talking

Google Talk users have yet another way to chat with their Gtalk buddies. The new "labs edition" which was quietly released on Friday brings to your desktop several features that previously could only be found in the Web version. Most importantly, the group chat feature which made its way into the Web version of Google Talk last year, yet was oddly missing from the desktop application until now. Also new to the desktop version are emoticons and notifications from Gmail and Google Calendar, as well as Google's hot-in-Brazil social network Orkut.

Oddly enough, with these extra features … Read more

Quite a few services on the market offer some variation on the theme of making inexpensive international calls. Fring and EQO dress it up with IM and a social networking aspect that grants free international calls between registered friends and cheap calls to everyone else. Likewise, there's Skype to Go and Talkster, which both require you to punch in local access numbers to get cheap rates. However, Packet8's MobileTalk has risen above them all as a mass market solution that sheds the extra messaging frills, money-making ads, and prep time to make the call. (Note: Give yourself a … Read more

There's a good reason that Yves Behar was once crowned "The Brand Wizard": It's true. The Swiss-born designer has proven himself something of a Renaissance man in his profession, finding success in fields as diverse as sports and interior decor, as well as his work on the OLPC XO laptop.

But his name became much more familiar in consumer electronics with his avant-garde design of the popular "Aliph Jawbone" headset, so one can't really fault him for going back to that well for a limited edition. The special models are perhaps most noticeably … Read more

I like the Belkin company. I remember when Belkin was basically nothing but a cable company, and by that, I mean a company that makes electrical and optical cables. They made good cables, and still do.

But in recent years they have expanded into a wide variety of consumer products. I've always assumed Belkin's expansion was driven, at least in part, by the success of Monster Cable, which has made a lot of money selling expensive cables that (in my opinion, at least) are not always worth the price.

I imagine Belkin's engineering-oriented management deciding that selling … Read more

Any jokes about Google becoming a self-aware, humanity-destroying robot got a little closer to fruition yesterday. Google Talk (download the desktop widget), Google's homemade Jabber-based chat client, is now host to 24 (and counting) new translation bots that will take whatever text you throw at it and convert it to the appropriate language. Each of the bots was built with an open protocol called XMPP that lets anyone build their own bots and share them on the Google Talk network--as long as you've got some place to host them.

The new bots become particularly useful if you invite … Read more

We're still waiting for Sony to hurry up and develop that sugar-powered battery for our mobile phones, but something like this might have to suffice in the meantime.

Philips is developing a handset for the Asian market that it says will provide 17 hours of talk time on a single charge and, on standby, will last for two months, according to SCI FI Tech. And it doesn't look like one of those one of those industrial-strength survival radios either.

The Xenium 9@9 has all the other usual appointments, including a color display, VGA camera, microSD card slot, … Read more

One of the newcomers to this year's SEMA show is Raytel, a subsidiary of German company Funkwerk, which is using the event to launch five new products: The Ego Drive, Ego Talk, Ego Flash Ego Look, and Ego Cup.

Ego Drive, the flagship product in the lineup, is a combined portable and dockable GPS navigation and multimedia device with a wireless rotary remote control. The device features a 4.3-inch color touch screen with 3D map view, and it comes with text-to-speech functionality to read out road names during turn-by-turn route guidance. For multimedia, the Ego Drive supports MP3 … Read more

Just wanted to let everyone know that I'll be doing an hour on Computer America -- America's longest-running nationally syndicated radio computer show -- tonight from 11-12am eastern, or 8-9pm pacific. I'll be discussing Windows Vista and a host of other topics.

Please tune in if you have the show in your area.

This morning Web-SMS service Joopz is launching a new Outlook plug-in that turns your desktop e-mail client into a one-stop SMS hub. Once tied into your Joopz account, you can send and receive text messages like you would e-mail. The tool also syncs up with your Outlook contacts, to let you send notes to anybody with a phone number.

The service is flouting the new plug-in as a handy way to keep in touch with friends, but for business users who use SMS to communicate with their colleagues while out on the road, this could be a handy, finger-saving tool … Read more