passport

The WD My Passport, the first-ever 2TB portable drive WD introduced last week, turned out to be pretty impressive.

Despite the fact that it offers the top capacity for 2.5-inch-based drives that use the current perpendicular recording technology, the drive is also compact and light. In fact, it's more compact than the My Passport Studio that offers just half of its storage space.

Originally, it was predicted that for 2.5-inch internal drives -- those housed inside portable drives like the new My Passport -- to reach 2TB, a new recording technology would be required. WD's My … Read more

Western Digital announced late yesterday the first single-volume portable external hard drive on the market that offers 2TB of storage, 500GB more than the second-highest-capacity portable drive of its type, the GoFlex Ultraportable of Seagate.

The new drive belongs to the My Passport family which, prior to this, offered up to 1TB of storage space. Despite the doubling of the capacity, the new 2.5-inch drive remains compact, bus-powered, and portable. WD says it supports USB 3.0 and USB 2.0, and is preformatted using NTFS but can be easily reformatted for Mac OS.… Read more

Western Digital announced today its latest in the My Passport family of portable drives, the My Passport Studio and My Passport for Mac portable hard drives. Both drives are designed to work with a Mac out of the box and feature compact, elegant designs.

The new My Passport Studio, which is the update to the version released in 2010, now boasts an all-metal, scratch-resistant design and provides multiple connectivity options, including two FireWire 800 ports and a USB 2.0 port. The reason it doesn't feature USB 3.0 is simply because Mac computers don't offer this option. … Read more

For many of us, almost every aspect of our personal business is online now: banking, bill paying, insurance, personal correspondence, and much more. Strong passwords are a good idea, and Web sites are increasingly requiring that users create more complex passwords and change them more frequently. That's all well and good, until you can't remember the password yourself. Passport is an extremely simple program that can store all of your passwords securely. It's a great choice even for people who aren't particularly computer-savvy but who know the importance of computer security.

The program's interface is … Read more

The last time we had a passport made we ended up with one of those typical unattractive headshots from the local copy place. If you'd rather have a little more control over your passport photo--and we don't blame you, as you'll be stuck with it for a while--you might want to try Free passport photo software.

What you actually get with this program is not just a tool for correctly editing passport photos, but a whole suite of photo tools called CamToPrint. In addition to the passport tool, there are also utilities for creating photo albums, calendars, … Read more

Happy Chinese Lunar New Year! According to the lunisolar calendar, this year's animal zodiac celebrates the rabbit, the fourth animal in the 12-year cycle. Jeff can't get enough talk about Chinese cultural traditions, although this day of celebration is a little bittersweet for me thanks to a present I received today from Amazon.com.

Rabbit Mothers aside, Verizon subscribers and AT&T haters are celebrating today for the release of the Verizon iPhone. Early reviews are already in, and it turns out the Verizon iPhone is indeed...a phone; which is more than we can say for the AT&T version.

CNET's cell phone expert Kent German already ran anecdotal testing to compare the data and call quality of the Verizon handset, and Big Red's version definitely has the advantage in almost all of the trouble-prone test sites in San Francisco. Keep in mind that this may change depending on your location, but if you were waiting to see if Verizon would deliver on its promise for better service, it did.

Like a good Apple fanboy, Wilson already has a digital copy of News Corp.'s experiment iPad-only newspaper, The Daily. He played around with it for a little while before the show, and even though he refuses to say anything bad about it on the recorded segment, I'll throw him under the bus to tell you that he wasn't entirely happy about the loading speed of the category carousel on the front page. We're also wary of a daily newspaper that updates itself at noon every day...is this today's news tomorrow?

We can't say anything too incendiary about The Daily since we live in fear of Peter Ha, a friend of the show who's also the tech editor for the good afternoon paper. He's booked to guest host tomorrow's episode of The 404, so we'll wait to grill him on it then.

Google also gave its Android Marketplace a makeover yesterday, and although it's been criticized in the past for being too difficult to install and pay for apps, the company hopes to change that with a new interface that allows users to access the store with their Google IDs. You can search for apps on desktops or laptop computers, and the apps will automatically download and install on your Android phone.

The new Android Market will also allow in-app purchasing, so you can add levels to games and other enhancements to existing apps over Twitter to all your friends. Check it out at http://market.android.com.

Mubakalar finally approves of a few voice mails that we listen to after the break, so keep them coming! The phone number to call is 1-866-404-CNET.

Finally, if you're looking to back up your data so this doesn't happen to you, consider today's Deal of the Day, brought to you by Kodak.

It's the Western Digital 1TB Portable USB Hard Drive for $99.95 from B&H Photo and Video. The drive is portable, easy to use with any USB 2.0 port, and is made from recycled materials to decrease your digital footprint on the environment. Enjoy!

The data breach at Gawker earlier this week had many people scrambling to figure out if their data had been exposed and resetting passwords on other sites just in case they had reused their password there.

The only Gawker subscribers who appeared to have been safe were those who logged in to the site using Login with Facebook (formerly called Facebook Connect), a single sign-on authentication service that lets you use one login for multiple sites as long as you have a Facebook account.

Basically, it works by allowing you to sign in to a Web site using your Facebook … Read more

Escort is a brand that's probably best known for its line of radar and laser detectors, but it got its toes wet in the world of GPS with its Entourage line of GPS vehicle locators last year. Today, Escort has stepped further into the world of GPS with its first portable navigation device, the Passport iQ (unless you count the SmartMirror, which is hardly portable). And because old habits die hard, they've crammed a radar and laser detector into its chassis for good measure.

Superficially, the Passport iQ looks like a standard portable navigation device. It's got a 5-inch touch screen, displays 3D Navteq-supplied maps, and mounts to the windshield with a suction-cup mount. The unit features spoken turn-by-turn directions, graphic lane guidance, and--like many GPS navigators we've tested--displays the current speed limit where available. However, where normal GPS devices may offer the ability to overlay POI icons for gas stations, hotels, and the like, the Passport iQ is able to overlay Escort's Defender Database icons marking red light cameras, speed cameras, and known speed traps. A 90-day trial of the Defender Database is included with the unit, after which a subscription will be required.

Things get interesting when Escort mentions that it has integrated a fully functional radar and laser detector based on its Passport 9500ix detector.… Read more

Seagate recently launched its USB 3.0-based line of external hard drives including the FreeAgent GoFlex Ultraportable (1.5TB for laptops) and the FreeAgent GoFlex Desk (3TB for desktops). Western Digital followed suit today with its own line of USB 3.0 external hard drives that offer up to 3TB of storage.

The company announced new versions of its three popular lines of storage devices, including the My Passport Essential, My Passport Essential SE, and My Book Essential. All three are external hard drives. The first two are compact and portable drives (suitable to accompany laptop computers) and the last … Read more