Unfortunately, I'm not one of the customers that AT&T has apparently been reaching out to in their testing of in-home micro wireless stations. I wish I was, since I live in the sticks and barely get service at all on my AT&T wireless phone. This is exactly what I need: A broadband-connected device that gives you local 3G coverage in your home.

Ars Technica reports that AT&T has described the device this way:

"AT&T's new product is a small, security-enabled cellular base station that easily connects to your home DSL or Cable Internet, providing a reliable wireless signal for any 3G phone in every room of your house. The device allows you to have unlimited, nationwide Anytime Minutes for incoming or outgoing calls."

If anyone from AT&T happens to be reading, I'd be ecstatic to try the device out and provide detailed feedback. Feel free to contact me, my email and phone number are over in the sidebar. I'm just sayin' ...

SD cards have become a de facto standard format for media in most devices, with a couple holdouts (namely Sony, which predictably uses a proprietary format). As such, the format has grown and there's been quite a bit of innovation effort focused in the SD arena.

A couple of announcements made this week at the CES show in Las Vegas are worth paying attention to. In one announcement, we learn that the SD format will support massively larger storage. In the other announcement, a popular WiFi-enabled SD card gains some nifty new video-handling features.

SDXC means on-card storage increase to a theoretical 2 terabytes

The SD Association announced a new standard (links to PDF file) that will soon have us leveraging massively larger storage capabilities (with much higher purchase prices, one would have to assume - we will have to see what the economies of scale bring us):

"The new SDXC specification provides up to 2 terabytes storage capacity and accelerates SD interface read/write speeds to 104 megabytes per second this year, with a road map to 300 megabytes per second."

That's some serious storage and speed. Photographers and HD videographers can soon rejoice. Just don't lose your little 2-terabyte card. Of course, it's likely that new devices will be needed to support the new standard. The SD Association says the SDHC, Embedded SD and SDIO specifications will also benefit from the new SD interface speeds. I'd be very (and pleasantly) surprised if we can take advantage of the larger storage capabilities in existing devices.

New Eye-Fi SD cards will allow direct HD uploads to YouTube

Eye-Fi already has a great thing going with their SD cards that use WiFi to transfer digital images, and now they're previewing a new card technology that will allow you to directly transfer your HD video content straight from the card to YouTube via WiFi. Now that's cool. I really want one of those for use in my Kodak Zi6 HD camera, and I'd use it in my full-sized HD camera, too. The power-requirement questions rattling around in my head will have to be answered at a later date, and I hope it will handle video as well as still images on the same card. Unfortunately they're not available yet, and no date was set for release. But I, for one, will definitely be watching for this.

Ever wonder how they put that amazing magical yellow line on the line of scrimmage and at the first-down point on the college and NFL football games we watch on TV? It's a terrific technology and has in many ways made watching football very different since it was adopted several years ago.

Well, for those of use who have wondered exactly how they do it, here's a video via FANDOME that explains in some technical detail how the magic TV line on the football field works:

Very cool stuff.

This is pretty cool. Not completely new, but interesting for the future.

LG will (eventually) be shipping a wrist-wearable cell phone that they just showed at the CES show in Las Vegas. I'm just pointing it out because this might just be the first watch I'd be willing to actually wear. Maybe. I'll probably hold out for a little thinner and smaller. Regardless, it's pretty cool.

There's an Engadget video of it at: http://www.viddler.com/explore/engadget/videos/116/

Would you want to wear a phone on your wrist? Useful or just geeky? I can hear the wrist-cancer complaints coming already...

(via Engadget)

Update - More links:

IntoMobile coverage - with lots of pics

I've written here several times in the past about Pandora, the slick Internet music app that streams music it determines you'll like based on a starting point you give it (like a specific artist, for example). You can refine the channel by voting up or down, song by song. Based on your votes and the "genetic" makeup of the music you rate, it determines what other music to put into the channel. The greatest aspect of using Pandora is discovering some truly great music and artists, many of which I never heard of before Pandora. It changed my music world.

Not too long ago, Pandora for the iPhone was released, and it was the number-one free iPhone app for 2008, and for good reason. It works well on WiFi or 3G networks and provides the majority of the functionality you get on the full-blown web app.

Well, today Pandora released v2 of their iPhone app, and they've added even more to it. Gleaned from the release notes, here are the new features:

• Tap the album art to see a progress bar, create a station from the current song or artist, or to email the station to a friend
• View the "back side" of the album art to read artist bios
• Rotates to a landscape layout to see recently played songs (coverflow-style)
• Play samples of each of your bookmarked songs
• Create a station based on genre

It's a cool update. I just wish I could close it and have it play in the background while I do other thing son my iPhone. I mean, come on Apple - It's the number-one app, make an exception, please! Anyhow, I don't know if I will use it more (it was already pretty great), but it adds some smart new functionality that's appreciated. You can find it here (links to iTunes App Store) or just get it for free via the App Store icon on your iPhone or iPod Touch.

A few photos to show you what I'm talking about:

Artist bio

'Create New Station' options

Sending to a friend without leaving the app

Coverflow-like view of past-played songs

Mark Minasi is a true character, and always a fun guy to have a conversation with. While in Las Vegas at the Connections conference Richard Campbell and I had a couple fun discussions with Mark, including one on the concept of Cloud Computing, and in the context of Microsoft's recent Azure announcement.

Mark's take on the whole cloud-computing thing is an interesting one. You can listen to our conversation with him via the RunAs Radio show link (Site|MP3).

While you're at it, you might also be interested in our other interview discussion with Mark that we did in Vegas, in which we covered (sort of, and among many other random things) Windows 7 (Site|MP3). It's a little crazy and chaotic, but was also a lot of fun.

Enjoy.