I don’t normally follow politics, but my own Senator from the state of Minnesota, Amy Klobuchar and other senate colleagues introduced a bill today that would limit the amount of cell phone service provider could charge in early termination fees. The timing is perfect since Verizon recently announced that their customers who were smartphone users would have to pay in upwards of $300 if they prematurely ended their relationship with the provider.  How ridiculous! Several years ago, I did pay Verizon $175 to end our relationship.  “Changing your wireless provider shouldn’t break the bank,” said Klobuchar. “Forcing consumers to pay outrageous fees bearing little to no relation to the cost of their handset devices is anti-consumer and anti-competitive.” I have to agree.  Instead of spending the money on litigation with AT&T, both carriers should put that money towards getting their networks in better shape, especially AT&T.  The iPhone has been…

I was at Costco this last weekend and saw the Sony BDP-N460 Network Blu-ray Disc Player on sale for $199.  It usually sells for $249, but most places have it on sale right now.  As a side note, I wasn’t able to locate it on their website, but it was on an end-cap in one of their stores. A while back, right after Blu-ray was initially introduced, I purchased the Best Buy “Insignia” brand Blu-ray player.  I think I paid $250 for it.  Back then, if you wanted network capabilities, you had to pay a premium, now this type of functionality is pretty standard.  The Insignia model that I owned was slow to start up.  It took 30-45 seconds for it to power up before I could even insert a disc.  You can’t upgrade the firmware on it, and there are no network capabilities. That’s why the Sony was appealing. …

Only a week after I had purchased the Virgin Mobile Broadband2Go USB card, I returned it to Best Buy, the exclusive reseller of this product. Last week, I wrote about the Broadband2Go card with somewhat of a glowing review because of the fact that it was available without a contract and actually connected through Sprint’s EVDO network. So why didn’t it survive my bag of gadgets.  It’s pretty simple.  Windows Only Support I use both a Mac and PC and most of them time I am using Windows on top of my Mac.  This means that wherever I go, I usually have my Mac with me so I can work on both personal and business-related stuff. Even though the Virgin Mobile website indicates that the system requirements include Mac OS 10.3, and the modem drivers actually install on my Mac, there is no “Connection Manager” type software.  I did manage…

I picked up a Virgin Mobile Broadband2Go USB modem for my laptop tonight.  I travel fairly regularly and like to have access to the Internet when I am on the road.  Since AT&T hasn’t enabled tethering for it’s iPhone users still, I wanted to find an aircard that would allow me to get Internet access wherever I may be. I thought about purchasing an AT&T card, but wasn’t crazy about having to sign another two year contract even though the hardware was free, or pay $60 per month for data access.  In addition, monthly data transfer was capped at 5 GB. Other vendors like Sprint and Verizon offer similar plans. The one that I found that was pretty intriguing was the offering from Virgin Mobile called “Mobile Broadband2Go”.  Virgin Mobile prides itself on not signing it’s customers up for contracts, but providing affordable hardware and service at competitive prices.  The…

One of the challenges has always been trying to manage bookmarks (or favorites in Internet Explorer) across multiple computers. You may have bookmarks that you use across a couple different computers at home, some that you might want to share at work, and it’s even more challenging if you have both a PC and Macintosh mix.I have a mix of PCs and Macs. I want to share my “Home” bookmarks across those PCs and Macs, and a separate list of bookmarks for “Work” on my work laptop. Windows Live Favorites worked great for my PCs, but required the Windows Live Toolbar, Internet Explorer, and therefore a PC. It didn’t help take care of my cross-platform needs.Till Xmarks. Xmarks in the new name of the product previously known as Foxmarks. Foxmarks was a Firefox add-in that would handle the synchronization of bookmarks across computers using the Firefox Web Browser. When Xmarks…