's launch). SIO is an acronym for Security Intelligence Operations.

Cisco's SIO site describes it as: Early-warning intelligence, threat and vulnerability analysis, and proven Cisco mitigation solutions to help protect networks. But, from what I see this free iPhone app...

Cisco SIO To Go (iTunes App Store)

Doesn't tell me anything I couldn't find using nslookup. It didn't see to tell me much else of use from a cyber security aspect.

The app doesn't even record the domain names and IP addresses I typed into its search box. So, a recheck requirings retyping the name or IP address all over again (and again and again for repeat checks) on the iPhone's virtual keyboard.

This app is a huge disappointment. I don't understand how an industry giant like Cisco allowed it to be released.

I'm starting to find Intel's Mobiln Linux for mobile devices a bit more interesting than I did a few months ago. But, to be perfectly honest, I still don't see a reason to migrate to it from Ubuntu Netbook Remix. So, the Moblin aspect of the video posted in the Intel blog entry...

Video: Paul Cooper on the Moblin User Experience

...didn't really interest me. But, this sentence did: According to Jeff Orr, an analyst at ABI Research, Linux-based netbooks will be close to one-third of the 35 million netbooks shipped this year or 11 million Linux netbooks...

Hmm... 11/35 = 0.3142. So, 31% of all netbooks shipped in 2009 shipped with Linux installed? Nearly 1 out of every 3? Really? Where are all these Linux based netbooks? I bought one (an Acer Aspire One) in 2008 but haven't seen another one since then. Are there millions and millions of Linux netbooks shipping in Europe and Asia? I certainly don't see them in the U.S.

Video courtesy of Slashgear

So, if Google's Chrome OS announcement disappointed me, Slashgear's report about the plain looking...

Quanta Android Smartbook hands-on plus Qualcomm tablet prototype [Video]

...is very interesting to me. This notebook/netbook/smartbook looks like any of the hundreds of others on the market. But, it runs Google's Android operating system like the Droid, G1, and other smartphones currently on the market. Android looks like a capable lightweight quick booting OS. And, I think it will be a good fit as a quick-boot netbook for people on the go. It can do everything a Chrome OS device could do (access the web) as well as run Android apps. Sounds good to me!

YouTube video courtesy of googlechrome

Google announced their Chrome OS yesterday...

Releasing the Chromium OS open source project

And, like a lot of people I watched the live stream on a web page built using Cold Fusion (how retro!) and requring either Real or Windows Media to watch (what happened to YouTube?). I thought Chrome OS was going to be a superset of Android and was very excited about the prospect of this super-Android on tablet computers. Instead, I became less and less excited by Chrome OS as the presentation unfolded.

After the announcement's conclusion, I tried to figure out why this all seemed so familar. Then, I remember a product I really liked that failed about a decade ago: Microsoft's MSN Companion. The MSN Companion was based on Windows CE (like today's Windows Phones) and essentially hosted Internet Explorer 4 in its firmware. The MSN Companion was a desktop dedicated web browser. Although it was not a mobile device, it was essentially 10 years ahead of Google's Chrome OS.

MSN Companion with a T-Mobile Dash on top of it to provide relative size information

I thought the MSN Companion was a great idea a decade ago. However, I'm not sure what is essentially a dedicated browser opearting system is what we need or want today.

It is quite an interesting world we live in these days when even a pen has its own app store...

LiveScribe's Pulse Smartpen Gets Smarter with the Beta Launch of an Application Store

Of course, the LiveScribe Pulse Smartpen is no ordinary pen. It can record and playback the ink you write on a paper with it as well as synchronize recorded sound with the ink. I bought my pen back in May and have been getting good use out of it.

You can find its app store beta at...

http://www.livescribe.com/store

The first page of paid apps for the Pulse Smartpen (21 apps) are mostly in the 99 cent to $2.99 range with the loan outlier being the $14.95 American Heritage Spanish Dictionary.

There are also 9 free apps in the store ranging in topics/functions from a video poker game to spanish travel phrases to guitar chords for beginners.

Ribbit Mobile is a Google Voice-like service that was acquired by British Telecom. It's service, however, is available right here in the US of A (as they say). Unlike Google Voice, Ribbit does not offer the choice of using a unique Ribbit-provided phone number or your own cell phone number.

I was fortunate enough to get a Ribbit Mobile beta service account for testing recently and followed Ribbit's instructions to auto-forward unanswered calls from the cell phone I use as my main voice phone to Ribbit.

The initial tests of calling my phone, letting it ring until it went to voice mail, and leaving a voice mail all worked fine. Ribbit recorded my message and sent an email notification. The problem turned up with the first actual incoming call I received after setting up the service (a call from my daughter). My cell phone rang once and then stopped. My daughter said she heard a strange sound on her end and then ended the call. Both my phone and Ribbit logged it as a "missed call". A second test confirmed this odd behavior.

Fortunately, Ribbit provides clear instructions on how to deactivate call-forward-on-no-answer. My phone rang normally and let me pick up the call as usual after deactivating Ribbit.

My action plan is to activate Ribbit for testing once a month until it seems to work as expected and then begin longer term testing of the service. Let's hope this happens soon.

I bought my Droid on its first day of availability with the idea that I might return it afer a few months (and pay the early termination fee). But, the more I use the Droid and learn how the Android ecosystem has changed since the first few weeks of the G1 back in October 2008, the more convinced that I'm going to stick with the Droid for more than a few weeks. One of my most frequently used web services is the Evernote note-taking and web-clipping service (among other features). Evernote's mobile friendly site...

http://www.evernote.com/m

...looks pretty good on the Droid. However, unlike the desktop/netbook environment (where I prefer to use Evernote's web page instead of their Windows and Mac apps), I prefer to use Evernote apps on my mobile devices (iPhone & Windows Mobile so far).

After a quick search, I found Evernote's beta release of their Android client at...

http://s.evernote.com/androidbeta

It seems to be working well on my Droid (running Android 2.0) so far.

YouTube video courtesy of fringland

The Android smartphone ecosystem has changed a lot (and for the better) between my brief T-Mobile G1 ownership period in October 2008 and today. While the Android app population is nowhere near the size of the iPhone's, it is big enough and rich enough to keep things interesting. One big hole, though, is the lack of a decent Skype VoIP client. And, don't get me started on that Skype Lite thing for Android. I don't even know what to make of it.

Fortunately, even though Skype appears to be ignoring Android, fring is not...

fring it on Android!

And, fring can apparently make VoIP calls over Skype, MSN, and Google Talk. It also works over 3G or WiFi and is free. Very nice!

I downloaded and installed a copy from the Android Market and plan to give it a test (and perhaps record one my mini-podcast sound sample episodes).