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IoSafe Rugged Portable review: Anger management alternative

Admit it! Sometimes you are so mad, you just want to slam something on the floor, step on it, and then kick it a few times. I know a friend who did just that with his portable drive only to later regret losing data and hurting his big toe. If only he had had the IoSafe Rugged Portable, his data would have been safe. His toe's another story, however.

First introduced at CES 2011 with a bang (quite a few bangs, actually), IoSafe's Rugged Portable is the first mobile external hard drive that can really withstand serious beatings and abuse. The drive can handle drops, water submersion, dust, chemicals, and being crushed by a vise. I have personally shot at it with a shotgun--at a demo, not out of anger--and it didn't break.

This means that if you happen to drop it in the street and the thing gets run over by cars, chances are it will survive quite easily. As a matter of fact, the only situation it seems the Rugged Portable won't survive is extreme heat, which its brother the IoSafe SoloPro can handle. To make up for this, the Rugged Portable is about 15 times more compact and lighter. The drive is slightly smaller than a 3.5-inch internal hard drive and weighs about 1 pound. It's designed to be carried around, while the SoloPro is meant to be used at home only. … Read more

Google App Engine goes for Go language

Go, Google's experimental programming language, is coming to the company's App Engine cloud-computing service--and a bit closer to reality in the process.

Google hopes to use Go to tackle modern programming challenges such as getting useful work out of chips with multiple processor cores. Getting new languages to catch on is difficult, though--it took Sun Microsystems years with Java, and its Fortress never really caught on widely.

But incorporating Go into App Engine could help make it more relevant, or at least easier to test out, by reducing the hassles involved in trying it. App Engine is a … Read more

Google's Chrome OS: Start small, then build

SAN FRANCISCO--Google expects Chrome OS to be a success. But it's chosen its terms for success very carefully.

Google shares with many of its rivals a natural, reasonable ambition to measure success by market penetration. This week at the Google I/O conference here, the company was quick to tout that there have been 100 million activations of Android devices, that 310 different Android devices have gone on sale so far, and that Android users have downloaded 4.5 billion apps to date.

Though data-obsessed Google doubtless will count how many Chromebooks are sold, that isn't the measurement … Read more

iFlow Reader developer rages at Apple (Q&A)

CNET ran a story yesterday about BeamItDown Software, the start-up behind the iFlow Reader app for iOS, offering harsh words for Apple as it felt forced to shut down. In a note to customers, the Irvine, Calif.-based company said its demise was due to Apple's "mid-game rule changes that make it impossible for anyone but Apple to sell e-books at a profit on iOS."

I was struck by the candidness of the remarks and decided to track down BeamItDown's co-founder Dennis Morin for a follow-up interview. Morin has been an entrepreneur for a number of … Read more

Google's choice: Chrome OS or Android?

SAN FRANCISCO--Google isn't the only big tech company with two operating systems. But it's the only one with two that take such a different approach.

Android and Chrome OS each got a day to themselves here at Google I/O a conference designed to fire up programmer interest in Google's technology.

With the new Android 3.1, an update to the tablet-centric Honeycomb version, Google yesterday added the ability for people to plug in keyboards, mice, game controllers, and many other USB and Bluetooth devices. In short, it's making the tablet more into a PC, architecturally … Read more

Microsoft buys Skype

Links from Tuesday's episode of Loaded:

Microsoft buys Skype

Google's Music Beta

Underage Facebook users

Angry Birds flying to the Web

SAN FRANCISCO--Angry Birds is coming to Web.

At the Google I/O developer conference today, Rovio head Peter Vesterbacka took the stage and demonstrated the popular game played in the Google Chrome browser.

Rovio is using the Google Web Toolkit (GWT) to build the Web-based app. And it's hosted on the Google App engine. The game is available free of charge in Google's Chrome Web Store in "beta."

Vesterbacka said Rovio liked Chrome in particular for the browser-based version of the game. Building Web apps with high-end graphics is tough in a browser, CNET's Stephen … Read more

Google adds in-app payments to Chrome Web Store

SAN FRANCISCO--On the second day of Google's developer conference here, the Google team announced a feature that lets developers add one-touch in-app purchasing to their Chrome Web Store apps, using Google's payment system.

Now with a single click, app users can make a purchase and then jump right back to the application, be it a comic book, game, or whatever else.

In addition to making it easy for users to make one-touch payments, said Google's Vikas Gupta, the company wanted to make it simple for developers to add the feature--it requires the addition of only a single … Read more

Andy Rubin: Why Android is only quasi-open

SAN FRANCISCO--Android is open-source software, but it doesn't come with much of an open-source community, and the Google leader of the project explained why yesterday.

Because people can scrutinize Android's source code, modify it, and build it into their own hardware, the mobile operating system qualifies as open-source software. But Google exercises tight control over what gets built into the official Android software, what gets released as Android, and when that source code appears--especially with the tablet-oriented Honeycomb version.

The reason for Google's approach is so the company can control Android's interfaces, the underlying features that … Read more

Dynamic Google doodle draws dancers, complaints

Today's Google doodle honors choreographer Martha Graham's birthday--and with animated dancers revealing it, the doodle also showcases the company's push to build a more dynamic Web.

The only problem: some people find it's slowing their machines. That's hardly the outcome that Google--obsessed over every millisecond of delay in delivering search results--could have wanted.

The dynamic doodle is a rarity for Google, but you can expect more as the company tries to draw attention to what can be done on the Web, not just to the subjects of its doodles. Indeed, Google had a whole session … Read more