Dell debuts wireless, 3D-capable S300w short-throw projector originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 18 Mar 2010 02:56:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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When we last saw the AirStash, it was keeping its mystique about it and refusing to disclose any salient details beyond the fact that it’ll function as a wireless SD/SDHC card reader. Today, the fog of war is lifted with the news that the AirStash is now officially on sale for $99.99, and will come with a battery good for five hours of continuous data streaming. Marketed primarily at iPhone OS devices, it creates a wireless network that allows any WiFi and browser-equipped computer to access the storage cards within it. The UI is built around HTML5 and recharging is done via a USB connection, which also turns the AirStash into a simple SDHC card adapter when plugged in. Check out our hands-on with it from CES over here and look for a full review coming up shortly. We do care so very deeply our portable storage.

AirStash brings the WiFi, neglects the storage, for a cent under $100 originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 16 Mar 2010 10:19:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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You know how you pay a fixed monthly fee for your phone, and can check email and Twitter, surf the web and the Yelp app anytime you like without counting minutes or megabytes? Yeah, well that’s all gonna end.

Yesterday, Verizon CTO Tony Melone said that the days of all-you-can-eat data plans are ending, echoing something AT&T’s boss said a week ago, that metered (or variable) pricing was ahead.

The bigwigs talk of fairness—why should the weekly email checker pay the same as the out-and-about Pandora and video streaming junkie?

They talk of transparency: “It’s one thing to say all you can eat is gone,” Melone told the Wall Street Journal. “It’s another to have consumers worrying, ‘Can I stream this radio?'”

This isn’t going to be abrupt, and it won’t affect all people equally. But one thing’s for sure, if you use your phone’s data plan a lot, you’re going to start paying more than $35 per month for it. And even if the “unlimited” plan remains, it’s certainly going to cost more, and be one of a multitude of levels or options.

Once upon a time, the home ISP business went through these similar phases: The dial-up age when we kept track of specific hours given away free on shiny, shitty AOL discs gave way to the strange time of the single device with unlimited data. ISPs meant that to be for a fixed machine but Wi-Fi routers and wired routers soon split that up to many many machines in the home and perhaps even in the apartment building. This happened to the chagrin of broadband providers. And now, in this moment, most of us pay a fixed rate for unlimited data, capped by speed rather than maximum downloads. But as all of you pirates know full well, there are maximum-download caps out there too, and more and more people are becoming eligible for that taxation. Who dares to guess how low that threshold will go?

You may say, “Phew, I’m definitely not a target.” You may think you’ll never use wireless like you use your home broadband connection, that your phone is just a phone—one that, sure, streams songs and stuff, but big deal, right?

But think about the MiFis of the world, the little portable hotspot which turns broadband meant for cellphones to Wi-Fi for almost anything. Better still, think of Sprint’s Overdrive WiMax-to-Wi-Fi router, the next generation high speed network equivalent of the MiFi? And what about the next-generation of WiMax and LTE phones, which will hopefully be able to be used as Wi-Fi hotspots? Not following? Here: If your phone can give connectivity to your computer—and whatever else you have within 30 feet—you’re gonna have to pay for that. And God help us all if the Hulu iPhone app ever shows up, because we’ll use a ton of broadband, they’ll charge us a ton for that broadband or they’ll go out of business not doing it.

My fear is that metered pricing will feel like a gotcha, like when you go over talk-time minutes. The problem with those minutes is that you have to provide a “best guess” of how much you’re going to talk, and if you go over, they nuke your wallet. Sprint tried a plan that just charged different reasonable amounts of money depending on how much or how little you used your minutes. Both of these are flawed. The best guess is often based on nothing, and the variable pricing is too confusing: you never know what you’re going to be paying month to month.

As these carriers roll out their metered plans, hopefully they will combine these two types of billing. We need helpful constant monitoring. (At the moment, the best way to keep track of an iPhone’s downloads requires AT&T’s optional app.) We have to be aware of our usage, comfortably not naggingly, and when we go over, we need to be treated like fans of the service, not like criminals stealing cookies from the wireless-broadband cookie jar.

All You Can Eat neon by Jeremy Brooks/Flickr, used under CC license

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 Mitchell, who couldn’t care less if you have a problem with his question. If you’re looking to send in an inquiry of your own, drop us a line at ask [at] engadget [dawt] com.

“I just got a new laptop and am looking for a WiFi detector. The catch is that I want one that will tell me if the network it is detecting is open or not. I can’t fathom the point of one that doesn’t tell you that information. If posted, this will probably generate a lot of snark, but whatever, I just want to be able to find open networks!”

You know, we appreciate the honesty here. And we totally feel you. If anyone out there has found a fantastically useful WiFi detector, throw your recommendation(s) in comments below!

Ask Engadget: Best (useful) WiFi network detector? originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 12 Mar 2010 00:23:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Here’s the story: I’m in love with the Wacom Intuos4 Wireless tablet. Free from cables, it’s the best graphics tablet experience I’ve ever had.

Smoother Than the Smoothest Thing

The Wacom Intuos4 was quite a leap from the Intuos3. It doubled the pressure sensitive levels, and it added multifunction Touch Ring trackpad, on-screen radial menus, and eight user-definable buttons with OLED tags—called ExpressKeys—in a thin, ultralight 2.2-pound package. The Wacom Intuos4 Wireless has all those characteristics, and they work equally as well over the Bluetooth connection.

With a sightly smaller working surface than the Medium model—8 x 5 inches versus the 8.8 x 5.5 inches of the cable-bound model—the wireless tablet is a pure joy to use. The 2048 levels of pressure sensitiveness, requiring only 1 gram of pressure to start painting vs the 10 grams of the previous version, offer the best real drawing simulation of any of the tablets I’ve ever tried. It feels like the real thing, with the slightest touch transferred to the screen as if it was real media. The brushstrokes are as smooth and precise as the real thing, and the tablet never misses a single beat, no matter how fast I try to move its very comfortable stylus—which comes with different tips for different surface feedback.

This performance is not only good for digital painting. It is perfect to retouch in Photoshop, allowing you to mask or clone with absolute precision, down to the last pixel, without having to vary the size of the brush. It makes everyday brush tasks so easy it makes me giddy when I’m using it.

Screw the Keyboard

But plenty of other tablet features also help dramatically in the daily workflow, allowing you to circumvent the keyboard almost completely.

Take the multifunction Touch Ring, a circular trackpad that allows you to perform four different, user-definable functions, like zoom: Circling my finger in one direction would zoom in. Doing so in the opposite direction will zoom out. The second function will cycle through layers, the third will change the brush size—although sadly this doesn’t work in Photoshop—and the fourth rotates the canvas to face the physical orientation of your tablet. To switch to the next function, you click in the middle button. An LED will change and your monitor will display an elegant transparent dialog that fades in and out briefly, but long enough to identify the new trackpad function.

The eight user-definable ExpressKeys are located in a perfect position: Four above and four below the Touch Ring. Each is labeled with a completely customizable OLED display, much like the Optimus Maximum keyboard, but presented in a starkly contrasting black and white. (The display looks so good that, at first glance, you’re sure the buttons are permanent, backlit cutouts.) Like the Touch Ring, you can define the functions for these buttons using the Wacom control panel. The labels will change according to your preference.

Another favorite feature of mine—which I’ve been jonesing for since I stopped using Alias PowerAnimator and Maya—are the radial menus. These are just software-based and can also be found on the Cintiq line, but they are great timesavers. Pop-up radial menus are easier to use than regular pop-up list menus (both for mouse and tablet operation). They are also user-defined, and give you eight functions at a time, which can also be sub-menus.

However, the best thing is that all these features can be application dependent, something that was possible with previous Wacom tablets, but not with this level of detail and finesse. In Photoshop, for example, my radial menus are tailored to fit my most used program features. The result is that I touch the keyboard very rarely, if at all.

Perfect Wireless Performance

All these cool features and exceptional performance, however, are shared with the existing, cheaper, cabled Intuos4. The question here is: How good is the performance of the Intuos4 Wireless over the Bluetooth connection? And what about the battery life?

Response is just as fast and just as good. The Wacom Intuos4 Wireless works just like the USB-based Intuos4.

As for the lithium ion battery, it charges quickly via USB. The tablet puts itself to sleep when it detects no signal and, as a result, you can use the tablet for a day, heavily, without recharging it at all. (Or just keep it around without worrying about losing power.) The advantage of USB recharging is that you can be using it while connected to the computer, with the cable itself as the connection (the Bluetooth goes off when the tablet is connected physically).

My only little gripe with the wireless component of the tablet is that, on occasion, it will take a few seconds to reconnect when you turn it on. This happened when the computer wakes up first, so I suspect is an issue with Bluetooth getting silly after the Mac wakes up. 99% of the times is instantaneous, however.

A Joy to Use

If you have a Wacom Intuos4 you can probably skip this upgrade. That is, unless you are itching to have the freedom of movement of the Bluetooth connection. That’s the joy of this tablet: You can move around freely with it. It adapts to your position, not the other way around. You don’t depend on your table. You can lay back on your chair, and lose yourself in hours of photo retouching or illustration.

Given the nature of its custom menus, any user can take advantage of the Intuos4 for every program. You can be using it constantly, instead of a mouse. If you just want to use it for graphic applications, however, another advantage is that you can put it away easily, without having to disconnect it or struggle with cables.

This tablet could only be bettered if they made it into a wireless display. Like the iPad, but connected to the computer so I can use Photoshop on my bed, the sofa or outside on the terrace (the Bluetooth signal gets there, I tried). Like the Cintiq 12 I tried, but with the same response, weight, and form factor.

If you have an Intuos 3 or any other display-less Wacom tablet, get the Intuos4 Wireless. Even though it doesn’t come with a mouse—like the regular Intuos4 Medium—it’s absolutely worth its $399 price tag (just $30 more than the USB-based Intuos4’s list price).

Amazing performance with 2048 levels of pressure and only 1 gram of minimum pressure


Touch Ring and ExpressKeys customizable controls avoids touching the keyboard


Slightly pricier than Intuos4 Medium, and it doesn’t come with the mouse


A couple of times it took the Intuos4 a few seconds to reconnect after being asleep, although this is probably related to the computer coming out of sleep as well