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There is a new breed of storage devices that allows you to use Wi-Fi to stream movies to your iDevice (iPhone, iPod, iPad, etc).

First, let’s look at the Kingston Wi-Drive.  It’s about the size of an iPhone, but slightly thinner and looks like most of the portable USB drives out there.  It has some great features, such as a data pass-through that allows you to connect your iDevice to it and still access the Internet.  It’s available as a 16GB ($149) or a 32GB ($199), but Kingston failed to add an SD card slot, so the capacity could be an issue if you’re used to having a massive collection available. If you convert the movies all the way down to 500MB per movie, video quality will take a visible hit, and you’ll have about 64 movies available on the 32GB.  If you change the target size to about 1GB, quality will be noticeably better, but you’ve dropped the available movies to 32 (assuming the 32GB drive).  I really liked the idea of this one, but the limited capacity and price kept me searching.

Next up is the Air Stash that is a USB flash drive, you plug in your SD card up to 2TB, and connect to it via Wi-Fi.  It charges via USB and has it’s own battery so just drop it in your pocket and stream your movies to your iPhone. It’s easier on your wallet at $99, but you’ll have to also spring for a SD card of your choice. The freedom to take multiple memory cards with you and connect them could be good if you’re traveling alone, but could be an issue if you’re sharing the connection and want to watch something on a different card. You can see what’s available via the browser on your device, so there’s no software to load.  This could be good if you have a wide variety of gadgets you want to connect with.  I’d love to try this one with a Sony PSP, the Nintendo DSi, laptops, iPhones, and anything else I could find with a browser on it. With a maximum of 8 Wi-Fi connections available, you won’t max it out easily.

Seagate address this segment with the Go Flex Satellite. They addressed the capacity issue with a decent 500GB so you’ve got some elbow room. That’s far more than the 32GB  Kingston was able to pack into the $199 price point. Once you’re connected to the Go Flex Satellite, you’re unable to connect to the ‘net, so I can see that being a major annoyance as I’m the type that often looks up actors in IMDB (Internet Movie DataBase) while watching a movie.  That’s a big strike against it.  Some might complain about the relatively large size compared to the others, but I still consider it a size that’s easy to travel with.  It would fit nicely in my laptop bag.  The five hour battery life is reasonable, but that may go quickly if you’re waiting at an airport and going on a long flight.  You’re limited to three Wi-Fi devices at once.  That could be an issue with some families, as last weekend on our roadtrip we had 8 iDevices in the car at once, you’re mileage may vary.  Here are the Seagate ads for it – Seagate GoFlex Satellite Demo

Saving the best for last, I offer you Air Video. This is a $2.99 app for your iDevice and a free server to load on your computer. This is great, because now I can load the server on my laptop, which happens to have a 500GB drive, so there’s plenty of room.  If the movie on the laptop is not in a format the iPhone can play, it can convert the movie on the fly and the stream to the iDevice will start in a few seconds.  The conversion process does take a good chunk of computing horsepower; when converting a 720p video, my laptop with an Intel i5 2.4 Ghz with 8GB of RAM had the CPU usage at around 56%.  There is an option to convert the video and it will save it to a folder and then you can stream it to your device. Sure it will take a bit longer, depending on the power of the machine, but then streaming it to the iDevice will be far easier and won’t have to go through the conversion process every time you want to watch it. I’m aware that may sound like a hassle while reading it, but in use, it’s very, very simple to use.   I’ve been testing with the free version, but once you see how well that works, it’s pretty much a no-brainer to go with the $3 version.  I’m using it on a Wireless N network, the laptop on a 5Ghz connection, the iphone an a 2.4 Ghz wireless N connection.  I will do further testing using a Verizon Mi-Fi as the Wi-FI host and everything connected with Wireless G.  Then the laptop can stream movies around the car.   There is a way to connect to it through the Internet so you can stream all the movies on your home network, but some people have said it was a bit buggy.  I will have to test this out.

At work, the Wi-Fi is horrible, but I do have a copper Ethernet jack with an unfiltered Internet connection which is pretty much useless when I want to connect my iPhone to that connection.  Then I found Connectify, a specialized little utility that may seem odd to some people, but when to those that need it, it’s pure genius.  Basically, you connect your laptop to the copper Ethernet port and use that connection to get to the outside world.  Then Connectify uses the Wi-Fi card in the laptop as a wireless hotspot.  Now I can connect to the hotspot with my iPhone and get out to the net with higher speeds (depending on the Internet connection) and no worries about using the data quota on the phone, a win-win!!

You can get the free demo at http://www.connectify.me/ or you can purchase the pro version for $29.99.

I’ve been using it for a while and it is well made software that seems to just work.

The desktop experience is having an fundamental change that some of us ol’ timers may not have noticed, or really appreciated.  Many of use are used to a specific computer set up exactly the way we like it and dread going to another machine without our favorites, our history, etc. on it. Firefox Sync allows the information to be at your fingertips without being tied to a specific machine.

Firefox now includes a feature called Sync.  I’ve been using it for the last few versions of Firefox and it’s become a very handy feature.  I have it installed on Firefox on my Mac, Firefox on my Windows 7 laptop, Firefox on my work machine running Windows XP and I have Firefox Home on my iPhone. You can choose what you want to Sync – Bookmarks, Passwords, Preference, History and/or Tabs. Firefox Home runs on your smart phone and syncs with the data, then you click on a link and it will open in Safari on the iPhone.  Now, I’m sure you’re asking how could this possibly be that handy. Let’s explore a few examples that have come up in the real world:

One day I watched a funny video of a barking cat on YouTube before going to get the kids after school.  I left the video up in a tab on the Mac so I could show it to the kids after we walked home.  Then I was talking to some of the other parents before the children were released for the day and one of the other parents brought up the video and the rest of the parents hadn’t seen it.  I whipped out my phone, opened Firefox Home and clicked on the tab with the video and within a few seconds everyone was able to see the barking cat.

I had Firefox all setup on my Mac with all the usual plugins; Ad Block Plus, Evernote Clipper, Stumble Upon, etc.  Then I added a new Windows 7 laptop to the collection.  A fresh install of Firefox, then set up Sync and Shazam!, all the ad-ons, history, preferences, and bookmarks were on my new install and I was off and running with all the settings I was already comfortable with. Very Cool indeed.

My work machine has Sync enabled so when I log in, I everything at my finger tips.  This was very handy when I was at home researching some solutions for some tech issues and I was explaining what I had found to a co-worker.  I couldn’t remember the name of the site where I found the applicable information, but a quick click on History>Tabs from Other Computers and I had the information without even as much as a Google search.

For more information, check out the Firefox page “What is Firefox Sync?“

The amount of candles on the last birthday cake was an all time personal high, but somehow all the jokes of forgetfulness are somehow filled with a bit less humor and touch more reality.  Sure, Post-It notes do help prove Benjamin Franklin was write when he wrote “The faintest ink is more powerful than the strongest memory”, but they are messy when used in great numbers and somewhat hard to access when away from them.  One other shortfall with Post-It notes is that they don’t do well with multi-media like voice recordings, videos, pictures, etc..   The excellent solution is Evernote.  Now you can put your notes into Evernote using your smart phone, any web browser, the app for Windows or Macintosh.  I’ve just started exploring what Evernote is capable of and it solves many issues with other ‘getting things done’ type apps.  Evernote does their very best to be there when an idea strikes so you can capture it quickly and easily.  On the iPhone, I can record voice notes when walking the dog, then listen to them when I’m back in my home office and search for additional information, or go through the ‘to do’ list that I dreamed up. I can access the Evernote notes on a browser from work so I don’t have to load any software on that machine.

I found an interesting little app called Click.to that has the potential to be a very nice little time saver.  Sure, all of us that have worked over a keyboard for years are all about cutting and pasting, and this little gem streamlines the process.  I never really complained about copying and pasting data, it was faster than retyping long strings of text and it also meant to typos.  When using Click.to, simply highlight the text as you’ve always done, then click on copy with either the mouse or good ol’ ‘ctrl+c’ and you’ll see a little semi-transparent toolbar float above the text with logos of Facebook, Evernote, Outlook, etc (it’s configurable for a large list of apps and sites). Choose the icon of the app or site you want the text to go to.  It really works smoothly in reality and saves several steps.  This could really add up over a typical workday.

The Click.to site has a really bad video trying to demonstrate the app, but it will give you an idea of what to expect.

So far, this has worked very well for the apps that are already in the list.  I will have to to some testing to see how well this works with our ticketing system at work so I can copy things from emails into open tickets with click or two.  It seems to be one of those ‘a-ha’ apps that when you use it, you’ll wonder how you ever got along without it.

Lifehacker brought Type2Phone to my attention with their quick review of the app. (Note: The screenshot they show with the iPhone notepad app is NOT displayed in the actual app, only the window above that is on the Mac)  If you have a Mac and a bluetooth phone, then Type2Phone allows you to type on your Mac and it will forward the keystrokes to your bluetooth phone.  I’m using a Mac Mini (Mid 2010) running OSX Lion and a iPhone 4S with IOS 5.01 for this test.

A quick download from the App Store and my wallet five bucks lighter, I was ready to see how well this actually worked.  First, I had to pair my iPhone with the Mac. Directions to pair the devices are pretty simple, but if you need the steps, these should help you get it done.

1. On your iPhone, go to: Settings > General > Bluetooth (ON)
2. While the Bluetooth menu is still being displayed on the iPhone, now on the Mac, click on Settings >  Bluetooth settings and select both  “On” and “Discoverable”.
3. The Mac should pick up your iPhone as it does a scan for all Bluetooth devices around.
4. Once your iPhone shows up on the list, select it click “Add”.
5. Once you add this device, it shows a code to be entered on the iPhone.  The  iPhone will display a field for these code number to be entered to enable the pairing. I didn’t have to type them in, as they already matched what was displayed on the Mac, so I just clicked ‘OK’.
6. Your iPhone should be successfully paired and the name of your computer should also appear on the Bluetooth settings page on your iPhone.
7. Now you can launch the Type2Phone app and click on “Click here to connect” in the menu bar.

Then I just started up the messaging app on the iPhone and then typed a few things on the keyboard on the Mac keyboard and they show up on the phone.  I was up and running with no hassles very quickly.

I can already see that it will be very handy to have some sort of stand for the phone to hold it up above my keyboard.  I’m looking seriously at a Luxa2 stand, either the H1 or the H2.  I really love the look of the H2, but I haven’t seen anyone review the H2 while using the Apple bumper case with a iPhone 4/4S.

So far, every app that uses the keyboard on the iPhone has worked very well with Type2Phone.  Oh, how I love using my old IBM ‘clicker’ keyboard to type to a killer smart phone.  I hope Steve Jobs doesn’t find out, he’ll come back to haunt me for this.