syncing

Amid a tablet market crowded with pricey products, ViewSonic is offering more cost-conscious consumers an alternative with its new ViewBook 730.

Powered by an ARM Cortex-A8 1GHz processor and running Android 2.2, the ViewBook 730 will sell for just $250 when it makes its debut in late June. Though at that price, the tablet does skimp on a few features and specs found in more expensive models.

The 7-inch tablet provides an 800x480 LCD LED backlit touch screen with 8GB of memory and an extra 32GB of storage via a microSD card slot. ViewSonic includes a mini-USB port and a mini HDMI port, the later of which can pipe in 1080p video. A single VGA Webcam is built onto the front of the device.

As an Android tablet, the ViewBook 730 supports Flash, specifically version 10.1.

For connectivity, the ViewBook 730 comes with Bluetooth 2.1 and Wi-Fi 802.11b/g. (Sorry, no Wireless-N.) The tablet offers ViewSonic's AirSync technology, which lets it automatically receive over-the-air software updates and enhancements as they become available.… Read more

Photo events that appear in iTunes when syncing your iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch may not show up the way you ultimately wish them to. This hint from Mac OS X Hints explains how you can use iPhoto to change the sort order of your events and have them show up properly in iTunes when you sync your iOS devices.

To change the order of events as they appear in iTunes, you must first change the order of your events in iPhoto. Open iPhoto and choose Events from the sidebar (under Library at the top of the list). From this … Read more

Having multiple computers can be great when one of them is a laptop for mobile computing and another stays at home for the family. Fortunately, Google Chrome lets you sync your bookmarks and extensions so you don't have to add or transfer them to your other computers. So how can you turn on this feature? Follow these five quick steps for enabling sync on Google Chrome:

1. Open the Settings menu in your Chrome browser (the wrench icon off to the right) and choose "Options."

2. In the new Options tab that opens up, choose "Personal … Read more

The open-source audio and video jukebox Miro debuts a new version today that wants to be iTunes for Android. Miro 4 for Windows (download), Mac (download), and Linux (download), adds simple and effective desktop-to-Android synchronization to the program, which also offers media file conversion, torrent management, podcast catching, and media discovery. The Android syncing features focus on music and videos and includes built-in app browsing and management via in-program access to the Google Android Marketplace and the Amazon.com Android Marketplace.

"We set the bar very high. We want to be the open iTunes," said Nicholas Reville, co-founder … Read more

For many moons I've been looking for the perfect to-do list app for my iPhone. For a while I used Producteev, which I likened to Evernote for task management. But you know what? It was overkill.

Ultimately I realized that what I need is not a Web-accessible to-do list or even one that syncs with Outlook (a key consideration last year when I asked CNET readers to name their favorite to-do list app). I need one that lives on my iPhone, offers a simple, logically designed interface, and reminds me when it's time to do something. Period.

Oh, … Read more

PhatWare announced this week the release of its handwriting-recognition, note-taking software, WritePad 5, for iPhone. That alone isn't groundbreaking news. But there's an interesting tidbit in the software's feature list: the fact that it offers synchronization services with note-taking and memory-keeping app Evernote.

The latest WritePad also cooperates with Facebook Dropbox, Google Docs, iTunes, SMS services, and Twitter clients. It's one of a growing generation of unrelated apps that allow interaction with third-party software. WritePad, PhatWare's top selling app (according to its own stats), was developed entirely independently of Evernote and its other sync companions. But the separate developers allow cross access to their software to make both more appealing to users.

If you consider that we're still in the early days of app development--as what we think of as apps didn't exist just a few years ago--this open, co-development philosophy is a new software experience for consumers. We never would have seen similar kumbaya in the earlier days of computer software. Competitive software packages like Microsoft Word or the old Wordperfect wouldn't have acknowledged their rival's existence, let alone have cooperated with it. QuarkXPress and Pagemaker would have burned down each other's HQs before looking to swap features on the fly.

It'll be interesting to see where this future takes us. How willing will app makers be to extend a hand across the desk and make everything work together? Will we see the development of super apps that handle multiple major functions that make multiple apps obsolete? Could we one day own a smartphone or tablet with just one Joshua/Forbin Project super app that does everything, including launching international missiles? Stay tuned.

Meanwhile, for those willing to settle for Writepad for now, it also offers an improved handwriting-recognition engine that converts handwriting into editable text by reading inline gestures, analyzing word context, and decoding shorthand. WritePad 5 is available in English, French, German, and Spanish versions and sells for $3.99. … Read more

Software that synchronizes the contents of two or more folders is a great idea that usually comes up short somewhere, such as an inability to access a network or enter passwords or one-way synching that tracks updates in one folder but not the other. Allway Sync (64-bit) is a free tool that analyzes the contents of two folders simultaneously and updates both based on the latest content in either. But instead of simply copying the latest content based on time signatures, Allway Sync's bidirectional algorithm analyzes the content for actual changes, so even if system clocks are out of … Read more

One of the longstanding knocks on Apple's iOS is its lack of independence when it comes to downloading new updates. Currently all iPhones, iPads, and iPods require a hard tether to a computer running iTunes in order to be updated to the latest software.

According to a new rumor reported by 9to5Mac, that could soon be changing. Citing "multiple sources," 9to5Mac says that iOS 5 incremental updates could be the first Apple mobile operating system updates to be synced over the air, joining Google's Android and Palm's WebOS in the phone-only update game.

Keep in … Read more

If you or your employer use Google Apps as your e-mail provider, and you are experiencing issues setting up Google Sync on your mobile device, make sure that the account admin has Google Sync enabled. This short guide will walk you through enabling Google Sync (ActiveSync), which will allow members of the Google Apps account to access their e-mail, contacts, and even calendar as if they were on an Exchange server. … Read more