sync

Microsoft gets reprieve in Motorola suit on Exchange ActiveSync

Score one for Microsoft.

Judge Andreas Voss of the Mannheim Regional Court in Germany today ruled that a complaint Motorola has brought against Microsoft related to data-sync technology in Exchange ActiveSync will not be decided on anytime soon. According to Foss Patents' Florian Mueller, who was first to report on the news and has acknowledged being a paid consultant for Microsoft, the judge instead decided to reopen the case. The move could push back a final ruling several months, according to Mueller.

"We are pleased the Mannheim court is looking even more closely at this case and remain confident … Read more

Note-taking from anywhere

Evernote for Mac is just one part of an excellent, access-from-anywhere note-taking system. In addition to the Evernote desktop client, you can create and get to your notes from a variety of mobile devices (including apps for the iPhone and iPad) and any Web browser on any computer. A free Evernote account links all your notes together.

Evernote is a mature and popular application, with an impressively streamlined interface that shares similarities across its multiple platforms and gives you many different ways to create notes and collections of notes called notebooks. Your notes can be text, images, or Web clippings, … Read more

Cloud-based storage options for Mac OS X

With more and more computing devices becoming mobile or located in different areas besides the desktop, the need for online storage and syncing options to manage files created or edited on these devices is increasingly important. To tackle this need, Apple has explored various approaches to online document management and sharing with its MobileMe and .Mac services, but these options have been phased out in favor of newer and more integrated approaches to online storage and syncing options.

Apple has its online storage offerings that so far have culminated into its iCloud service, but there are others as well, which … Read more

Samsung SyncMaster S27B970 First Take: Beautiful and thoughtless

Thanks to the fine folks over at Samsung, this week I got the chance to check out the Samsung SyncMaster S27B970 in pre-production form.

As you can see from the picture above, the monitor is quite striking in looks and while this is a preproduction model, performance (aside from a few bugs) is also really impressive. … Read more

Sync your music files to Spotify on iPhone

Spotify's Android users have it easy. In the Android version of the app, Spotify can just peek at whatever music files you have loaded on your phone and allow you to play them alongside any songs from its streaming library.

But because Apple is very particular about third-party apps accessing iTunes content, the Spotify app on the iPhone has to jump through a few extra hoops to accomplish the same feat.

The payoff? Well, if you love using the Spotify app and resent having to jump out of it to hear songs from your personal collection, you can now … Read more

Google Drive for Android is a beefier Docs app

If you haven't noticed, Google Docs for Android has just morphed into Google Drive. Or perhaps more accurately, it has been sucked up by the brand-new file-syncing and file-sharing app. This means that not only does it give you access to all of your old Docs, it also lets you access and store any kind of file in your cloud-enabled Google Drive account.

Similar to the experience on the Web, Google Drive for Android opens up to a main navigation panel, from which you can see a list of all your files (My Drive), files that have been shared … Read more

Google Drive for Android is a beefier Google Docs app

If you haven't noticed, Google Docs for Android has just morphed into Google Drive. Or perhaps more accurately, it has been sucked up by the brand-new file-syncing and file-sharing app. This means that not only does it give you access to all of your old Docs, it also lets you access and store any kind of file in your cloud-enabled Google Drive account.

Similar to the experience on the Web, Google Drive for Android opens up to a main navigation panel, from which you can see a list of all your files (My Drive), files that have been shared … Read more

Google Drive, SkyDrive, Dropbox? Heck, use 'em all!

It's true that the newly launched Google Drive competes with plenty of other services for sharing files across all your devices. But there's something very different in this particular situation than in a lot of online services.

Namely this: why not use them all?

With social networking, few people have the patience to keep a lively feed of activity at Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, Google+, and any number of other sites. We gravitate toward the one where our contacts are active.

And with e-mail, it's inconvenient to have multiple addresses on multiple services, generally speaking.

But with … Read more

Google Drive: It's slick, integrated...and not exactly free

Google is set today to open Google Drive, a service to store files online and share them among various computing devices that turns out to be a lot more important than you might think.

Why? Two reasons:

First, Google's service goes well beyond rivals because of integration with Google Docs, Google+, Gmail, and other services. Second, beyond a basic free level, ordinary consumers will pay to use Google Drive -- not much, but enough to make them into customers, not just users of an advertising-subsidized service. That's a pretty big philosophical shift for Google.

What is Google Drive? … Read more