Powerpoint Books for Dummies

An Android-based smartphone, the G1 from T-Mobile.

(Credit: T-Mobile)

After preloading an iPhone app on Sansumg camera phones and expanding to Mexico, Scanbuy announced Tuesday that its ScanLife multi-bar code reader is now compatible for mobile phones running on Google Android.

As in any other mobile devices, the ScanLife application, …

Netgear shows off its Internet TV Player at CES 2009.

(Credit: Dong Ngo/CBS Interactive)

The main networking themes at CES 2009: faster, greener, and more diverse.

The nicest surprise, however, was not a product but the return of Buffalo. After two years of court sanctions, Buffalo now has regained the right to sell networking products in North America. It’s interesting that in the Chinese calendar, 2009 is also the year of the Ox.

The company offers a few sleek-looking routers, both Wireless-N and Wireless-G. In my experience, Buffalo offers great budget routers, which are affordable and yet reliable at the same time. This is good news for consumers.

While Buffalo’s portfolio doesn’t contain anything revolutionary, Trendnet D-Link showed off new Wireless-N routers that offer speeds up to 450Mbps, a 50 percent boost from its cap of 300Mbps. This is achieved by adding more single streams to an antenna, much like adding more garden hoses to better the watering. The new technology uses three signal streams per antenna.

The new speed is based on a common standard, and therefore, once certified by the Wi-Fi Alliance, routers and adapters from different vendors will inter-operate at the new high speed.

Speaking of the Wi-Fi Alliance, the organization, together with In-Stat, released at CES a report saying that the consumption of Wi-Fi chips increased by 26 percent in 2008. The group expects this momentum to continue into 2009.

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Originally posted at CES 2009

Tuan Anh Do shows off an unlocked iPhone 3G at one of his cell phone repair shops in Hanoi.

(Credit: Dong Ngo/CBS Interactive)

Editor’s note: CNET editor and Crave contributor Dong Ngo is spending the next month in his homeland of Vietnam, and plans to file occasional dispatches chronicling his impressions of how technology has permeated the culture there. Click here for more of Dong’s stories from abroad.

HANOI, Vietnam–Every obstacle presents an opportunity. I saw this firsthand in Hanoi.

Tuan Anh's shop on Nguyen Du street.

(Credit: Dong Ngo/CBS Interactive)

The obstacle in question: the iPhone 3G. Since its launch, it has proven a much tougher nut to crack than the original iPhone. Without a viable software-based unlock solution, the only way to make the phone work with any GSM carrier has been the use of a proxy SIM. Put this piece of very thin circuitboard in the iPhone 3G atop the carrier’s SIM, and you can make calls and text on a new network.

(I did experience some problems using the proxy SIM, including short battery life, instability, and, most seriously, incompatibility with iTunes.)

Unfortunately, the recently released 2.2 software update, for now, has made the iPhone 3G impossible to unlock–unless you happen to be in Hanoi. Here, I met a man who takes the job quite seriously and gets it done the hard way, literally.

His name is Tuan Anh Do, and he’s a 29-year-old businessman who owns five cell phone repair shops. A big part of his business is servicing the iPhone and iPhone 3G, and that often involves getting those devices unlocked at the hardware level.

One of his shops is on Nguyen Du street, a relatively small, quiet block in Hanoi. It’s located in a typically narrow four-story house, with one floor serving as a reception area, and another holding the accounting department. The top floor is the workshop, where the magic happens.

Here I witnessed a brand new iPhone 3G getting its hardware unlocked and was really impressed. This is how it happened.

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Powerline adapters generally don’t work with power strips or surge protectors, needing to be plugged directly into the wall socket. This would be a problem if you have only one power outlet at the remote corner of the house where you want to put that home server.

The HDXB111…

(Credit: CallPod)

Most new laptops have built-in Bluetooth these days, but if yours doesn’t, you might want to get what CallPod introduced on Thursday, theDrone.

The Drone is not a regular Bluetooth adapter. It’s a high-powered device that offers a range of up to 300 feet; that’…

Nuff said.

(Credit: Dong Ngo/CNET Networks)

If you are a fan of the Fail Blog (and I think you should be), be in the know that you now can view the site conveniently with an iPhone app.

The app, developed by MC Development, is called “I Can Has Cheezburger?”, …

(Credit: Moshi)

Don’t know about you, but personally, I have often fumbled around trying to snooze the alarm clock, and then ended up having to get up from bed because I pushed it off the table to a place I couldn’t reach. Moments like that I wish I …

If you are a fan of notebook hard drives with hardware-level encryption, apart from Seagate, you now can turn to Hitachi.

The company announced on Tuesday the third generation of its 2.5-inch Travelstar hard drive with built-in encryption, the Travelstar 5K500.B. This is a 5400rpm, SATA II hard …

According to credible sources, a notebook computer is stolen every 53 seconds and 97 percent are never recovered. In most cases, the risk of losing data stored on the hard drive is much higher than the value of the notebook itself.

A Momentus FDE 2.5-inch SATA hard drive.

(Credit:

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(Credit: Dong Ngo/CNET Networks)

It’s great to be able to log in your computer remotely. It’s convenient, it saves gas, hassle, and most importantly, time. Personally I’ve used Logmein for a long time and loved it.

The company has actually been cooking up an application for …