Advocate's Studio

We are right at the start of CES, the consumer electronics show, where all the big and small manufacturers of tech toys trot out some of the stuff they are working on in order to get the tech press all excited. Being that this is a tech blog and that I do have a keen fondness for electronic whiz-bangs, I felt I should at least make a mention that the show is going on and point out a few of the cool things that have been unveiled thus far.

First up, my personal favorite non-Apple computer manufacturer: Lenovo. They have been very busy developing a couple of new tablets, a smartphone and, get this, an Android 4.0 Smart TV. How cool is that? It’s a whopper at 55 inches. The Idea Tab S2 10 10-inch tablet is very light and thin at 1.1 pounds and docks with a keyboard, making it look a bit like a MacBook Air.

My favorite camera manufacturer right now, Fuji, has an exciting new addition to its Finepix X- line – the X-Pro1, which apparently is mirrorless, but sports the same cool retro looks as the X-10 and X-100.

And the affordable tablet for kids, targeted at poorer communities around the world, is finally making its tangible debut. The OLPC XO 3.0 tablet will be $100. It’s rugged and can be charged with a hand crank or a solar panel. One minute of cranking gives you ten minutes of run time. I would love that on my iPad! But you won’t be able to buy one: the XO 3.0, like the XO laptops, won’t be sold directly to consumers or parents. OLPC will sell the tablets in bulk to countries who want to ensure their children have computers, and won’t produce units until orders come in.

Along the same green power lines is a solar powered Kindle cover called SolarKindle. Seems an obvious must have for beach reading. And, it even gives you a built in book light!

Many of these products are available now (in other countries) or coming soon, so hopefully the wait won’t be too long. And there is still more CES to go, so who knows what fun stuff is yet to be revealed. I’ll be watching for the shiny.

Have you heard about this new player in the cheap cloud storage / sync field called Insync? You might want to take a look at it, particularly if you are a fan or user of Google Docs. Insync, which has been in closed beta for more than a year, has now opened its doors to the general public with a claimed better feature set and lower cost (through Google storage) than Dropbox. Insync is trying to differentiate from Dropbox with more granularity and control over sharing and organizing files and its cost structure (free, with Google providing the paid storage in the background). Unlike Dropbox, you can set sharing conditions with read only or read write access and can revoke sharing permissions without moving or deleting the shared file entirely. You can share all or part of a folder structure and specify whether or not those you share with can reshare. You can tie multiple Google accounts to an Insync account too – which is GREAT for me and my many Google accounts. And, although the storage is via Google Docs, Insync doesn’t limit you to the supported Google Docs file types – you are only limited by the amount of storage you purchase from Google which is pretty darn cheap – $5 per year for 20 GB and just over $4,000 for 16 TB and by the 10GB per file size limit. Sign up is incredibly easy – just connect your Google account, download the local program, and link your machines to your Insync account.

Downside? No mobile apps yet. I have seen some complaints on Mac fora to the effect that it duplicates files with multiple labels, making organization difficult. However, at the price point, a little extra organization effort seems a reasonable trade-off. No problems here from this Mac user. As in the early days of Dropbox, there may be a few kinks to work out but this application seems promising indeed to heavy Google Docs users.

Want to expand your virtual real estate on your mobile phone? If you haven’t already gotten your free Windows Live account, now is the time to do it. Sneaking under my radar during the holiday crazies was this announcement from the fine folks at Windows Live – you can now access SkyDrive’s 25GB of storage via apps on your iPhone or Windows Phone. Pretty darn cool. Dropbox is nice, but it can’t hold a candle to the size of SkyDrive.

Of course, Microsoft has baked SkyDrive fairly deeply into Windows Phone 7.5. With the Windows Phone app, you can store documents, notes, photos, videos and access them from your phone. Share photos stored on SkyDrive by email, text, or IM, use Office apps like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint with SkyDrive files, and keep your phone’s camera roll up-to-date on SkyDrive automatically. SkyDrive is integrated directly into the apps as well as core phone functions. Of particular use on mobile, you can browse your entire SkyDrive. share files and manage your storage.

The “extra extra” though is an iPhone app! In addition to their OneNote notebooks, iPhone users can access their files in SkyDrive, create folders, delete files, and share links to folders and files directly using the Mail app. Much of the functionality is the same between the Windows Phone and iPhone apps – tailored to the particular phone’s user experience. This is very very cool indeed – kudos to Microsoft for not leaving us iPhone users hanging!

Read more about these apps and SkyDrive and check out some vids over at the Windows Live site. And get an extra 25GB of useful storage on your mobile device. Thanks Microsoft.

Whether you want it or not, the frenzy of election season is upon us and the Iowa caucuses are bearing down hard. To be forewarned is to be forearmed (not to be confused with the right to bear arms), so Google has stepped up to make it easy to track election data and remain in the know. First up: the U.S. Elections Hub – a Google site dedicated to Politics & Elections with a focus on 2012. Left nav gives you trends, “on the ground”, candidates links and issues links. Blogs and news blurbs offer real time coverage down the middle, and the links on the right give you even more navigational informational options.

The trends map link at the bottom offers a compelling animated graphic that moves over time showing peaks and valleys in the trends for various candidates.

Google Politics & Elections also has a Google+ Page with the most up to date information. A quick scroll shows the page to be chock-full of links and blurbs to satisfy even the most avid political junkie. Have at it!

Interesting. ToutApp lets you pull a report on your 2011 email habits and insights from a scan of your inbox. Tout’s main biz is email management software that assists businesses in making the most of their email efforts, by offering Email shortcuts, View/Click tracking, Scheduling and Analytics for those emails. The app requires permissions to scan your emails, calculate a set of metrics and generate the report. It purports to only look at your email headers and not content or file attachments. Once the report is generated, the data is discarded. While the report is only accessible to you, you can choose to share it with others via a secured link. Tout does advise that, while your report is secure, it may use data to create its own reports on generalized geographic trends, albeit in a completely anonymous manner. Right now, the app only works with Gmail – and you need to make sure that IMAP is enabled and that the Language setting is set to “English.” Apparently, the app will extend to other providers soon, so stay tuned.

If this interests you, then check out the explanatory video below.