My solution to iPhone 3G battery life

July 16, 2008

Well, I took the plunge on Saturday and moved from a Blackberry to an iPhone 3G. I am working on a more detailed review of the pros and cons of what I've done but, in the mean time, I wanted to let you know my solution to the shorter battery life of the iPhone 3G.

For the record, the battery life is "just OK" - it isn't abyssmal and, as PC World reports, the iPhone 3G's battery life is better than that of competing smart phones.

What's my solution? I bought Kensington's Mini Battery Extender and Charger for iPod and iPhone (available via Amazon and elegible for free 2nd day shipping for Amazon Prime members). I've only had it for a couple of days but I love it already. On a call-heavy day, I start to run out of juice on my iPhone by late afternoon / early evening. By plugging this battery extender into my phone I get a few more hours of talk or browsing time (I haven't had it long enough to give you definitive times, but it definitely lets me finish the rest of the day).

This battery extender plugs into the docking connector on the bottom of your iPhone (original or 3G, and it works with the iPod Touch, too). It is small enough to carry in my pocket which I did all day today, for example. When you attach it to your iPhone, it is small enough that you can still use your phone without feeling like a mutant and you can continue using your headphones since the iPhone's jack is on the top of the phone.

This battery comes with a retractable charging (but not syncing) cable which plugs into your USB port or iPod charger, and you can charge it alone or while it's attached to your iPhone (in which case both will be charged). The LED's on this battery are very useful. When you are charging it, the three blue LED's (on the left in the photo) indicate when the charge level has reached 20%, 60%, and 100%. The red LED (on the right in the photo) is lit during charging and during use with the phone, it begins blinking to let you know when you have less than 20% remaining.

As I said, I've got more coming about my iPhone conversion but this was just too exciting to wait.

Scour, the search engine that pays you

July 14, 2008

I have been playing around with Scour today, and it's pretty interesting. Scour is a very powerful search aggregation engine, in that it will search for terms, images, or video across the top 3 search engines and weights your results according to Scour's own algorithms. What? You know of other search engines that combine results from multiple sites?

Let me tell you why Scour is different. When you search, you're given the chance to sign up as a member. If you choose to do so, you become an advisor to Scour, which means:

You can review and provide feedback (by voting) on the quality and relevance of the searches you received. Scour then folds this feedback into the mix for future searches to make them better.
You can earn points for ever search, comment, or vote you contribute to the site.
You can invite others to join, and get points for the stuff they do on the site, as well.
You can redeem your points for Visa gift cards.

It seems pretty cool so far, and it's free. One nice thing: if you're busy and just want to use it as a search engine, there is no pressure to do more than that. And you still earn a minimum of 1 point per search.

Sound interesting? Click here to sign up for Scour and start earning points for searching (if you use this link, I'll get some points for what you do). And once you're signed up, you can invite other people and get points for their activities.

Yapta gets more amazing

June 22, 2008

Yapta (Your Amazing Personal Travel Assistant) which I reviewed in the past, is launching some new capabilities today. To refresh your memory, the things Yapta is best at are:

helping you track airfare prices to get the best deal (you get alerts when the price drops) and
helping you get money back from the airlines if the price drops after you buy your tickets (again, they alert you and provide instructions for how to get a refund or a voucher from the airline)

I've been using this for a while and, thanks to "best" #2, I've gotten several hundred dollars back form United when my airfare dropped on one of my family's vacation trips.

What's new today?

In the past, you had to use a browser add-on to get Yapta's functionality, which meant you used a bunch of other web sites to search for flights and used the add-on to "tag" the trips you want to watch.

Now, they've unified several capabilities into a web experience that doesn't require a browser add-on. You can, through their web site:

quickly search for the cheapest flights based on your saved preference profile,
start tracking price fluctuations for a number of routes and flight combinations all at once (great for planning trips that are a good distance in the future), and
get alerts via email when fares drop or fall below a "target" price that you can configure.

After you purchase your ticket, the site will alert you when you're elegibile for a travel credit from the airline. That's how I got my vouchers from United - and it was dirt simple, since I followed the instructions Yapta included in their email.

They've also added some other convenience features like storing your frequent flier numbers, information on your unused tickets, and information on your travel credits.

There's much more than I've described here - check it out yourself -- for free -- at Yapta today.

Smart To-Do List software

June 16, 2008

If you're looking for a straightforward way to track your to-do's, organize projects, and keep yourself on track, you might find what you need with "Smart To-Do List." This Windows-based application helps you create projects, track progress, rate task importance, and filter your tasks.

The software is intended to be "GTD Friendly" so you can manage projects, priorities, and contexts all from within the tool. For example, you can tag tasks @Office if they need to be peformed at your office, and you can filter based on these tasks. Pretty neat approach.

The product does a nice job of segmenting tasks by projects, as well, and I found it very easy to change projects or contexts and quickly refocus on what I should be doing.

For me, the only drawback is that all of my task information "lives" in Outlook, and there is no automatic synchronization. This product does offer import/export capabilities, but they are manual as this is really a standalone application.

I am experimenting with using To-Do List as the UI for a couple of projects to see how a blended approach works. Basically, I put a "pointer" in my tasks list in Outlook for a project, which reminds me that the project 'lives' in Smart To-Do List so I can manage it from there.

I've been trading emails with the folks at the company, and they are really passionate about this product and committed to ongoing enhancement of the product so I'm optimistic the product will be even better in the future..

The publisher provides a free, 30-day trial so you can download Smart To-Do List figure out if this is a tool you want to adopt. By the way - if you decide to evaluate it, be sure and read the help file - while you can start using the product immediately without it, the Help system introduces some advanced features that are not obvious from looking at the UI.

Eluma opens it up

June 10, 2008

Last month, I wrote about Eluma 2.0 (Eluma: Browse, organize, and share) which is a pretty cool tool for organizing, sharing, and tracking web-based information (web sites, RSS, web clippings, etc.) on Windows XP and Windows Vista. At the time of my original review, Eluma was in private beta.

Good news: Eluma has unleashed the hounds, and Eluma 2.0 is now in public beta. You can find out more about Eluma and download the beta at their web site. They also have a useful blog that discusses how to cope with information overload (using Eluma, of course).

Here is their video fly-by: