You probably have seen the video on YouTube about a molten Fonera, apparently due to overheating, which shows the plastic case completely deformed.  Gizmodo  ( also in Spanish ) and other sites are also reporting on this. As usual, Fon has censored the post on their forums that broke the story, but alas, thanks to their partners a…

I wrote before about the Logitech MX5000 Bluetooth keyboard & mouse combo, and there are plenty of posts around the web that confirm that the product sucks - badly. To recap a bit, the problems are random reboots of the keyboard, disconnections of keyboard and mouse, erratic mouse behavior (including spontaneous motion of th…

You probably remember  the post I made regarding FON’s figures, and how much I thought they differed from reality. It got quite a lot of attention, particularly from detractors, and from Martin Varsavsky himself. Many comments were posted on my blog and some others, which pointed towards the fact that I am involved in a startup th…

So, the  great news  over at  TechCrunch  today was that Google has added a feature called  Mail Fetcher  to Gmail, which basically allows you to grab email from other services, such as Yahoo. This sounds great, and it probably is for Gmail users, but it is also great for Google. Someone with legal wits should point a browser towa…

Went to my local  Vodafone  store to pick up the new  Huawei E220 HSDPA USB modem , which with a 49 Euro monthly contract gives you 1GB of transfer at 1Mbps maximum, and free mobile to fixed landline calls - pretty good deal if you ask me. For 59 Euro you get 5GB of transfer, at the full 3.8Mbps that HSDPA offers. These are theore…

Two days ago, I posted a comment in reply to Martin Varsavsky’s post, Fabricar vs Crear, as the first comment asked Martin to look at a particular thread in FON’s forums. The comment was critical of the way things are going at FON, here is a translation of it: Martin, I see that you are traveling a lot and promoting FON. But you s…

Ars Technica reports  that Microsoft is being sued by a company named  PalTalk , which has two patents on a “Server-group messaging system for interactive applications”, original patent filings  here  and  here . If you read through the patents, it becomes evident that they cover a hugely broad number of messaging systems, whether…

Reading with interest the  flurry  of  posts  about Google’s purchase of YouTube for around $1.6 billion, it seems the main worry right now is that since Google is a very rich company ($131 billion caps!), the lawsuits for copyright violations will start raining faster than you can say MPAA. Mark Cuban  is particularly pessimistic…

Today is my last day as a  Fonero , which is the way people registered in  FON’s network  are called (IMHO a rather ugly name). Why this decision? There are a number of reasons, and I have chosen to simply make a list.   The most important reason is that I have taken a position at a company that makes it unethical for me to contin…

This was seen  on a Boeing 767 while en route from Las Vegas to Atlanta, the flight being operated by Delta. Apparently, many people were having problems with their purchased movies, and so the crew decided to reset the system, provoking a nicely familiar sight. Now we could all start making jokes about mapping the plane, or tryin…

Today I decided to attempt a second round at configuring the router  FON  sent me a few days ago since my first out-of-the-box experience hadn’t been that good. Emails to tech support unanswered, which seems to  be   an   endemic   problem ,  as   can   be   seen   on   FON’s   forums , I finally gave up. After plugging in the W…

No pun intended, honestly, but Tony Smith’s article on  The Register’s RegHardware  ‘ How to get your Wi-Fi working again , while making a nice and broad effort at examining the problems plaguing WiFi nowadays, and reviewing several options to improve your experience around WiFi, also uses somewhat pseudoscientific methods to meas…

Leaving aside regulatory issues that may turn this particular setup into an illegal operation, I will better not describe the quality of the installation to be polite. Check out this picture: Spotted the problem yet? Radio antennas are affected by any element that is present around them, even non-metallic elements, such as the gro…

Not much point to .mobi domains in the realms of Verizon, it seems -  the New York Times reports  that starting 2007, ads will be placed on sites that are accessed using their mobile phones. The Verizon Wireless release claims that certain types of ads and video clips will not be allowed, as they may not be compatible with the lim…