For my column yesterday, I almost ran out of synonyms for the word "wireless." The Sony Vaio T350 laptop I reviewed included three different forms of wireless connectivity: Bluetooth, WiFi and Cingular's EDGE service. The last was the newsworthy bit, as the T350 was the first laptop I've seen with built-in wirelessI mean, cellular data support.
I thought that a nifty idea, but ultimately unappealing on two counts. One, EDGE isn't the best cellular-data service. It's much slower downloads than Verizon's EvDO service, even though it costs the same (here's my March 2004 review of EvDO.)
Two, a technology called software-defined radio will someday, hopefully soon, allow us to use any wireless service we want with a computer or cell phone. (Here's Intel's propaganda about it.) On a related note, for those readers still looking for reasons to Apple to switch to Intel chips, consider what getting early access to this technology might do for Apple's fortunes.)
Have a look at my column to find out more. Then stop by my Web chat at 2 p.m. ET today to pick my brain about this laptop, and any other personal tech topic that comes to mind.
Right below that on Sunday's personal-tech page, we had a first-hand report on another new form of Internet access -- the power-line service offered in Manassas, Virginia. In Web Watch, Mike Musgrove (covering for Leslie Walker, who's on vacation) reports about a new study that shows how some people are changing their behavior and their software to try to get away from spyware. And our reviews cover a trio of games: Fantastic 4, Conker: Live and Reloaded and Juiced.
Burned By a Firewall
While I was testing out the Vaio T350's wireless capabilities, I spent a little time assessing this machine's utility as a plain old laptop. So I found myself trying out a program called Vaio Zone, a clean, full-screen interface that allows simplified access to movies, music and pictures stored on the computer.
That's the same basic idea as Microsoft's Media Center Edition of Windows XP, but here there's no remote control. Sony isn't trying to provide something to be used from 10 feet away (certainly not when it's viewed on a 10.6-inch screen!); it just wants to give users an all-in-one alternative to the usual set of media programs.
Anyway, I popped in an audio CD to copy to the hard drive with this interface. First, though, a dialog box popped up, asking me to register the GraceNote software on the machine. (This is the service used by most music programs that matches the pattern of track times on a CD against an online database to automatically fill in the song titles.) Somewhat annoyed at this bureaucratic detour, I clicked on the usual "accept" and "finish" buttons to OK GraceNote's licenseand then nothing happened.
Thinking the GraceNote registration program had stalled out, I tried closing it. Nothing. I stabbed the Ctrl, Shift and Esc keys to bring up the Task Manager, which showed two instances of the Vaio Zone program "Not Responding." Clicking "End Task" on them brought up the usual dialog asking if the system could send a bug report to Microsoft, but failed to actually knock out the offending application. After several fruitless bouts of that, I rebooted the laptop.
Then I tried the same drill, and again the GraceNote registration window froze. Here we go again, I thought. But this time, I thought to hit Alt-Tab, which brought up an alert from the preinstalled Norton Internet Security firewallasking if the GraceNote registration program should be blocked from accessing the Internet.
Well, duh. Is it asking too much for manufacturers who load firewall software to configure it so it won't trip the other bundled applications?
