Mobile Computing Tips and Advice

Six essential extensions for Google Chrome

On 17 March 2010

Firefox used to be our web browser of choice for netbook use — it’s a better performer than Internet Explorer, is more secure, and can be tweaked to high heaven with a bevy of third-party extensions. In fact extensions were the reason Firefox is so well-suited for netbook use, which is why we wrote a guide a while back that recommended several to make the web browser really sing on a small-screen

How to install Windows 7 from a bootable USB flash drive

On 17 February 2010

Windows 7 may run really well on most netbooks, but actually installing it isn’t so straightforward. No netbook has an internal optical drive, which means you’ll either have to connect an external USB DVD drive for the installation, or else share another computer’s optical drive across a network. Neither solution is particularly convenient, of course, but there is a better option. Since

How to set-up push Gmail for the iPhone

On 22 September 2009

Google launched the Google Sync push synchronisation for its Calendar and Contacts services in February this year, but Gmail support was conspicuously absent. This didn’t prevent you from setting up a Gmail account in the iPhone’s Mail app, but it did mean that you couldn’t make use of the push email feature added in iPhone OS 2.0. As of today, however, you can — Google just turned

Kill the "Use this link to open Tasks" pop-up in Gmail

On 20 February 2009

Gmail user? Fed up with the "Use this link to open Tasks" box that pops up in the navigation pane every time you start a new Gmail browser session? Yep, us too. In fact, it’s a new bug that’s a result of the offline mode Google recently bolted on to Gmail. So, if you haven’t enabled offline mode, then you won’t have seen this problem. Consider yourself lucky. On

Does a different hard drive boost a netbook's battery life?

On 11 February 2009

Since it already has an 80Gb hard drive, increasing the storage capacity of the MSI Wind probably isn’t the top priority for most owners. Still, given its two hour (give or take) battery live, we were curious to see how a different hard drive would affect how long this netbook – or any netbook, for that matter – can last away from mains power. The stock 2.5in Western Digital

Sync your Google Calendar with an iPhone using NuevaSync

On 27 January 2009

The iPhone may capable of many things, but working well with the cloud isn’t one of them. Out of the box, it can synchronise calendar and contact details with Apple’s own (and somewhat beleaguered) MobileMe online service, but it won’t play nice with Google – which is a bit of a problem if that’s where you keep your calendar and contact information. If you’re a

Eight essential netbook utilities you never knew you needed

On 23 December 2008 2 Comments

They might be small and are often cheaper, but netbooks are no less capable than much larger laptops when it comes to running Windows applications. That’s not to say you should just install them, of course – 10in screens (at best) and often limited storage space mean that the Asus Eee PC, Samsung NC10 and other such netbooks are best treated a little differently to their bigger brethren. Some

Read O2 MMSs on an iPhone

On 03 December 2008

A few weeks ago we stumbled upon an Apple iPhone-optimised website called iApps, but we didn’t get around to flagging it up at the time. Well, we want to put that right today because iApps is rapidly becoming one of our favourite iPhone websites. Recently, for example, iApps added a link to a web service that lets UK users easily read MMS messages sent to an iPhone. So what is iApps? Put

Reinforce your router against the WPA encryption hack

On 11 November 2008

If you thought WPA Wi-Fi encryption was the bullet-proof alternative to the wide-open WEP, think again. A German graduate student Erik Tews claims to have discovered a security exploit in WPA encryption and plans to present a paper on his findings at the PacSec conference in Tokyo this week. It’s far from a gaping security hole – the exploit takes up to 15 minutes to effect and

Gmail Calender, Docs, SMS and user gadgets now in Labs

On 31 October 2008

Click the Labs icon in Gmail ( Google Mail) today and you’ll find a bunch of new experimental features. The one most people seem to be talking about is the addition of SMS (text messaging) to Google Chat but be warned, for the time being this is for US-based GChatters only. However, there are three other recent additions to Labs that to our mind are just as noteworthy. It’s now