Hasta La Gadget!

We know you’ve got questions, and if you’re brave enough to ask the world for answers, here’s the outlet to do so. This week’s Ask Engadget question is coming to us from Sheikh Adnan Abdullah, who seems to need a MacBook Air not made by Apple (or a KIRF counterpart). If you’re looking to send in an inquiry of your own, drop us a line at ask [at] engadget [dawt] com.

“I currently own a Macbook Air, but I’m not a big fan of Mac OS. I’m planning to transition back to Windows. Can you recommend me a 13- to 14-inch Windows PC that is as light as a MacBook Air and provides the same amount of battery life? Thanks!”

We just have to believe that this fellow isn’t in this boat alone, and while the obvious answer is to just install a fresh copy of Windows 7 onto the MBA through Parallels or Boot Camp, it’s quite possible that he’s trying to shake the entire Apple design. So, outside of MSI’s X-Slim series, is there anything on the Wintel side quite like Apple’s thinnest laptop ever?

Ask Engadget: best PC alternative to 13-inch MacBook Air? originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 18 Mar 2011 23:38:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The front and back of Apple's iPhone 4 are composed of glass. Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired.com

With some unauthorized hacks, you can share your smartphone’s internet connection with other devices, free of charge — and AT&T has had enough of that.

On the iPhone, for example, the hack MyWi has been a popular tool for “tethering” the handset’s internet connection for free, and just recently users of MyWi reported receiving text messages and e-mails from AT&T requiring them to “update” their plans.

“Well, that was fun while it lasted,” a MyWi user posted in a forum. “It was a good 3 years. Goodbye iPhone tethering.”

AT&T is telling users of free tethering that they have three options:

1. Stop using free tethering.
2. Contact AT&T to activate a legitimate tethering plan and start paying up.
3. Go ahead and keep tethering, and AT&T will automatically sign you up for a tethering plan and bill you.

Also known as mobile hot-spotting, the official tethering service provided by both AT&T and Verizon costs an additional $20 per month on top of data and voice plans. Free, unauthorized tethering has been accessible on the iPhone for years, and AT&T is only now beginning to crack down on people using the service without paying.

“We’ve just begun sending letters, e-mails, and text messages to a small number of smartphone customers who use their devices for tethering but aren’t on our required tethering plan,” an AT&T spokesman told Wired.com. “Our goal here is fairness for all of our customers.”

AT&T told Wired.com that it’s “able to determine if a smartphone customer is using the device as a broadband connection for other devices,” which isn’t surprising, because telecom carriers carefully monitor our mobile activities, counting the number of texts we send, voice-call minutes placed, and data used per month.

It’s unclear whether Verizon will take similar action on smartphone customers using free tethering tools. Verizon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Wired readers: Take our poll below! If you’re an AT&T customer and you’ve been tethering with your phone, we want to know whether you’ve heard from the carrier about it.

See Also:

• AT&T Adds iPhone Tethering, Kills Unlimited Data for iPad. Smartphones
• Verizon Denies Tethering, Hot Spot Features to Droid Customers
• Apple Approves, Pulls Flashlight App with Hidden Tethering Mode
• Verizon iPhone Tethering Plan: $20 and Two Extra Gigabytes
• AT&T Copies Verizon iPhone’s Tethering, Hot-Spot Plans

This article was written on January 22, 2007 by CyberNet.

It looks like Google just updated their Feed Reader Module for the Google Personalized Homepage. I’m sure that this is to help compete with Netvibes who offers an amazing built-in feed reader for their customizable homepage. The screenshot above demonstrates how the Feed Reader Module works.

As you can see each of the items can be expanded/contracted so that you can read the feed items without ever leaving the homepage. One thing that I did notice was that the module will display summaries of an article if the feed supplies them, instead of displaying the entire article. We want to give everyone the best experience possible when reading the feed from the Google Personalized Homepage so we have removed these summaries from the feed. This means that after Google erases the cached version of our feed (probably after we post this article) it will start to display the full article when expanding them.

Before you all go rushing to check your homepage for the new feature, it does look like they are rolling it out to the accounts. One of my accounts has it but some of the others don’t, and sometimes if you logout and then log back in you’ll receive it. You can also try switching browsers because the account that I used to take the screenshot above displayed the updated module fine in Firefox, then when I refreshed the page it was gone. I switched over to Internet Explorer and then the feature popped back up. I think it is just temperamental right now, but I’m sure all of the kinks will be worked out soon.

P.S. This is not some separate module I have installed…it is a real update by Google.

Thanks for the tip Eric!

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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