I’ve avoided the GPS scene and have relied instead on printing out maps from Google/Mapquest/Live maps. But having recently moved to a new city, I decided it was time to make the plunge. After some basic research and asking around, I went for the Dash Express. Here’s my first impression of the Dash Express and GPS in general:

I don’t know how I’ve lived without this thing until now. It’s not perfect (more on that in a sec) but is so much more convenient than what I have been doing. In fact, I think it’s an even bigger jump in convenience than my first jump years ago (the jump from using an outdated map you keep in your car to printing out turn-by-turn directions).

Truth be told, though, I don’t think I would have been happy with a GPS system had I given it a try before the Dash. The reasoning revolves around a number of features that are, as far as I can tell, exclusive to the Dash Express. The most important one (for me) is Send2Car.

Send2Car is basically a God-send for anyone converting to GPS from map/directions printing. It’s simple. Using an online account at dash.net, you can send addresses to your Dash Express. The next time you power it on, it shows the latest address(es) you’ve sent to it and asks you if you want to map / get directions to that location. It’s just that it’s so much faster and more convenient than dealing with looking up an address and/or typing it in manually while in your car.

And what’s even better is the browser plugin (I use Firefox). This makes it so that any address I find anywhere online I just highlight, right click, and click on “Send2Car” from my regular ol’ right click popup menu. As an example, I like browsing for new restuarants on my computer and reading reviews from various sites. Any time I want to give one a try, right click, Send2Car.

I only wish the feature would go one step further and let me manage my “Send2Car” addresses from within my online dash.net account. As it is, it only sends addresses to your car. If you want to look up or delete a previous address you’ve sent to your device, you have to do that from the device itself. But I brought this up with one of Dash’s tech support guys, and he said that this feature will probably happen eventually.

Other nifty features include real-time traffic and automatic alternate route calculation. All Dash GPS units are part of a network and give feedback on traffic conditions. So if there are enough Dash users in a given area (which there are in my area), you see real-time traffic on the route you’ll be taking. And the device automatically gives you two other routes to choose from and compare traffic with, if necessary.

Also, the device is integrated with Yahoo Local search so that you can browse a pretty comprehensive database of points of interest. You can get movie listings or even compare the current price of gas among gas stations in your area, all directly from the device while driving. It actually has a bunch of other advanced features that I haven’t even dived into (such as GeoRSS and a developer API for add-ons from third party services).

As for the GPS part of the Dash Express, I find it works very well. The voice isn’t annoying and turn-by-turn directions are spoken/displayed in an intuitive fashion. The user interface overall is very simple and clutter-free while also displaying most relevant information when you need it. If you make a wrong turn or skip a direction, I find that it recalculates your route very quickly.

But like I mentioned earlier, it’s not perfect. It takes way too long to get new “Send2Car” addresses showing up on the device. The problem is that once you turn it on, it takes a couple minutes to find an internet connection and resync. In the meantime, unless you pull over and wait, you have to know the first few steps of wherever you’re going before you get access to the address you sent to yourself earlier from your computer.

Part of the problem, for me specifically, is that our car is in a parking garage below our apartment complex. And when we pull out of the parking garage into the open, there’s nowhere to really hang out while waiting for the thing to get connected. So we have to drive around a bit. I’m not sure if this problem can be fixed easily, but even halving the wait time would be a great improvement.

I’ve heard some complaints of size. The standard picture floating around online (see picture above) scared me off initially. But once I received the device, I was pleasantly surprised. Keep in mind that this is my first GPS, so I’m not necessarily used to a tiny device. It seems about the right size and is much smaller than I thought. The picture above seems more like a marketing blunder to me. It makes it look like one of those older, portable cube TVs. It’s actually not a cube and is much smaller and better looking than it appears in that picture.

When it’s all said and done, this is a nearly flawless GPS device that does much more than what I was able to find via other devices. The only other downside might be the price, $299, though plenty of other GPS devices that do less are priced similiarly. But there is a monthly fee of $10 to $13 (depending on how much you prepay) to use the Send2Car and live traffic services. (It has a nice, long trial period; the first three months are free.) Although, personally, I’m fine paying a small incremental fee for value-added services I use that aren’t available from the competition.

*Update* Amazon now has the Dash Express selling for $254.49.

It’s been nearly a week since I installed Firefox 3. And though the end result is largely positive, the process wasn’t free of complications. As I’ve discussed before, sure enough, my major issues revolved around the Firefox catch-22: extensions.

The first issue is that Firefox 3 doesn’t check to see if your existing extensions (from Firefox 2) are compatible until after it’s installed. It installs itself, replaces your working copy of Firefox 2, and then basically says, “oh, by the way, here’s a list of extensions you were using that won’t work now.” How hard would it be for Firefox to give you that list before it’s overwritten your working copy of Firefox 2?

In my case, my favorite theme was not compatible (Blue Ice) along with half a dozen extensions I use daily: copy plain text, delicious complete, dictionary tooltip (this is the extension I found so useful, I paid for it), AVG safe search, and Google pagerank status, to name a few.

Leaving that problem aside for a moment, I also realized that my bookmarks did not transfer properly. How frustrating. After some searching, I found the problem to be that Firefox 3 does not import your bookmarks from Firefox 2 if, at anytime in the past, you used the Firefox 3 beta. So since I tried the Firefox 3 beta back in January for two days, it meant a big headache for me now.

For a moment, I was frustrated enough to go back to Firefox 2. But once I found the fix for my bookmarks problem, I decided to look through the available extensions for Firefox 3 in hopes to find some that might be able to replace the ones I was used to having in Firefox 2. This is where the good news finally came.

I was able to find extensions that had the same or better functionality than all but two of my previous extensions. The two in question are copy plain text (makes it so that any text copied from within Firefox is stripped of its formatting) and dictionary tooltip. Luckily dictionary tooltip released a new version a few days after I installed Firefox 3. So that leaves me, as of now, with only one piece of missing functionality.

As for not having my favorite theme, I’m actually impressed enough with the default Firefox 3 theme that it doesn’t bother me. As I’ve said before, Firefox is my browser of choice mostly via its extensions. But when I have to take two steps backward (broken extensions) before taking one step forward (new features), I’m disappointed. Luckily, this time around it feels its only one step backward and dozens of steps forward.

This version of Firefox is much faster. While Firefox 2 would lock up on me a couple times a week with even more occurrences of slow downs, Firefox 3 has not locked up or slowed down on me once! And that’s even with instances of 30+ tabs open and the browser not being closed for days at a time. In fact, new benchmarks out today confirm that Firefox 3′s performance is better than pretty much all other popular browsers.

Huge improvements were also made to the address bar (now called the “awesome” bar), which allow you to type in practically anything (not just an official web address) while it tries to read your mind based on your recent browsing activity and bookmarks. Speaking of bookmarks, the system is much more easy to use and organize.

Other little improvements are nice too, like the way you can browse for new extensions from within the browser itself. And when the browser asks if you want to save a password, it’s not obtrusive like it used to be (used to be a popup you had to answer before you could do anything, now it’s an out of the way drop down question that doesn’t get in the way of browsing).

Overall, I’m hooked. This is the best browser I’ve used to date. If only the initial upgrade process were better…

Slingvine is a free application that allows you to send files over the Internet. For me, it felt like a replacement to email attachments. Here’s how it works:

You download and install the client on your computer. Then you right click on any file or folder in Windows and click on “Sling Selected Items.” This uploads your files or folders to a temporary webpage (url) that you then give out to whoever you want to receive your files.

The nice thing is that you can send any type of file (music, photos, video, etc.), any number of files, and any size of files. And outside of the quick application install, it’s as simple as can be (no configuration, no passwords, and no online accounts).

That’s not to say that I don’t have a couple of suggestions for SlingVine. For one, it’d be nice if the queue (where it shows you what you’ve sent/received) had two separate sections: one for sent and one for received. As it is, all your files (sent or received) or in the same list.

I should also mention that this is peer-to-peer (P2P) technology. If your file or set of files is larger than 50 megabytes, then the source computer needs to stay on in order for others to receive the files being sent.

When I first started using SlingVine, I did run into a snag. But I emailed SlingVine support and received a response (and fix) within an hour on a Sunday. Not that there’s any guaranteed response time, but it definitely made a first impression!

Bottom line: I think SlingVine is useful for particular situations. For me personally, I like the idea of an easy way to send a group of files while preserving file structure (something not possible with email). It’s definitely convenient.

So I had an extra $50 that Amazon gave me for buying an HD DVD player and was interested in getting a new mouse for my computer. For my day-to-day computing needs, I’m a laptop user all the way (and have been since 2001) but still prefer a mouse attached over a touchpad. Maybe that’s why I couldn’t help but try out Logitech’s VX Nano cordless mouse.

Just like it looks in the picture above, the USB adapter is small enough that you can plug it in once and just leave it plugged in even when you pack up your laptop. I should say, though, that it does stick out ever so slightly. So if your laptop bag is a bit of a tight fit (mine is), then you might need to be careful when taking it out so that the adapter doesn’t get snagged on anything.

But that’s a small price to pay for the added convenience. Otherwise, the mouse itself is great. It’s small but not too small. (I think its shape works well.) It has a few extra buttons that can be customized via the software it comes with. Speaking of which, the software isn’t too bloated. It installs quickly and is fairly straightforward and easy to use.

The sensitivity/precision is very good (much better than my previous mouse) and is easily customizable. Even the scroll wheel speed/sensitivity can be adjusted. And the mouse comes with batteries and a nice little carrying case. (I’m always a fan of products that are prepackaged with obvious things I would use.)

I only have one minor quibble. The scroll wheel doesn’t work as a middle button. For years now I’ve been used to pressing down the scroll wheel of most any mouse and having that work as a middle button. (Its most popular use for me is in Firefox as a “open in new tab” click rather than the left click “open in existing tab” or the right click “show me a menu.” I like having all three options with three buttons.)

But there is a workaround. What’s interesting is that the scroll wheel is actually two more buttons. If you push it to the left, it clicks. Or if you push it the right, it clicks. This is instead of pushing it down as a click. So I customized both of these clicks as the middle click I’m used to. I guess it’s just a little bit of an adjustment in movement from down click to side click. And I can see how some might like the added flexibility of having two customizable buttons in the scroll wheel.

In any event, overall I think it’s a great little gadget. I give it a 9/10.

So I finally gave in and started using Twitter this past weekend (if you’re on Twitter, follow me at twitter.com/bobcaswell). What is Twitter? It’s a mix of instant messaging, email, Facebook, and text messaging. It’s a network of users that follow each other. Here’s how it works:

It’s quick and easy to sign up; you just need a username, password, and email address. Once in, you can have it scan your email contacts to see if you know anyone already using Twitter. Or, it allows you to quickly send invitations to anyone you’d like. One way or another, you need some friends before getting started. The whole point of Twitter is to answer the question “What are you doing?” in 140 characters are less. Your friends instantaneously see a trail of your answers, and you see a feed of their latest answers as well.

If none of your real life friends are using Twitter (which is mostly the case for me), you can start making friends by following anyone who seems interesting. For me, it wasn’t hard to quickly find and follow 150 or so pseudo- friends (that is, people who I already know from their blogging online even if I don’t know them in person). And each time you add someone to your following list, they get an email from you. If you don’t know where to start to find friends, check out the Twitter public timeline, which is a running list of all “tweets” (messages) updated every four minutes.

Some people like to keep their following list limited and won’t follow you just because you follow them (which is just fine). But others will add you as a friend (i.e., follow you) after you begin following them (like entrepreneurship celebrity Guy Kawasaki who added me within minutes of me adding him). So, in short, Twitter relationships can be summed up as follows:

• I can follow you, and you can follow me.
• I can follow you and you don’t follow me.
• You can follow me, and I don’t follow you.

Twitter can also be setup easily for your cellphone. In fact, that’s what it’s designed for (the tweet limit of 140 characters is so that it works well with cellphone text messaging). This makes for a lot of tweets that read something like, “bored, waiting in line at…”

So what’s the purpose of Twitter? The Twitter FAQ states it as, “Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co-workers to communicate and stay connected.” But from what I’ve seen, people use it more for other reasons. Marshall Kirkpatrick explains how he uses it to find the latest breaking tech stories. NBC, CBS, ABC Family and MTV are using it as a marketing platform. And of the 150 friends I’m following so far? A good chunk seem to use it almost exclusively for alerting everyone when they have a new post on their blog.

Not that there’s anything wrong with any of these uses, mind you. In fact, I’m inclined to be one of the users that adds most anyone who either seems at least mildly interesting or has already added me. I don’t think Twitter should be confused for email (i.e., a service where you generally scan/read every message). I’m inclined to use it as more of a zeitgeist or snapshot of the latest happenings of those I follow. Overall, I like it and will likely contribute / check others’ contributions frequently.

But it’s interesting for me to see how some have already claimed it to be a wasteful addiction that should be bridled. Well, true, but couldn’t that be said of anything used in excess? If you need it, here’s a 12-step program for email addicts that can just as easily be applied to any technology addiction. Incidentally, Twitter is already popular enough to have had a third party (Twitterholic) create a list of the top 100 most popular Twitter users.

Overall, I think I like Twitter. Is it a waste of time? Maybe. Is it useful? Maybe. However you’d like to classify it, it’s at least an interesting experiment in communication.

Backing up your computer is something you don’t want to think about; you wish it would just happen. With that perspective, I thought I’d bring up the online backup service offered by Mozy. I use it for both my laptop and desktop and now think of backups only when I desperately need to restore something (which can happen more often than you think).

Mozy has a free version, which allows you to backup two gigabytes of data. It requires no credit card and is quick and easy to install. And it’s no different than the version you pay for in terms of features and options. The only difference is that if you do pay $5 per month, your backup has no size limit (if you are interested in the Mozy Unlimited version, when signing up, use promo code TECHCONSUMER to get 10% off an annual subscription or TECHCONSUMER2 to get 10% off a biannual subscription).

In either version, the software automatically detects what it thinks are your most important files needing backup and compiles them into “backup sets,” such as Favorites, My Documents, Music, Photos & Images, Videos, etc. But if you’d rather backup your data from a typical Windows Explorer kind of view, that option is easily accessible by just clicking on the “File System” tab.

The company has had a serious credibility boost via an action-packed year last year. Here’s a wrap up:

• It now works for the Mac which Michael Arrington of TechCrunch calls the “first really useful Mac hard drive backup solution.”
• Even Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal seemed impressed by the backup service.
• General Electric bought MozyPro (the enterprise version of Mozy) for all of its 300,000+ employees, which more than doubled Mozy’s customer base.
• Last but not least, the company was acquired by EMC Corporation for a rumored $76 million.

See below for a chart that sums up nicely what Mozy offers when compared to the competition. Keep in mind that this is straight from the company’s website, though I can attest to having used many of the features listed that aren’t offered by the competition (same goes for Mossberg in his review). It can be the little things that seem to make the difference, such as the option to have all your files sent to you on DVD or Mozy keeping multiple versions of your files for 30 days.

So if you want a free, simple-to-use backup, try the free version of Mozy. If you want a more complete backup solution for your computer, it’s hard to beat the unlimited service offered for $5 per month. And if your backup needs are more robust, MozyPro is definitely an option, which includes a bunch of additional features: 24/7 support, server backups, administrator control for the IT department, etc.

Disclosure: Mozy is a sponsor of this site, though I have been using Mozy as my backup solution well before it was a sponsor (and before any of the positive news from last year). Sponsor or not, I use it and recommend it.

In theory, Blockbuster has a better offering than Netflix in that it “lets you rent online with the flexibility to exchange movies in-store, so you never have to wait for a movie.” That is, according to the marketing pitch plastered all over its homepage. But I decided to see just how “total” Total Access is, and I found it pretty lacking. In short, over half the movies in my Netflix queue are not available at my local Blockbuster.

So I could switch to Blockbuster and have the added “flexibility” of exchanging movies in store. But it would honestly be more of a headache to micromanage the discrepancy between what I want to see and what’s available in the actual store. I’d rather wait and see what I really want to see.

I remember when Blockbuster locations had decent selection. But nowadays, the stores located closest to my past two addresses have all been half the size of the Blockbusters I browsed growing up. And let’s not forget the focus: hundreds of copies of new releases so as to be “guaranteed” in stock while other movies get demoted to only one copy that is often checked out indefinitely (yes, there is a downside to no late fees).

And what if you’re not interested only in box office hits released within the last five years? The sales associate hovering uses it as reason enough to ask, “Have you tried Blockbuster Online because that movie isn’t available in our store.”

So why don’t I try using Blockbuster Online then? Well, I did, and it seemed fine. The problem? I don’t have a single friend who uses Blockbuster Online. All my friends who rent movies online use Netflix. The social side of movie watching has never been better; I use it as a way to stay in touch with high school / college buddies. We see what each of us has been watching lately, rate movies, leave comments, etc. It’s great fun.

Will I never go to Blockbuster again? Not necessarily. There do seem to be those few times a year when I impulsively want to “browse and pick” (even if my wife isn’t a big fan of that move). Of course, now that I have access to streaming movies via Netflix (which so far seems to work extremely well for me), my token in-store browsing time may shrink even more.

We here at TechConsumer are no strangers to trying new ways of getting quality entertainment onto our living room big screens. Regular old cable TV doesn’t cut it, what with frequent commercial breaks, horrible selection, and inopportune timing. Surprisingly (at least to us), though, cable TV is what most of the free world uses (the part of the free world with TVs, that is).

To recap, Logan reviewed using Amazon Unbox on TiVo without a computer, Paul reviewed using both CinemaNow and Vongo on the Xbox 360, and each of us took a turn at pointing out why Netflix is amazing. But each service has its disadvantage ranging from “too complicated” to “inconvenient” with “too expensive” and “too slow” somewhere in the middle.

In fact, we aren’t the only ones noticing this phenomenon. The Wall Street Journal yesterday had an article with video (see video below) that explained it like this:

“Millions of people love watching Internet video on their PCs. So why can’t the technology industry figure out how to get them to watch Internet video on their television sets? It seems like a no-brainer: Consumers get a greater breadth of on-demand content than cable offers, and in the comfort of their living room or bedroom, the industry argues. Yet consumers aren’t buying.”

The article then goes on to list all the major problems with the current setup (too many boxes, too complicated, limited selection, and slow downloads) followed by some fairly obvious solutions. But will we ever find the perfect solution? We would need a service that integrates into what we already have (no new box), is easy to setup and use, has a huge selection, and starts playing movies/shows instantaneously. Easier said than done.

However, according to the site Hacking Netflix, Netflix is going to tell us in January about its plans to get its “Watch Instantly” feature on TVs. As mentioned previously, everyone here at TechConsumer loves and uses Netflix. The”Watch Instantly” feature meets all of the above conditions for a near perfect solution with the exception of one problem: watching movies/shows via Netflix doesn’t go past your computer unless you’re tech savvy enough to hook up your computer to your TV. But if Netflix finds a way to be integrated into a device we already use on our TVs…

That, my friends, could be the first successful joining of Internet video and TV.

Digg founder Kevin Rose announced that Digg buttons will now be available on the Wall Street Journal website (WSJ.com). Not only that, but anyone will have free access to any WSJ articles visited via Digg. Coincidentally, this news comes around the same time Rupert Murdoch suggested that he might take down the Wall Street Journal’s online subscription pay wall. Whatever the circumstances, I’m a daily user of both sites and welcome the collaboration.

In fact, here’s a walk through of how the integration looks and works:

The Digg button is located in two locations, top right just above the main advertisement and bottom center below the article (see screenshots below).

The submit window is similar to the one you’d see at the NYTimes.com. But what seems like more of a new feature is the window that pops up after you’ve submitted. It shows one column of the recently popular stories from the WSJ.com on Digg and another column of upcoming WSJ stories on Digg (see screenshots below).

It’s still unclear how exactly the respective sites keep track of making content free. But it looks like the url used for the submission via the WSJ site creates a url that is different than what you’d see from regular browsing of the WSJ site. Again, however they do it is fine with me. The WSJ.com is an excellent source of news and is one step closer to being accessible by the masses.

Anyone familiar with digg, Netflix, del.icio.us, flickr, Picasa, LinkedIn, Last.fm, StumbleUpon, reddit, etc. knows that any sort of social networking at any of these sites (that is, sharing / commenting / befriending) happens in isolation. Want to see what your friends are up to in terms of music listening, picture uploading, movie watching, career changing, or Internet bookmarking? Well, clear your schedule because you’ll need the time to log in to your dozen or so favorite social networks. Being social has never been so fragmented and time consuming.

But a new service called FriendFeed has emerged. Conceived and created by a few ex-Googlers who are notably responsible for Google Maps and Gmail, FriendFeed allows you to quickly and simply aggregate and consolidate all your social data from the above listed social networks (and many others, see below for a list). If I may be so bold as to take a stab at creating a useless label for this technology, I’d call is RSS 2.0. In fact, FriendFeed may be the easiest way to explain RSS to anyone unfamiliar. It takes what RSS is supposed to do (if the masses could get past what it is in the first place), strips out the techie context, and just works.

How it works is simple. You decide which social networks you’d like to add to your friendfeed (as an example, I started with my Amazon wishlist, my Netflix movie queue, and my Last.fm list of music I’ve listened to recently). You decide to make your feed public or private and can share it with everyone or preselected friends. Your friends do the same, and you create a feed of your friends’ activity across all these social platforms. So any time Joe watches a movie, Beth adds a book to her wishlist, or Tim uploads new pictures, you see the activity all in one place (without having to login to all those separate sites).

And each time you or your friends has an update like that, any of you can comment on it within FriendFeed. The commenting system is pretty simple right now and a fun and easy way for you and your friends to drop each other notes, again, without logging in to multiple sites. Right now the service is an invitation only beta, so it doesn’t quite work as intended since most of my friends aren’t (and can’t be) using it currently. But you can request your friends be sent invitations in the next round (which I have already done for a bunch of you). And, in the mean time, you can get recommended friends based on similar tastes.

It’s not perfect and still quite new. One idea that will need to be implemented sooner rather than later is that of filters. You may not be interested in seeing your friends’ activity across every social network they have included in their feed. But the overall concept and the initial delivery seem brilliant and simple. For more coverage, check out this piece in the New York Times.

Oh, and the supported sites so far are the following:

Amazon.com Wishlists
Blogs
del.icio.us
Digg
Facebook
Flickr
Furl
Google Reader
Google Shared Stuff
iLike
Jaiku
Last.fm
LinkedIn
Netflix
Picasa Web Albums
Pownce
Reddit
SmugMug
StumbleUpon
Tumblr
Twitter
Yelp
YouTube
Zooomr