Crave

Using Wi-Fi, I was able to download software needed to run the Verizon USB727 EVDO modem on loan for Road Trip 2008.

(Credit: Verizon Wireless)

SAN FRANCISCO--One of the cool things about going on road trips for CNET News.com, as I've done in both 2006 and 2007, is that I get to test out a bunch of cool tech.

For the trip I'll be embarking on next month, that is very much the case, and one of the gadgets I've been looking to get going is the USB727 EVDO modem Verizon lent me for the trip.

The only problem has been that until today, I had been unable to get the modem to work properly. I had been told it was essentially plug and play on Macs, like the USB720 modem I bought myself, but that wasn't proving to be true.

I got back in touch with Verizon, hoping it was a simple fix, and after waiting a few days for the right tech person to get ahold of the question, I was finally told that the USB727, unlike the USB720, doesn't natively support Macs.

This struck me as a problem, since the computer I'm going to be using on the trip is a MacBook Air that Apple has lent me.

So I was sitting in my car here in San Francisco, waiting for the annual Xbox 360 games showcase event to start, trying to figure out what to do. I had my personal MacBook Pro connected to the Internet with the USB720, and in came an e-mail from Verizon suggesting that to get the USB727 running on the MacBook Air, I needed to download some driver software.

How to do it, I thought. Well, it turned out there is an open Wi-Fi network where I'm sitting, so I quickly logged the MacBook Air on to that and, a few fits and starts later, downloaded the driver software.

Then, shutting down the Wi-Fi, I ran the activation software for the USB727. At first it failed, and I was just about to send a message back to Verizon complaining that they still didn't have it right when I decided to make one more try. And suddenly, voila! The MacBook Air was on the Internet.

So here I am, still sitting in the car, pounding out this blog entry on the MacBook Air using the USB727 modem.

And the point, I guess, is that despite worrying that I was going to have to wait until I got home to connect an external Superdrive to the MacBook Air and try to load the software off the CD Verizon sent me with the modem, I didn't end up having to do so at all.

That proves to me, for the moment at least, that Apple's claims that the MacBook Air can be used without the need for an internal optical drive are valid.

On June 10, Geek Gestalt hits the highways for Road Trip 2008. I'll start in Orlando, Fla., and visit many of the South's most interesting destinations. Stay tuned, and be sure to keep up, both now and during the trip, with what I'm doing on Twitter.

Sprint Mogul gets a speed boost.

(Credit: Corinne Schulze/CNET Networks)

The HTC Mogul is about to get fast...real fast. Today, Sprint released a software upgrade that brings an EV-DO Rev. A upgrade to the Windows Mobile smartphone, making it the first such handset in the United States. EV-DO Rev. A is an evolution of EV-DO which boosts download speeds from the 400Kbps-to-700Kbps range to 600Kbps-to-1.4Mbps range, while upload speeds will average about 350Kpbs to 500Kpbs (compared with EV-DO's 50Kpbs to 70Kbps). In short, you're going to get faster Web browsing, e-mail, and downloads--that is, if you're lucky enough to live in a coverage area.

According to the carrier, the Sprint Mobile Broadband Network is available in 13,453 cities and 1,321 airports with a "vast majority" of that network upgraded to EV-DO Rev. A. You can check for your city on Sprint's Web site (Click the "Data, Email, and Multimedia" tab; Sprint Mobile Broadband Network areas highlighted in orange). As for the software update, it's available now as a free download from HTC America's Web site. We'll be getting our hands on a juiced up HTC Mogul soon so check back for an update to our full review of the smartphone.

Update: We just got word from Sprint that HTC's support site is having some problems right now, so the update isn't quite available yet. However, they expect the problems to be resolved later this morning. We'll let you know when everything is a go.

11:30 a.m., PDT: The software update is now available for download.

The CradlePoint WiPipe, attached to a Verizon EVDO USB Modem

(Credit: Rafe Needleman / CNET)

An odd little device made me a hero tonight. We were in the middle of a what turned out to be a 13-hour blackout in my San Francisco neighborhood, and my wife was getting antsy since she couldn't get her laptop online to work. She had some battery power left, but no connection. (My computer has cellular, but I'd rather let my wife drive my car than use my laptop.)

But I had brought home a demo unit of the Cradlepoint PHS300, a battery-powered cellular-to-WiiFi router. With a Verizon USB EVDO modem plugged into it, it turned my house into a battery-powered hot spot even though we had no power to our cable modem.

Setting it up took no time at all. Other cool features, which we didn't use, include a built-in chat function for people sharing the connection, and flexible security and administration utilities.

The use cases for this device are limited. It's an expensive networking backup, for example. While the device itself is $179, you'll also need a cellular data plan and modem to use it, and that usually costs about $60 a month. Individuals who need to guarantee themselves that they'll always have Internet access should get a laptop or modem that connects directly to a cellular data network; there's no need to use Wi-Fi as an intermediary. But if you need to quickly pop up a hot spot for several people to use, it's worth looking at.

Amazon has released Kindle, its new e-book reader.

[Later update: my Kindle review is online now.]

Newsweek has published a lengthy article about it. CNET's coverage includes a review, a photo gallery, a Crave blog, and a News.com blog. That's plenty of factual coverage.

Amazon's Kindle e-book reader

(Credit: Amazon.com)

I won't rehash the basic features of Kindle, but I will try to compare it with the Sony Reader--now in its second generation and Kindle's primary competition. I will also talk about what I see as the strong and weak points of the Kindle design.

Disclaimer: This is all based on what I've seen and read. I haven't seen a Kindle in person. Yet.

First, I'm surprised by Kindle's industrial design. The unit has the same screen as Sony's Reader (or one with identical specifications), but Kindle is much, much larger overall--longer, wider, and more than twice as thick. Yet somehow it's only 1.4 ounces heavier--10.4 ounces vs. 9 ounces. The Sony Reader feels solid; I suspect Kindle will feel lighter than it is.

Kindle includes a keyboard to aid in searching stored content and browsing the Kindle e-book store. The keyboard, however, looks like it'll be in the way of reading, which is Kindle's primary purpose. The other buttons also look awkwardly placed to me--the page-turning buttons, for example, are on the right and left edges. They're so large that they basically are the left and right edges.

To my eye, Kindle is fairly ugly. Angular shapes, sharp edges, weird button placements, etc. I'm not all that impressed by the design of Sony's Reader either, but I think it looks much better.

Amazon appears to have devoted some of that extra volume to shock protection; Amazon's Kindle page includes a video of drop testing. I'm all in favor of such protection. I am constantly worried about my Sony Reader getting broken just from normal use--that's exactly what happened to my first-generation Reader, and Sony asked almost the same price to repair it as the cost of a new unit.

Also, Kindle seems to be pretty much limited to a vertical (portrait) orientation; there's no mention of landscape mode in the user guide (which is available online as a PDF). Sony's Reader works fairly well in landscape mode, which helps a little with extra-wide documents, especially in PDF format. But Sony's PDF viewer is pretty awful, so that advantage often isn't enough.

I'll give Amazon credit for trying something new as part of Kindle's design--the "cursor bar," a tall, skinny display alongside the main one that works with a scroll wheel to select on-screen menu options. The Reader has 10 buttons down the side of the screen; menu options are physically aligned. Kindle's cursor bar appears to be more flexible. Whether it's as easy to use remains to be seen, but I appreciate the fact that Amazon is trying to innovate.

The other surprising thing was Amazon's decision to use a mobile broadband connection through Sprint's EV-DO cellular data network...and to shield users from all the complexities of that service. It's called "Amazon Whispernet," which is a strange name, but what the heck. Customers don't have to maintain a separate cell phone account; there are no bills. The cost of browsing Amazon's Kindle e-book store is covered by Amazon; download costs are built into the price of the books, newspapers, blog feeds, and other services available from Amazon.

This isn't a completely new business model; cell phone companies have offered similar deals for a while, but this is the first time I've seen this approach applied to mobile broadband. There is some risk to Amazon; it could be expensive to support Kindle users who browse a lot but don't buy much.

I wasn't surprised to see that Amazon is suddenly the world's best place to buy e-books. Most New York Times bestsellers and other new releases are $9.99 or less. I searched Amazon's Kindle store and found thousands of titles at or under a dollar, although many of these were individual stories or articles. As a specific example, the novel Burning Tower by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, released in December 2006, is priced at $5.59 in the Kindle store.

There's no need for a PC; everything can be handled through Whispernet. Amazon even keeps track of your purchases so you can download them again later if you have to replace or re-initialize your Kindle for some reason.

If you do have a PC, you can transfer files via USB. There's also an SD card slot. Kindle natively supports only a few different file types, however, so I hope that situation improves soon. Several other file types can be handled via translation, including Microsoft Word, PDF, and HTML documents and JPEG, GIF, PNG, and BMP image files. Sony has a slight edge here with native PDF and RTF support, and possibly a bigger edge once Adobe Systems' Digital Editions is available for the Reader, but I'll have to get my hands on one to see if Amazon's translation service works well enough to substitute for broader native file-type support.

I should be able to figure that out by Wednesday. Regular readers here can probably guess what's coming next--yes, I bought a Kindle. I couldn't resist! Stay tuned for a Gizmo Report as soon as I've had a chance to make detailed comparisons with my Reader.

Starting this month, five Hewlett-Packard business notebooks will be come packaged with Sprint's mobile broadband network.

The HP Compaq 2710p convertible notebook, 6510b, 6910p, 8510p notebooks and 8510w mobile work station, are the first offerings from HP to be eligible for embedded Sprint service. Prices for the five models range between $959 and $2,049. HP says to expect additional models to be added later this year.

The companies will jointly market the notebooks, which will have access to Sprint's 3G EV-DO network beginning sometime in October. Customers who sign up for a one- or two-year service agreement will get one free month of service from Sprint.

AT&T says it has spent an additional $50 million in the months leading up to the iPhone launch to upgrade and add more capacity to its 2.5G EDGE network, but a company official said that subscribers shouldn't expect to surf the mobile Net any faster.

"We don't want to set unrealistic expectations," said Mark Siegel, a spokesman for AT&T. "We have been upgrading the network on an ongoing basis, and we've made an additional investment in anticipation of demand for the iPhone."

AT&T has spent over $16 billion since 2005 upgrading the EDGE network.

The iPhone has been criticized for the fact that it works on AT&T's 2.5G network instead of its faster 3G network. But in the last few days, some AT&T subscribers have been reporting noticeably faster data speeds using their 2.5G handsets. And there has been speculation that AT&T gave EDGE a "boost" in the days and weeks leading up to the launch, which happens Friday at 6 p.m. local time.

But AT&T's Siegel said that what customers are likely experiencing are bursts in speed.

"The connection speed depends on so many things," he said. "It depends on the site you're connecting to or the size of the file you're downloading. And sometimes users experience bursts that are above what is typical."

He said the company has not changed what it cites as the average data rates for the EDGE network. He said on average subscribers should expect between 100 kilobits per second and 130kbps.

But even if some users get bursts of faster speeds from time to time, the EDGE network is still much slower than a 3G network. AT&T's 3G network, which uses a technology called HSDPA (High-Speed Downlink Packet Access), gets average data rates of between 400kbps and 700kbps. Verizon Wireless and Sprint Nextel, which use a 3G technology called EV-DO (Evolution Data Optimized), also offer data rates between 400kbps and 700kbps.

So unfortunately, for all the soon-to-be iPhone users, AT&T hasn't magically increased the speed of its network. For truly faster speeds, iPhone fans will have to wait for the next-generation device that will work on a 3G network.

Qwest Wireless customers will soon be able to wirelessly surf the Net at 3G speeds on their laptops.

The company says it will offer its customers wireless broadband service using Sprint Nextel's evolution data optimized (EVDO) network. Qwest has been using the Sprint wireless network to provide nationwide coverage for its cellular subscribers since 2003. Now the carrier will be able to offer nationwide broadband wireless too.

Qwest Mobile Broadband customers can choose one of three plans based on the amount of data they will be uploading or downloading. Service plans start at $70 a month. The unlimited plan costs $80, but according to Qwest?s terms and conditions the service is capped at 5 gigabytes of data transmission per month. So it's not really unlimited.

(Credit: HP)

If you're shopping for a somewhat snazzy business-oriented notebook, HP's got some AMD-flavored newness for you. The imaginatively named HP Compaq 6515b and 6715b both support a variety of wireless protocols, including EVDO (Verizon) and HSDPA (AT&T). And, being business laptops, they're big on security, including drive encryption, an optional privacy filter for your screen, and a fingerprint reader.

We've got the smaller 14.1-inch 6515b in the CNET Labs right now, and it's actually surprisingly slick-looking for a button-down biz laptop. Both these systems will be available in late April, starting at around $649.

Motorola Razr Maxx Ve

(Credit: Howard Forums)

We know the HSDPA Motorola Razr V3xx is coming to AT&T/Cingular but we still haven't heard anything regarding U.S. carrier availability on the equally powerful Motorola Razr Maxx. And that's too bad as the Razr Maxx promises to be the most appealing Razr to date.

But now it appears we may get our wish, just in a different form. Howard Forums has published marketing photos of a promised EV-DO variant of the phone, the Maxx Ve for Verizon Wireless. Details are sketchy at this point but it's rumored the Maxx Ve will offer a 2-megapixel camera and a microSD card slot. V Cast video and music support should be onboard as well but apparently it won't be compatible with Verizon's new V Cast TV.