Go Beyond AIM…

This one’s mainly for Mac users, but can be used for Windows as well. Last week, I wrote a review of Meebo, a multi-IM app for iPhone (also Beejive IM, a similar app). Meebo also has an online webapp component for PC use, but many (including myself), prefer full applications – such as iChat, Mac OS’s built in IM app.

Now, it’s easy to set up AIM with iChat – just type in screen name and password, and you’re good to go. But in recent years, new chat services have been cropping up – specifically, Google Talk and Facebook Chat – as part of accounts you already have. Now for me, I hate having multiple things open for what is essentially the same purpose. So, here’s a little help in setting up iChat with not only AIM, but Google Talk or Facebook Chat as well.

Google Talk (Snow Leopard 10.6) -

This one’s pretty easy – iChat 5 has the feature of adding a Google Account just as easily as an AIM account – just select the Google Account option when creating a new account in preferences.

Google Talk (10.4 Tiger/10.5 Leopard) –

A bit more difficult, but not by much. When creating a new account, select “Jabber Account” – as the ID, enter your Gmail account “______@gmail.com”, your password as the password. The server is talk.google.com, and the port is 5223 – and check the Use SSL box. All set.

Facebook Chat: (10.4-10.6) –

Similar to Google Talk – but a few differences. First, you need your Facebook username – “______@chat.facebook.com” – which you can find by going to the “Account Settings” – where it lists your username (right after your name, 2nd from the top).  Going into iChat now – in Preferences, go to the “Add Account”, and again, select Jabber. Enter in the “______@chat.facebook.com”, the _____ being your Facebook username from earlier, and the password, your regularly Facebook password. Server options are: server is “chat.facebook.com”, Port is 5222. Uncheck SSL for this one. And you’re good to go.

Personal tip – in General Preferences in iChat, enable “Use the same status for all accounts” – allowing you to log in and out of all 3 at once. Enjoy!

Now, for everyone else – those not using iChat. While not personally familiar with these programs, Google lists here how to set up other clients, and Facebook is compatable with Pidgin, Adium, and anything else that can use Jabber using settings that they give here. Enjoy!

Doubletwist – like iTunes, for non-Apple stuff

The age-old issue: you, like nearly everyone else, uses an iPod for music – be it Touch, Nano, Shuffle, or Classic — and you are very happy with using iTunes for syncing and so on. But unfortunately, unless you have an iPhone, the iTunes program is quite unhelpful when it comes to your phone. Unlike your iPod, you can’t just plug in to your computer and sync your music, and while phones have separate applications for syncing media, lets face it – getting everything to work, getting your music from iTunes…its annoying– especially every time you get a new phone.

Enter Doubletwist. iTunes for everything else- literally. Able to recognize and import your iTunes library (even playlists), Doubletwist is compatible with a whole slew of companies and devices – PSP, Zune, Nokia’s, LG’s, Motorola’s, etc. True, it’s not compatible with everything – but it’s certainly more then an iPod and it does a great job syncing. The interface is simple, and familiar to iTunes’, and features the drag/drop method we all know and love. Videos – provided they aren’t purchased (and therefore, DRMed) from iTunes – are converted into a suitable format and synced. Photos – same deal. (Note: iTunes Plus songs, without DRM, are fine)

Best of all – it’s not only a Mac application – Doubletwist is for Windows as well. It also has features for sharing – or “twisting” as they call it – media with friends and family, as well as integration with the Amazon MP3 store.

If you’d like Doubletwist, check it out on the site here to see if they support your phone or device. Also, you might want to check that you have a USB cable to connect your phone to your PC. Finally, if you’re looking to keep a fair amount of songs, look into getting a MicroSD card, so you have memory to store ‘em.

And next time your iPhone toting friend is bragging about having his music on his phone – you’ll have the last laugh.

The last thing a Mac ever displays…

For computers today, backing up a hard drive is easy. Really easy. Macs – you have Time Machine; Windows – dozens of alternatives. But, chances are, YOU, the teenager reading this – don’t. Because, you (like me) are lazy. After all, the backup popup (“You haven’t backed up your files in a while – would you like to now?”) serves to annoy and is ignored more often then not, and the odds of YOUR hard drive failing – when does that happen?

The point of all this? Well, actually, there is one. See, about two weeks ago, my laptop’s hard drive failed. Everything – gone. 3 years of schoolwork, documents, pictures, projects, movies, music, applications – everything from the template to my school’s newspaper to my pictures from summer camp – totally gone. I suddenly was that guy – and man, did I wish that I had backed up some of this stuff – schoolwork especially.

If I can, through these years of writing, get one thing out to you, it is this – don’t mess around with backups. Yes, I know that many of you reading this won’t care – the odds are against it – but trust me: you don’t want this to happen to you. If you don’t want to do a whole backup drive – use a flashdrive to hold your most important stuff, or use Dropbox and store it in the cloud.

But seriously – learn from my mistakes. TeenTechBlog exists to help you – teens – with tech. I’m trying right now to help you – I had a few files on Dropbox, which at least had some recent school stuff. If your computer goes down, you don’t want to deal with data loss too.

But go now – open your document folder, and copy some stuff to a drive. You won’t regret it.

Have you ever wanted your own DJ? One that is so smart that it can pick from literally thousands and thousands of songs, the perfect songs, customized to your music preferences? Imagine, a DJ that will create a whole playlist of songs based on songs you like, even comprehending the elements of the song that cause you to enjoy it so much. No I’m not talking about Genius, Apple’s attempt to create your own DJ, but something you can run entirely off the internet, for a mere price tag of $3 a month. I’m talking about Pandora One, which is an attempt to bring the very successful Pandora (known for their great iPhone, Android and other mobile apps), to your desktop.

A screenshot of Pandora's interface

In case you don’t know, Pandora is an online radio station and calls itself the Music Genome Project. Basically, you tell them one song or artist that you like, and based on the qualities of that artist, Pandora chooses the playlist. However when I say qualities, I don’t mean just the genre; I mean harmonization, vocals, riffs, and even the tone of the song. The best part of Pandora.com is that it offers two plans; a free plan and a paid plan which allows for more skips, and no ads.

Pandora One's interface

If you don’t like a song you can skip it or hit thumbs down to never hear that song again. However due to music license laws, there’s only a specific amount of skips you can get a day. Also, since this is a radio station, you get to make your own stations. However there is one catch to Pandora One, it costs $36 a year. But for the amount of variety you get in your songs, $3 a month is a steal. If you want to try out Pandora One for yourself, there is a free trial.

The Apple iPad

Well, it’s official. Apple has finally ended the months (and years) of speculation today, with the announcement of the iPad tablet. What is the iPad? Well for starters, think of it as an iPod Touch– just on so much steroids that it would make Jose Canseco jealous.

Ok, so there is a TON to cover here, let’s start with the hardware and specs, and WOW does this thing look great.

Hardware and Specs

As you can see from the pic above, this thing looks absolutely amazing. The multi-touch screen is a very sleek looking 9.7 inches (same as the Kindle DX), with the same fingerprint-resistant oleophobic coating found on the iPhone 3GS. The front of the device really does look like a giant iPod Touch, with the only button being the home button.

Now as for the rest of the iPad, again all I can say is wow. Like the latest MacBook Pro’s, the case is unibody made out of one sheet of aluminum, and this means a really thin design. How thin? Try .5 inches thin! Yeah, this thing really is pretty much paper thin! And weight? Try 1.5 pounds! Yeah, in terms of looks, Apple seems to have yet again knocked this design right out of the park.

Now specs. This is a pretty standard set of spec, and pretty much what you’d expect:

• WiFi with wireless N support (for the latest and greatest WiFi networks)
• GPS
• Accelerometer
• Mic
• Bluetooth
• 1 GHZ Apple A4 processor
• 10 hour battery (yes, 10 hours!)
• Availability in three different storage capacities– 16 GB. 32 GB, and 64 GB

In addition to the WiFi-only model, Apple plans to sell a version with both WiFi and AT&T 3G (sorry Verizon users, today sadly wasn’t your Apple device day).

Now this is actually really interesting stuff here: Apple and AT&T will be selling this WiFi+3G version (in all the same capacities as the WiFi-only iPads) for $130 more than the WiFi-only model, and there will be no requirement for a 2 year contract. Think of it as pay-as-you-go Internet, with plans starting at $14.99 a month for 250 MB of data, and $30 a month for unlimited data. Again, this is pretty great as not only are you not tied down to AT&T for 2 years, but price wise, a regular laptop card will cost you $60 on pretty much any carrier, not to mention that it will also require you to sign a 2 year contract. Paying only $30 for unlimited internet without contract? Not a bad deal at all in my book.

Software

Ok so the hardware for the iPad is only one part of this awesome-looking puzzle, perhaps the bigger part is the software on the device.

As we wrote yesterday in the rumor round-up, the tablet runs the iPhone OS (version 3.2 if your wondering) instead of the full OS X found on the Macs. Now for a mobile device, this isn’t so bad as it means the 140,000+ apps in the App Store will be able to run on this larger device.

How are the applications compatible with an iPad screen twice that of the iPhone and iTouch? One option is to just put on the app and either run it in a smaller 1x version (basically a small box for the app surrounded by a lot of black), or to double pixel the app, scaling it to the iPad’s larger screen. This seemed to work pretty well for some apps when shown off in the demo today, but there is also another way: Apple announced a new SDK today for developers to make apps specifically for the iPad, and while this does require some work on the developers’ part, Apple is saying this will be a whole new “gold rush” like the original App Store was when it first came out, and from a user point of view, it should mean a lot nicer iPad apps.

YouTube on the iPad– looks a lot like the normal YouTube

Speaking of reworked apps for the iPad, Apple did this themselves, redoing pretty much every one of the standard iPhone apps from Calendar to YouTube to Mail and iTunes to Maps to even iPod (which now looks exactly like normal iTunes), with everything else in between– making them a lot nicer and more powerful than their iPhone counterparts.

The iTunes Store app now, for example looks pretty much like the real, regular iTunes, with even the ability to play back iTunes LP content. YouTube also looks great, with videos now not only playing back in HD, but with the look and feel of the real YouTube. Other apps like Photos have gotten some upgrades as well, with cool smooth transitions and even nicer sorting. In short, all the Apple apps, which were great on the iPhone and iTouch are even better here.

iWork on the iPad

Apple also announced a new version of iWork for the iPad, meaning now you can write notes in Pages, work on slideshows in Keynote, and make spreadsheets (for whatever reason you may have) in Numbers right from the iPad, and just like you would on a regular Mac. These will be available at the launch of the iPad for $9.99 each.

Sadly though there is still some bad news here, as Apple still seems to have left 2 things off the iPad, things we really were hoping to finally get– multitasking and flash video. Why we still don’t know, but this device is just screaming to play back Hulu and listen to Pandora while checking your email, so let’s hope Apple makes both happen and soon.

Books, Newspapers and Games

There is so much on this end and that it’s such an important part of the iPad that we’re going to separate it from regular software.

Managing and reading books on the iPad

Let’s start with the books and newspapers. For music and movies there’s the iTunes store; for apps, there’s the App Store; and now for books, there’s an all new store called the iBookstore. Basically, its a one-stop shop to download all the latest books (called iBooks), in the simple Apple way we’ve all come to know and love. Apple also has deals with not only book publishers but textbooks as well. If it’s up to reading and carrying a thousand pound textbook or one that is just an app on a 1.5 pound iPad, which would you choose (particularly if the iPad textbook price is much lower than the regular, non-digital version).

Not to mention that reading books on the device look great, and while it’s still to early to tell if it’s better than reading on say a Kindle or Nook, we get the feeling Barnes and Noble and Amazon are pretty nervous right now.

Newspapers also look great, and when the New York Times got up to show off there iPad version of the paper (which you can see in the first pic of the post),  it looked even better than the regular paper and much better than the Kindle version. Not only does the layout seem to perfectly replicate that of the normal paper, but it also has features like built in playback of videos, taking newspapers to a whole new level.

Gaming is the third huge piece of the iPad, and like with the iPhone and iTouch, Apple doesn’t look to be stopping their rush on the mobile video game market anytime soon. The iPad looks to be yet another sick gaming device, and when EA came up to show off an iPad version of Need for Speed Shift, it looked absolutely insane. Definitely PSP quality graphics with the fun gameplay found on the DS. How much further gaming on the iPad will be taken is up to the app developers, but the iPad definitely has the promise, and we got a feeling that there will be a lot of good apps ready to make full use of the more powerful iPad.

Wrap Up

Is the iPad perfect? No. As mentioned before it still lacks multi-tasking and Flash support (really big things), and other nice things to have like a camera, but this is all just the beginning of Apple’s attempt for a middle device between smartphone and laptop. Honestly, I think the iPad has a shot to be something big. Not from a media aspect like the iTouch was, but in terms of using for things like reading textbooks and newspapers or taking notes in school (using either the built in keyboard or more preferably a Bluetooth one– which we’ll get to more in an iPad accessories post). The interface is simple and easy– it’s the same iPhone/iTouch one used by over 75 million people (yes, 75 MILLION), in a package that looks incredible.

And here’s the biggest reason I’m looking forward to the iPad– the price. The  WiFi-only version of the iPad will be available  in just 60 days (think late March) for a very, very solid $499 for the 16 GB version, $599 for the 32 GB version and $699 for the 64 GB version. The WiFi+3G version will be available in 90 days (think April time), for $629 for the 16 GB version, $729 for the 32 GB, and $829 for the 64 GB version. For a device like this with so much more potential and power (such as with using this as an eBook reader) than a netbook, $499 is an entry price I think a lot of people will get into, and will help the iPad succeed where many other tablets before it had failed. And I know I’ll be saving up to pick one of these up when it comes out over the next 2 months.

What you think– you into the iPad or think there is no need for this between your iTouch and computer. Would you use it in school as your textbook reader and note taker or would you rather go with a netbook? Let us know in the comments.

So, later this week, I’ll be flying out to California to join several other teen technology bloggers at Intel’s Youth Rock Stars Summit, at Intel Headquarters. We’ll be seeing (and showing you guys) some of the newest Intel tech, especially related to mobile devices for students. Coverage of the event will be both here, as well as on our Twitter feed.

Joining me will be:

Teresa Wu of College Candy and By Teresa Wu

Chris Lesinski of Hack College

Kelly Sutton of Hack College

Corvida Raven of SheGeeks

Daniel Brusilovsky of Teens in Tech (tentative)

Serena Wu of Social Geekette (tentative)

Julia Rubin of Under the Button

Arielle Patrice Scott

Disclosure: As per FTC Guidelines and the WOMMA Code of Ethics, I’m disclosing that my travel and accommodation expenses are being covered, and that I will be receiving a Dell Mini netbook as part of my attendance.

About the Intel Youth Rock Stars Summit:

Intel’s Youth Rock Stars Summit brings together bloggers that reach youth audiences in an all-day, immersive event at the Intel headquarters. On this day, attendees will get to preview some of the latest developments in Intel technology, including the all-new Intel Core 2010 processor family, mobile devices for students on-the-go, gaming and more. Attendees will even get to meet Intel “Rock Star” Mario Paniccia!

This one’s a new one, but it’s real good. I promise.

Those of you who follow the site know that I’m a big fan of online stuff that lets me stay sane and together across multiple computers and devices (especially in school). So… here’s my new favorite tool for doing that: TeuxDeux (pronounced “ToDo” – you can probably guess where this is going…)

TeuxDeux is an online ToDo list. (Yup. You guessed it.) As if happens, a very, very, very, nice one. As you can see above – it looks fantastic. The interface is clean, simple, and easy to understand. It’s broken down into two groups – stuff that has a date, and stuff that doesn’t. You just type into the text box, either for a specific date or as a “Someday” item, and it adds it. Once there, it’s there until you cross it off or delete it.

Need more time for something? Items are easily dragged and dropped across days. And since everything is online, you can get to your list anytime, anywhere. Which is an obvious plus.

Finally, TeuxDeux comes at the finest of prices – it’s completely free. Not free-but-you-have-to-pay-subscription-fees-if-you-want-more-features free, not free-but-has-annoying-ads-every-5-seconds, just free. And in its current state – it’ll stay that way (they are considering a paid version in the future). They also have an iPhone app being worked on as well.

So – wrap up. There are plenty of great ToDo applications out there – but TeuxDeux isn’t reinventing the wheel. It’s taking the idea and doing it in the best possible way. Which is perfect. For students looking to organize themselves a week at a time, in what is a beautiful and simple manner, from anywhere – try TeuxDeux.

So far, it’s helping me keep track of myself and my crazy amount of work for midterm week, and it’s doing it well. Check it out here.

The Lenovo U1 Hybrid, in laptop mode

The Slate PC by Microsoft wasn’t the only touchscreen computer shown off at CES (not by a long shot), and while at CES, Lenovo announced two really cool touchscreen PC’s of their own– the S10-3t netbook, and the U1 which, is… well you’ll see–think of it as a regular laptop mixed with a tablet. Read on for all the info.

Lenovo S10-3t

Ok, so let’s start with the simpler touchscreen version of the S10 netbook series. This takes the traditional netbook design we’ve seen, and literally adds in a twist– as in the screen can be twisted around 180 degress to go into full multi-touch tablet mode. Kinda like the Asus Eee T91 and T101 we saw last year, though these look to actually hit the US market. Full specs:

• New Intel Atom Processor– the 2010 updated “Pine Trail” version that offers a lot better battery life with slightly improved performance (this is pretty much on every new netbook). The standard model ships with a 1.66 GHZ Atom processor, but the $100 more “high-end” version bumps it  up to a more powerful 1.83 GHZ (new for the Atom line)
• Windows 7– The standard model contains the cheaper Starter edition, while that premium version goes up to the multi-touch friendly Home Premium (this version also adds in an extra GB of RAM– bringing it to 2 GB as opposed to 1, and a 250 GB hard drive as opposed to the standard 160 GB).
• Quickstart 2.0– This is Lenovo’s new “instant-on” startup which basically gets your computer on and you on the internet in seconds, by using a non-Windows, lighter OS. This is great if you want to quickly go online, fix a paper at the last minute, or listen to music/watch pix and videos without booting up Windows.

You also get all your other standard netbook specs here, like a webcam and WiFi wireless N (and on the higher end model, Bluetooth). We don’t yet know of a set launch date for this, but a price is said to be between $499-$549 for the standard model (Amazon says $499, with the bigger hard drive, while Lenovo’s site says $549), with $649 for the higher end, so these may still change as well before release. You can learn more from Lenovo’s site here.

Now let’s check out what looks to be one of the sickest laptop/tablets of the year (we don’t know which category to put it in):

IdeaPad U1 Hybrid

Ok, so this is just flat out really cool. At first look, you think its your average laptop– 11.6 inch screen, Windows 7, Intel Core 2 Duo processor….. just with a very thin design and a multi-touch screen. Now the very thin design and multi-touch screen are pretty cool in their own rights, what if we said the screen can be removed from the laptop and used as just a tablet? Yeah, that’s something we’ve never seen before and is pretty sick.

So let’s try to break this down.

When the screen is in and the laptop is in “normal” laptop mode, you’ve got an extremely light (3.8 pounds!) laptop with a full keyboard, Windows 7 and that Intel processor. Basically, when it looks like a laptop, it’s well, a laptop. Now what happens when you eject the screen from the rest of the computer? Now you’re running in tablet mode. Tablet mode is basically a whole second computer tucked in the screen alone– you’ve got a Qualcomm Snapdragon processor (like in the Nexus One and Skylight smartbook), Lenovo’s new Skylight OS (as seen on the Skylight smartbook), and of course that what looks to be amazing 11.6 inch LED HD multi-touch screen. All in a thin design that weighs a tiny 1.6 pounds (perfect for carrying, well, anywhere).

Switching between the tablet and regular Windows laptop modes are also really simple, with something Lenovo calls Hybrid Switch– which means that let’s say your in Windows playing a game but want to go watch some TV but don’t want a laptop sitting on your lap. All you do is remove the screen, and your automatically switched to the tablet mode, so you can still browse the web, listen to music, read books (yes, this also can be used as an eReader) etc. in a faster, simpler more mobile way without Windows, and when you wanna go back to using it as a regular laptop, you just put the screen back in and your switched right back to where you were in Windows, with everything you did while in the tablet mode (like the sites you had open) switching over to the Windows side. Pretty simple, right?

The U1 also has built in 3G, WiFi, webcam, stereo speakers and an echo-canceling mic, also built into the screen/tablet part, that are usable whether your using this as a tablet or laptop.

Now all this awesomeness does look to come with a little bad (sad but unfortunately true), as we shouldn’t expect this till the summer time (June 1st possibly), and the price is gonna be on the high side– at around/under $1000. Regardless, those looking for a new laptop but also want that tablet-ness everyone’s into nowadays should keep an eye out for this. We know we will.

The Lenovo Skylight

Just because CES starts on Wednesday doesn’t mean companies cant get a head start on announcing a bunch of new products. Lenovo has really taken full use of this, today officially unveiling a whole new line of computer called the Skylight smartbook. So what is the Skylight and what’s different about it than your normal netbook or laptop?

When you first look at the Skylight, you pretty much think netbook—10.1 inch screen, full keyboard, 1.3 megapixel camera, WiFi,  2 USB ports with an SD card slot (both a microSD card slot and a normal SD card slot), and even a mini HDMI port for hooking this up with your HDTV. The 10 hour battery also is right on par with that of the newer netbooks being released, and should be more than enough to get you through a day (or as Lenovo puts it, watching 2 movies back to back on a plane).

But here’s where it changes.

The Skylight has built-in AT&T 3G (again similar to 3G netbooks being sold at your local AT&T, Verizon or Sprint), but instead of running Windows 7 or XP and having an 160 GB or 250 GB hard drive and an Intel Atom processor, the Skylight runs on a Qualcomm Snapdragon 1 GHZ mobile processor (something we’re sure will be popping up in phones all over CES and 2010 in general. This will make all smartphones and other devices similar to them a LOT faster), and a Lenovo-customized Linux interface as the OS. This is a pretty simple web focused OS and is much quicker than Windows for starting up and getting you online. The OS features with special gadgets for quick access to Amazon Mp3, Facebook, Twitter, Gmail and YouTube all built in.

In terms of memory, the Snapdragon ships with an 8 GB minSD card, 8 GB flash built in, and also a 4 GB USB stick that is tucked in right above the keyboard (as you can see in the pic below, it’s the thing sticking up), with an additional 2 GB of online storage included.

And of course the size of this thing is also pretty important to mention—it ways only 2 lbs and is insanely thin (even thinner than some smartphones!), perfect for those who need a fully functional, always connected, computer but don’t have a lot of space in their bag to spare for carrying it around with them.

The Skylight is said to be coming April 18^th for $499  (though there is talk that there will be a cheaper, AT&T-subsidized version available as well this spring) in either “Earth Red” or “Lotus Blue”.

Info from Lenovo