Boost Mobile’s Unlimited Prepaid another good option for travelers

Product Reviews, Telecom

Boost Mobile‘s Unlimited by Boost service is another good option when traveling in the US so long as you plan to stay in one place for the majority of the trip. The cheapest phone available is about US$30. A GPS-enabled phone starts at US$50. Both come with $10 in calling credits. Add US$55 per month for Unlimited by Boost and you’ve got unlimited calling within a defined geographic area (a small per minute roaming charge applies for calls made outside the home calling area). On the next trip, bring back the phone and pay only US$15 to reactivate it. So unlimited calling for up to a month can be had for US$70-85. This includes US national long distance but not long distance to any foreign location (such as Canada). If you’re a Canadian roaming in the US, that translated into less than one hour of roaming fees payable to a Canadian home wireless carrier.

AT&T / Cingular’s GoPhone is a good option for travelers

Product Reviews, Telecom

Rather than paying high roaming fees, visitors to the US may benefit from purchasing a local prepaid phone. One option is Cingular/AT&T’s GoPhone. A US$100 prepaid card provides service for an entire year. Add another card before the year is up and the balance rolls over. From that perspective, the pricing is similar to that offered by TMobile in the US.
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Intel’s Metro Mobile Notebook

Road Warrior

Intel recently worked with a design firm to develop a concept notebook, codenamed the Intel Mobile Metro Notebook. It is ultra-thin (.7 inches), one of the lightest notebooks around (2.25 pounds), has a long battery life (14 hours) due to use of flash memory rather than a hard drive and a host of connectivity options (cellular, wifi and wimax). Smart-array microphones reduce background noise and enhanced security (finger print reader and a remote “kill” feature) round off the features. Of couse, not all of these are likely to make it into any commercial units since manufacturers will have to take cost into consideration.

From Business Week.

Blogger/Blogspot and fake blogs

Blogging

Blogger/Blogspot seems to be doing a better job this year in pulling down fake blogs (meaning, blogs that just copy random text from other blogs or from websites for the sole purpose of displaying paid placement ads). However, I’ve noticed that while these fake blogs may have been suspended or removed, their data is not also pulled out of Google’s Blog Search database. Better coordination needs to happen in order to improve the search results from Blog Search. There’s not reason why Blog Search should be displaying hits for a blog that was taken down months ago. Come on Google!