Some math: Gmail – ads + contact social info = ?

Ok – so browser plugins aren’t really something I usually write about here – but this one here’s an exception. To jump right in, I love rapportive. Love it. It’s just cool.

Backing up just a bit. Gmail users – you guys all know the ads on the right side of emails you read, right? Well, rapportive is a Firefox and Chrome plugin, that simply replaces them. Now that’s nice, but not only does it get rid of the ads, it replaces them with something pretty useful: a contact profile of the person who sent the email you’re reading, based on public profiles. And for the most part, it installs and runs very smoothly – just go to the site, install, and a few painless seconds later, you’re ready to roll – just go to Gmail, read an email, and rapportive’ll do the rest – showing info pulled from their Google Profile, links to Facebook, Twitter, flickr etc, if they have that info publicly available, so it’s pretty neat for connecting with the people you talk to. Also, a nice feature exists of being able to jot down a private note about the person for yourself for the next time you talk with the person.

It’s not perfect – not everyone I talk to has a profile – but overall, its pretty nice. rapportive is available for my favorite price of “free”  – as a plugin for Firefox and Google Chrome, with IE support on the way. Check it out here.

Meebo – it’s fun to say! Meebo.  Meebo.

A while back, I wrote a review of Beejive IM, for the iPhone – an IM app that did nearly everything. It’s a great app, but somewhat pricey for IM, ($10) – although it was the best way to IM everyone on all your networks.

But, recently, after showing the app off at the original iPhone 3.0 announcement, Meebo has finally been released, and joined the IM fray. And for most of you – the presumably cheap especially – Meebo might be the solution you’ve been looking for for using AIM, Facebook Chat, Google Talk, Yahoo Chat, and Windows Live simultaneously. (Although you might want to look at consolidating some of those networks…). And unlike the still-fantastic Beejive, Meebo comes at that lovely, lovely price of free.

Also, Meebo has the usual features of a great iPhone IM app: push support for getting IMs outside of the app, speed, and full chat history. It also has the ability to connect to the Meebo website – which allows a pretty sweet seamless transition from iPod/iPhone to computer. One minor qualm I had was related to my use of an iPod Touch – it takes a few seconds to reconnect/load your accounts when returning to the app from a notification – something that is due to the use of WiFi over 3G or EDGE.

But, for delivering almost all functionality of Beejive for free makes Meebo at least worth checking out. Link’s right here.

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.

There are a lot of great puzzle-like games available for the iPhone and iPod Touch. We recently had a chance to test out a new one called Colorix, a kind of Tetris-Bejeweled mix, and it actually plays pretty well, a great quick game for the bus or killing time.

Made by Mobo Studio, the goal of Colorix is simple— take the sets of 3 colored marbles falling down and try to get match 3 colors together in a row. You can make a row in any direction—horizontally, vertically, and diagonally– and can also get matches in different combos, like having one match lead directly to another. The more matches and combos you get, the more points you accumulate, with the goal to get as many points as you can while avoiding the marbles reaching the top of the screen. Simple, right?

As the marbles fall, you have the power to place the sets of 3 where you want (though they only fall vertically), and while it falls you can either speed up the fall by 2x tapping on the spot you want them to fall (getting you more points), or use swipes to change the order of the marbles. When we first started playing we thought this was way too easy (we picked up the controls pretty easily after playing it a little), but after playing for a little bit, we started to realize a whole bunch of different combinations to get even more points using special marbles (such as Rainbow ones that change after they’re placed—as seen above in the pic). As you get more points and move up to higher levels, the game does also get tougher, with more color combinations and black marbles that stay on the board for a certain amount of turns and block spaces and combinations (as seen in the number 4 marble above).

Gameplay in Colorix is also very smooth, with quick load times and no stuttering during gameplay. The graphics are also surprisingly good for a game like this, with everything looking slick and colorful.

While it isn’t as feature-packed as say a Bejewled or Tetris, Colorix is a solid game for those look for a cheap, fun puzzle game that while not intense, is still very addictive and we’re gonna give Colorix a very good 4 out 5.

Colorix is available now in the App Store for a not too bad price of $1.99 (with a free Colorix Lite version also available now). You can check it out in the App Store here (link opens iTunes)

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 Motorola Debut i856

Looking for a solid phone with a great plan that doesn’t make you sign your wireless soul away for 2 years? If so, then listen up as we got something you’ll definitely want to check out (trust me, you do). It’s called the Motorola Debut i856 for Boost Mobile (the carrier with the TV ads going “where you at?”), and for the past few weeks we have been putting it through its paces, and we came away pretty impressed with both the phone and Boost Mobile as a carrier.

Design and Features

The Debut i856 is pretty much your standard slider phone design. Small, nice and sturdy. It feels great in the hand– not too light though not too heavy– and really looks like a simple, solid phone. The 2.2 inch screen is pretty solid (though we don’t recommend watching movies or videos on it) and works fine for going about day to day tasks like texting, browsing the web, playing music etc.

Speaking of playing music, this has one loud speaker. Now this may be is because it has a built in walkie-talkie, but hey I don’t mind if it means I get a solid speaker for music. Speaking of music, the Debut is actually a pretty music-focused phone, with a dedicated music key on the front of the phone to launch the music player, a 3.5 mm headphone jack on the side for using your regular headphones (always nice to have), a microSD card slot for adding music, as well as a “changing navigational pad” that switches from the normal arrows seen when the phone is in other tasks like taking pix, viewing texts or browsing the web, to play/pause, rewind and fast forward icons. This was definitely pretty cool (kinda like what Motorola has done on phone like the Rokr E8 and Zine for T-Mobile, just obviously here on a much small scale).

The music player on the Debut i856

Once you slide open the phone you get a couple of things. First is a traditional slide out keypad. The keypad is nice and has a good feel, but the buttons were hard to press making texting initially pretty tough. Now the texting experience on the phone itself isn’t impossible, and we really liked how there were threaded conversations in texts that made them look more like IM’s and conversations. One thing that was weird about texting– all the texts we sent out to friends on Verizon, Sprint and other carriers appeared for some reason as MMS messages and of some “high priority” instead of just as regular text messages. Not harmful, just again, weird.

You also get a camera when you slide up the phone, it’s 1.3 megapixel and took some solid pix and videos (again not “wow” worthy and not gonna replace your regular camera with, but for such a small phone like this, it was pretty good). We wish though we didn’t always have to slide up the phone to get to the camera– again not terrible, just annoying.

Also, in the phone is a built in GPS, though there is no built in app on the phone to really test this out, and you’ll need to download the Boost Navigator app (which costs either $2 a day or $10 a month).

But most importantly, the call quality was impressively clear on both ends of the phone, so you’re covered in the actual “able to make phone calls” aspect.

Web

While the browser isn’t anywhere near as capable as the one found on say, the Droid, it performed well when loading up mobile versions of ESPN and Facebook, but it had trouble with our site (we had to test that out) and it doesn’t do YouTube videos. It was though very fast, and all this is really based on a solid job on Boost’s end.

Ok, so let’s give a little background on Boost. Like the prepaid services of AT&T (GoPhone) and Verzion (formerly known as INPulse), Sprint has its its own service called Boost. In a prepaid service, rather than using your phone with a 2 year contract to their service, you can instead PRE pay for minutes–either paying per day, monthly, or per minute– even picking up a prepay card with minutes from your local CVS, Walmart, Target, etc. No contract and no heavy fees if you want to switch carriers, and oh yeah, Boost offers $50 a month for unlimted talk, text, web, and walkie talkie. Not bad, huh.

So why doesn’t everyone do this? Well, what you save in the freedom to switch around carriers and the price per month, you lose in terms of phone selection and in higher prices for the phones upfront. For example, this same Debut i856 goes for $99.99 at Sprint’s site where you sign up for a 2 year contract, while at Boost your looking at $149.99. $50 more doesn’t sound like a lot, but on Boost and other prepaid services your choosing between 5-10 phones max, not the 30+ most carriers offer (you also don’t get phones like the BlackBerry, Pre, iPhone, Cliq or Droid on prepaid plans).

Ok, so back to Boost. They run on Sprint’s iDen network, or the stuff Nextel uses, and while it isn’t 3G, for doing things like simple browsing the web, texting and making calls, it more than gets the job done. Using it around the New York area I was pretty impressed with how great the service was– in some places where I’d usually lose reception on my iPhone, I had perfect with Boost– though reception still randomly dropped, even in places where I usually get great reception. Still, I gotta say that coverage wise, this is pretty solid (and again, since Boost runs on Sprint’s iDen network, you should get coverage in most states across the country, though like with all carriers, make sure to check online how it is in your area before buying).

Wrap Up

Ok, so that’s our thoughts on the Motorola Debut i856 for Boost Mobile, and overall, it’s a very solid simple phone that should definitely please anyone afraid of long term commitments or looking for something simple, yet giving a lot of bang for the buck.

While the great music player, call quality and speaker and the good price really gave this phone a lot of pluses, the tough keypad, and very simple web browser, do hurt this phone. All in all,  we’re gonna give it a solid rating of 3 out of 5.

We give the Motorola Debut i856 a solid 3 out 5

The Motorola Debut i856 is available now for $149.99 with NO 2 year contract, and you can order it from the Boost Mobile site here. BUT WAIT!!! DON’T CLICK THAT ORDER BUTTON YET!

Now here’s where were gonna go try something a little new– GIVEAWAY! The good folks over at Motorola have given us one of these guys to GIVE TO YOU! Yup, you can get one of your own without needing to spend a dime. How you ask? Well, we’ll have all the details on how you can win one in the coming days, so stay tuned!

Sync is a wonderful thing….

Recently, I was given the opportunity to try out a rather nice application called Syncmate for Mac, which, as the name implies – does Sync. From a Mac. But seriously, this program is incredibly useful – at least, to me, and I suspect most of you other teens out there, at least, those of you with Macs.

Syncmate has 2 flavors - the free edition and the expert edition. So, to start off, here’s the free edition: Contact and Calandar, as well as text message viewing. (More on that with Expert later on.) So…. what’s so  good about Calendar/Contact syncing? Two words – Google Account. Syncmate allows syncing to your, and more importantly FROM to/from Google Calendar, from/to iCal or Entourage. This, for me at least, is a huge feature – anything I do on my Mac calendar in iCal is uploaded to Google, and vice versa. And since Google Calendar can go to my iTouch, I can keep that in the loop too. My Windows netbook – same deal. Everything on all my various calendars goes everywhere. Likewise for contacts – keeps everything in perfect sync. And that’s all free.

Moving on to expert mode, you have a boatload more stuff – mainly centered around Windows Mobile phones: Syncmate is basically the iTunes sync for WinMo phones on Mac – can sync iTunes, iPhoto, Bookmarks, Mail Accounts, etc. Also included for text messages is backing up, syncing, and even composing texts on your computer.

Also in Expert is folder syncing to Windows PCs, and flash drives – so whenever you connect both your PC and Mac to the internet, you automatically can sync your notes, making sure you have the latest copies everywhere. Or, when you plug in a flash drive, it’ll update it automatically with your new pictures. Also included is the useful ability for backing up your data to their web-based storage, of which they give you 50 MB (free) or 200 MB (expert)

So, that’s features. In terms of usability, Syncmate also was excellent – I was able to get it up and running about a minute after installing. You just launch it, and it’ll just ask what devices you’d like to set up. You enter in the info, it does the rest, syncing from both Address Book, iCal, and even Microsoft Office’s Entourage.

Overall, SyncMate is a nice useful product, that does what it claims simply and easily. And since the Free version, is well, free, I’d highly recommend you give it a whirl. If you need the extra functionality, or use WinMo frequently, you might want to take a look at a copy of Expert as well.

Syncmate received an excellent 4/5.

Windows 7 is here, and boy is it awesome

Ok, we know it’s a little late, but without further ado, here it is, our review of Windows 7.

So in a couple of words how are we liking the new Microsoft OS after using it in it’s final form for over a month? We love it, and just keeping it short—it’s a thousand times better than Vista (yes that much better).

Want some more details on why we like it so much and what things about it we don’t like? Read on.

Installation

Ok, so we’ve installed Windows 7 on a bunch of different machines—from a high end MacBook Pro in Parallels, to a Dell that was bought with Vista, to a 5 year Windows XP Dell to a HP netbook.

On average, both when doing a new installation and an upgrade from Vista, it took about 1-2 hours. Installations from XP were tougher, as you would either have to first upgrade to Vista (which we did on the 5 year old Dell) or do a complete, new installation (like we did on the XP running netbook, and the other 2 computers). This is something we feel Microsoft really screwed up in—the upgrade from Windows XP to 7. Particularly in regard to netbooks—one of the hottest selling computer types right now at 99% (those aren’t official numbers) — which are mainly being bought and sold running XP, the lack of a straight upgrade to 7 is most upsetting. Nor is the upgrade from XP to 7 free: its another $200 for Home Premium. Additionally, since the only way to install 7 onto a netbook is via a disk, you will need either a memory card/USB stick (about $10) or an external DVD drive. So while when I upgraded an HP netbook to Vista everything was running smoothly within 2 hours, Microsoft could’ve done a better job considering the netbook’s popularity.

That being said, Micrsoft does provide a Windows Easy Transfer Tool which makes it simple to back up and then reimport your setting and files like music, pix, movies and documents, though you must still reinstall all your old programs, which is annoying. On a side note, we’ll keep reminding you: whether or not you’re just upgrading or installing from scratch, backup your stuff! I’ve had friends try to make the move to 7 from Vista and have trouble and need to do a complete reinstall, but since they didn’t backup before, so they lost everything. Trust me, it’s worth it.

So overall, the install to 7 is pretty much on par with that of Snow Leopard, meaning do this over a weekend, and don’t expect to get this all done in an hour the night before you have a test or paper due.

Look and Feel

This hasn’t really changed much since our use of 7 over the course of its beta and RC releases (see our first look of 7 here). Now that’s not a bad thing AT ALL. As you can see in our First Look of 7, the new User Interface is great and something that you really cling to—so much so that it feels weird when you don’t have features like Aero Shake or Aero Peek or that new taskbar (I even was wishing I had some of these as I was using a Mac!).

Aero Peek on Windows 7

In short, the new Windows 7 interface is still amazing and by far the best we’ve ever seen on Windows to date.

Performance

Performance overall on all our PC’s (and the MacBook Pro running 7) has been great. Generally 7 has been quick to boot up, and running multiple programs at the same time has been simple and easy—the way it should be.

Now that’s not to say everything has been smooth sailing. The 5 year old Dell (ironically, this was a Vista-capable machine), did have some freezes when running multiple programs, and when initially connecting to new devices and setting up things such as Aero, but most of those problems seem to have gotten better over time (and since we found the proper drivers, see note below). It also turns on and shuts off faster than on XP. The netbook was even more impressive, running multiple apps (on the normal Intel Atom processor, 160 GB hard drive and 2 GB of RAM) with all the intense Aero turned on, smoothly and quickly. I find it easier (and a lot more enjoyable) to use than XP was, and definitely worth the upgrade.

The other 2 PC’s, the Mac and the Vista running Dell, both seem to run 7 fine, and while starting up has seem to have gotten slower since it was first installed, they still turn on pretty quick.

Just a note: when upgrading or putting 7 on a not brand new PC (meaning a PC you didn’t just buy within the last 5 months with the upgrade DVD from Vista to 7), make sure to go to the manufacturer’s support site (here are Dell, Lenovo, Sony and HP) and look for the proper drivers for 7. This really makes a difference and will make your computer run a lot better.

Wrap Up

We really love Windows 7, and when your out holiday shopping this year looking for a new PC and hear that Best Buy ad mentioning Windows 7 installed—cast your negative impressions of Vista aside and embrace this wonderful system. I’ve been using it since the beta version first went public in January, and it has enhanced and simplified my computer experience.

Does it have some faults? Sure it does, and we would’ve liked Microsoft to have kept some of the Windows Live programs like Windows Live Movie Maker, Photo Gallery and Mail preinstalled instead of having to go out and download them ourselves (you can get them and many other Windows Live apps for free from Microsoft’s site here), but hey, Apple’s Snow Leopard isn’t perfect either. And we really can’t wait to see what PC makers will do with all the new touch and multitouch features built-in to 7 (something we couldn’t test out) in the coming months (and you can already get some multi-touch PC’s now from HP, Dell and Lenovo). We are sure it will make 7 even better.

So what we gonna rate Microsoft’s latest OS? A perfect 5 out 5, as even with all the minor problems we had (all were easily fixable and not major at all), we find it to truly erase all the evils of Vista, and not only finally give XP users a reason to upgrade, but also put Windows right up there to compete with Mac OS X.

We give Windows 7 a perfect 5 out of 5

What you think of 7—how are you finding it one month in? You happy or wishing you had switched to a Mac?  Let us know in the comments.

Not to be confused with Halo.

And, once again, I return to that wonderful gaming platform, the iPhone/iTouch. That’s right readers, another iGame review. This time, I’m talking about Eliminate Pro, the new online 4-player FPS that just came out. Also, its free. Kinda.

First off, what is Eliminate? As previously mentioned, its a iPhone first-person shooter. The quality of the game is way up there – some of the nicest graphics on the iPhone, especially considering that it’s running online with 4 players. There are 5 maps and a total of 6 weapons, 5 of which need to be unlocked, as do a variety of armor types. Weapon and armor attributes, like rate of fire and speed are also upgradable. You play up to four players online, with a matchmaking system based on skill ratings to provide as fair a match as possible. Private games are also available, which is nice for when you want to play some people you actually know. There is also an offline mode, but it’s somewhat limited, allowing you to play against 3 computer opponents, but it doesn’t allow much customization.

Gameplay is awesome – the maps are pretty small, so the action is pretty frantic, and fun. A variety of powerups, including heath regeneration, invisibility, superspeed, damage increase, and the always fun jet pack are scattered around the maps, adding to the chaos. Controls work well, with your left thumb working movement, and right thumb aiming, with tap to fire. Those used to playing console first person shooters should easily adapt.

So, I mentioned before you need to unlock and upgrade things. And you do that through credits, which you earn through playing games online. And thats where the monetary aspect of the game comes it. The game itself, as I said, is free. But unless you have “energy” while playing, you won’t earn any credits, which are used to unlock weapons, armor, and upgrades. You’re given a free energy recharge every four hours for about 3 games or so, but after that, if you want to play AND earn credits to upgrade (you CAN still play for fun), you need to buy energy through the in-app purchasing system. Personally, I can understand why they run the system this way, since its the only way to support the game and keep it free, but I can’t say I’m a fan of the nickel and diming.

However, even without energy, the game is still fun, and that’s what counts in the end. And since it’s well, free, I suppose I can’t really argue against it. Check it out on iTunes here. (Note: iTunes Link)

The coolest box ever.

There are a few apps on my computer that get the honor of running full time – things like iTunes, Tweetie…. and Dropbox. As the name somewhat implies, Dropbox is free online storage– 2 GB, to be exact. After a brief sign up on the site, you now own your personal Dropbox which you can upload to and download from via the Web, as well as add and delete files.

But perhaps the coolest part is their desktop app. Available for Mac, Windows, and Linux, it’s basically a folder as well as a mini-app which syncs all info when opened. Simple, really. And, being a folder, it acts like a folder – easy to use.

This synchronization is the highlight purpose of Dropbox. Personally, I use it to keep certain files available to me everywhere – a few of my favorite songs, a couple important school notes, some of my pictures – the stuff I want to have at my fingertips at all times. Dropbox shines in this regard – because of the whole folder system. Add an mp3 to my Dropbox on my Mac, and I can get it from my Window’s netbook on the go. Need to go over those notes on my way to school? There’s an iPhone/iTouch app, so you’re covered there too. At school, and need that important essay you wrote? Just use the website. It’s pretty awesome. Also, there’s the ability to make a file Public – so you can pass a download link to your friends if they need a file from you. And again, it’s all free.

You start with 2 GB and can upgrade that to up to 3 GB by referring people. The Desktop apps are free, iPhone app’s free – its pretty sweet, and highly recommended.

Now, those of you who DESPERATELY need more then the 2-3 GB? You can upgrade to 50 or 100 GB at $10 or $20 a month respectively – if, say, you need to have your whole computer with you everywhere.

So – interested? Check out Dropbox here. (iPhone App here [Note - iTunes Link])