Microsoft Wireless Laser Mouse 7000 is a stylish affair that sits comfortably in the hand and glides smoothly across the desk. A small docking station recharges the battery, but we found you need to be very precise when placing the mouse on the dock. The wireless connection is provided by a small 2.4GHz USB stick.
The two traditional buttons are joined by a smooth-scrolling wheel, which itself has three button actions, and two thumb-operated buttons Microsoft says they are for one-touch magnification and Vista’s Flip 3D tool, but the included software lets you reassign them. The extra buttons are well positioned, so you are unlikely to press them by accident. Will Stapley Overall A well-designed mouse but there are cheaper alternatives
Tags: Wireless Mouse
A femtocell home cellular base station from Thomson integrates a DSL modem, a Wifi access point and four-port Ethernet router.
The company expects mobile phone providers to bundle the device with ADSL broadband access and two handsets by the end of the year.
Femtocells improve cellular coverage within homes but offer even more benefit to operators because they make more efficient use of expensive spectrum and reduce the backhaul traffic from base stations to truck routes. So femtocells are likely to pack extra features to encourage adoption.
It makes sense for mobile operators to bundle them with broadband to simplify charging as the user’s own landline is used for the backhaul.
The TG870 femtocell will cost a little more than $150 unsubsidized but the price is expected to hit around $70 as production ramps up, Thomson business development manager Jeff Land said at Cebit.
The TG870 supports 3.6Mbits/sec HSDPA and 802.11g Wifi. Next-generation femtocells shown at Mobile World Congress last month supported both Wimax and 100Mbits/sec 4G Long Term Evolution (LTE) links. The 100Mbits would be shared with other users over a neighborhood base station but home femtocell users could have it to themselves.
Another selling point is that femtocells offer similar home coverage to Wifi but use only a tenth of the power needed for transmission, reassuring those who give credence to claims that the radiation is dangerous.
Tags: Wifi Router
Miniaturization has brought us amazing advances, tiny transistors, microscopic nanotubes, bite-size Frosted Mini Wheats, and now the Eye-Fi. Combining a 2GB flash card with a Wi-Fi radio, this affordable hybrid card lets you easily upload pictures directly from your camera to the web and your PC.
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Setup is easy. You plug it into your PC and run the included software, pick from a list of photo-sharing sites, which including SmugMug, Flickr, and Facebook, to create an Eye-Fi account, and configure security setting like 40-128 bit WEP, WPA-PSK, or WPA2-PSK.
Like magic, images popped up on our SmugMug page and the client PC. Of course, Wi-Fi capability in a digital camera isn’t new, but it’s never been this cheap, this tiny, or this universal. Because the Eye-Fi is a standardsize SD card, it should work in almost any camera.
What is the downside? Speed.
It took roughly 6 minutes to transfer a 5MB image over our corporate LAN, which has 14Mb uploads and 30Mb downloads. Bang out 35 photos, and you’ll have to leave the camera on for the evening to upload your pictures. Fortunately, the images are also stored on the card, so if you shut down, you can resume your upload later. What is wacky is that images are sent from the card to Eye-Fi’s server, which then disperses them to your website or PC. The impact on battery life is difficult to gauge but is certainly a drag. The card also can’t upload video or RAW files and doesn’t work with access points without security or in peer-to-peer mode.
Despite all these warts, the Eye-Fi is still very cool. You could, for example, use it to post snaps of uour hot New Year’s party to the web as it’s happening. The card’s also handy for tuckered parents who don’t have the energy to upload images of little Timmy to a web page for grandma to see. With the Eye-Fi, you bang out a couple of shots and set your camera down. There are clearly improvements to be made, but for the price, it’s a fun toy to try own.
Click for details: Eye-Fi Card, Wireless 2 GB SD Memory Card
Tags: Eye-Fi
More companies are begin bidding on a section of the 700MHz spectrum that had previously been used by analog TV. This auction, however, has engendered much more media interest than past FCC auctions, in part because of the spectrum’s features but also because of the companies participating in the sale.
The section of the 700MHz spectrum the FCC is auctioning off is composed of five different blocks. Of these, the A, B, and E blocks are further divided into smaller regional areas. These sections of the spectrum are of most interest to regional carriers hoping to fill out their networks. Unlike the other blocks, the D block is being sold as a single, nationwide license, however, there is one caveat: The spectrum must be given up to public safety officials in times of emergency. Allen Nogee, a principal analyst at In-Stat, explains that this makes the license most attractive to a big operator that can use other spectrum if the D block has to be given up.
The most attention, though, has been paid to the C block, which is divided into 12 regions. The C block is valuable because it has much stronger penetration than traditional cell signals and because of the FCC’s acceptance of open access rules that Google fought for, assuring that the spectrum will be open to essentially any type of device from any manufacturer.
Nogee believes only a handful of the 100-plus bidders are serious competitors for the C block. Of them, Verizon, Google, and AT&T are at the top of the heap, with Verizon having the best chance of winning. The company new policy of glasnost, after a long period of Soviet-style suppression of its network, going so far as to strip features from handheld devices, suggests a serious change in its business model.
Tags: 700Mhz
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