This post is part of eBay Finders, a new partnership that presents collections of items curated by a carefully selected group of electronics experts. Meet more of the Finders on the eBay Electronics blog. #eBayFinders

So you're all packed for your vacation - you've got your toothbrush, pajamas, guide book, sunscreen… These days, though, you're not really ready unless you've thought of how the right gadget could improve your trip. Like the nine we've gathered here, for example. Whether the device that lets you talk to the locals or the one that lets you invite them to a dance party, these must-have travel accessories wil enhance any vacation.

Detech Solar-Powered Battery, Phone Charger, USB Hub, and Flashlight

Electrical power can be iffy in some parts of the world, but there's always the sun. The Detech Solar-Powered Battery, Phone Charger, USB Hub, and Flashlight multipurpose device is basically a USB hub - something that's always handy, if not groundbreaking. But on top of that, its solar panels charge the built-in battery (which also charges via USB or wall plug), which in turn lets you charge your phone or tablet. If that's not enough, it's also a flashlight, again running off the rechargeable battery.

Digital Hanging Luggage Scale

One of the dangers of travel to interesting places is that you'll pick up enough souvenirs or local crafts to suddenly put you over the luggage weight limit. Avoid the nasty surprise of a hefty surcharge by bringing this Digital Hanging Luggage Scale for weighing your bags. Only 5.5 x 7.25 x 1 inches big, it's accurate to a third of an ounce and can handle up to 88 pounds. Sportsmen can also use it to weigh the one that didn't get away.

Goal Zero Guide 10 Plus Mobile Kit

The Goal Zero Guide 10 Plus Mobile Kit has two components. The Nomad folds up to a compact 6-x-9-x-1 inches and unfolds to reveal an efficient 3.5-watt solar panel. The panels can charge the four AA batteries in the Guide 10 Plus battery pack in about 6 to 8 hours. (You can also get an adapter for AAA batteries.) Once charged, you can use the batteries in other devices or leave them in the battery pack to use it as a 100mW white LED flashlight with up to 100 hours of shine time.

6-in-1 HDMI Dock Camera Connection Kit

For many travelers, their iPhone is also their vacation camera. But the iPhone (or iPad) doesn't offer easy ways to get your photos and video off the device. The 6-in-1 HDMI Dock Camera Connection Kit changes that: On one side, it connects to your iPhone, while on the other, it has HDMI and AV out as well as SD and Micro SD/TF slots and micro and regular USB ports. Basically, it's an iPhone-to-anything way of transferring or showing your vacation pictures.

Nyrius Global Entourage11 Talking Travel Translator

The world is growing ever smaller, and one result is that your vacation plans could land you anywhere from the Far East to Western Europe. To make sure you can communicate when you get there, take along the Nyrius Global Entourage11 Talking Travel Translator. It has more than 7,700 phrases in 11 languages, including Chinese, Turkish and Russian, and speaks the translation as well so you can let it do your talking for you. It even has a phonebook for important numbers.

Clear Spot Voyager 4G Hotspot

WiFi is in lots of places these days, but it's not everywhere, and definitely probably not in your campground. A mobile hot spot can help with that by connecting to a phone network and providing local WiFi. A good choice is the Clear Spot Voyager 4G Hotspot, which offers fast 4G connectivity with no long-term contract. That means you don't have to commit to something you just plan to use on vacations. Clear doesn't offer service way out in the boondocks and is still missing from some major U.S. cities - check local coverage before you go.

Scosche flipSync Charge & Sync cable

Wherever you go in today's world, you need access to USB connectivity for charging and syncing your mobile devices. Leave the cables at home and carry the Scosche flipSync Charge & Sync cable, whose little plastic case holds regular USB, micro USB and mini USB connectors. (There's also a version with a regular USB connector plus an old-style iPhone dock.)

Victorinox Swiss Army Flash USB

Generations of travelers have made sure to bring a Swiss Army Knife along on their trips. Keeping up with the modern age, this little Victorinox Swiss Army Flash USB knife includes the basics that people have come to expect - knife, nail file, screwdriver, scissors - plus a USB flash drive. With 32GB of storage, it's a handy way to offload those iPhone photos, carry key medical information, and so on. Just don't put it in your carry-on luggage or it may be a present for the TSA.

Jawbone JAMBOX Black Portable Bluetooth Wireless Stereo Speaker

Experienced travelers know that a party can break out anytime, and what's a party without music? Make sure the tunes sound good with the surprisingly powerful, surprisingly portable Jawbone JAMBOX Black Portable Bluetooth Wireless Stereo Speaker. At 6-x-1.6-x-2.25 inches and weighing less than a pound, the Jambox has Bluetooth so you can stream music to it wirelessly from up to 33 feet away. (It has a built-in rechargeable battery you can charge from a wall outlet or via USB.) There's even a microphone so you can use it for conference calls via Skype or Google Talk.

Click here for Must-Have Business Travel Gadgets [Sponsored Post]

This post is part of eBay Finders, a new partnership that presents collections of items curated by a carefully selected group of electronics experts. Meet more of the Finders on the eBay Electronics blog. #eBayFinders

For many of us, business means travel. Lots of travel. Riding in crowded airplanes, sleeping in strange beds and adapting to new schedules. Fortunately, you can find plenty of gadgets that make business travel easier, more pleasant and more productive - if you know where to look. We know where to look.

These must-have gadgets for business travel make the getting there less stressful, quieting the plane trip, making the hotel room feel more like home, waking you up to familiar music, and giving your work more impact.

Sony MDR-NC200D Noise-Canceling Headphones

With the "artificial intelligence" feature turned on, the Sony MDR-NC200D Noise-Cancelling Headphones analyze the ambient sound and select the proper listening mode automatically: airplane, train or bus, or office. (They also have a Monitor button so you can hear the flight attendant ask what kind of snack you want.) You can also turn off the noise cancellation and use the MDR-NC200Ds as a regular pair of headphones to save the battery. With an 8-23,000 Hz frequency range, they'll sound fine either way. And for easy packing, they fold up into a travel case that includes an airplane adapter and a battery.

Lingo World Traveler TR-4400 Language Translator

If it's Tuesday, this must be Belgium. Or maybe it's Tokyo, or Moscow. Be prepared with the Lingo World Traveler TR-4400 Language Translator, which can translate 880,000 words and 100,000 phrases in 44 languages, from Arabic to Vietnamese. Besides translating words, it will also translate measurements, currency, and even clothing and shoe sizes. And in case you find yourself someplace they speak English, it includes the New Oxford American Dictionary.

XtremeMac 3-in-1 Microdock

When checking into a new hotel room, there's nothing like your own music to make you feel at home. The XtremeMac 3-in-1 Microdock turns your iPod or iPhone (4s and earlier) into a music player and an alarm clock (as well as charging it), complete with a physical snooze button. XtremeMac's free Alarm Clock app adds such features as the ability to wake to specific songs and a night setting for the display that keeps it dim until it's time to wake up.

iHome Portable Alarm Clock Stereo

Owners of phones without available docks - that is, travelers with Blackberries or Android phones or new iPhone 5's - can use the iHome Portable Alarm Clock Sterio Speark With USB Charging Dock for Smartphones to bring a touch of home to their hotel rooms. Besides providing a pair of speakers, it has a USB charging port and comes with a USB-to-micro USB cable. iHome also has a Sleep app (for iPhones as well as Android devices) that provides custom alarms and sleep stats as well as the ability to catch up on your social network feeds and check the local weather before you even get out of bed.

Scosche flipSync Charge & Sync Cable

With today's tech, access to USB connectivity for charging and syncing is a must. Rather than round up a bunch of messy cables, just carry the Scosche flipSync Charge & Sync cable, which snaps regular USB, micro USB and mini USB connectors into a little plastic case that hangs on your keychain. The company also makes a version with a regular USB connector paired with a classic (30-pin) iPhone dock.

Kindle Fire HD

Whether you're reading to pass the time on the plane or reviewing business documents in your hotel, peering at your phone's tiny screen gets old fast. At the same time, a full-sized tablet like the iPad, Galaxy Tab or Microsoft Surface is bulky and expensive. The Kindle Fire HD, on the other hand, comes in at a portable 7.6-x-5.4 inches, weights two-thirds as much as a full-size tablet, and costs a relatively modest $199. You can buy books or rent movies from Amazon, and load documents in formats from PDF and TXT to DOC and JPEG.

Aaxa P4 Pico Projector

A lot of (sometime it seems like most) business trips center on presentations and conference rooms. Rather than hope your hosts have a projector and worry about fiddling with connecting your computer, you can control the whole situation if you bring along the tiny little Aaxa P4 Pico Projector . Not only does it let you easily connect your PC or Mac (or iPad or iPhone, with the proper adapter), it also lets you transfer video, image or music files. (It can also read files from a micro SD card or USB flash drive.) After that, you can show your stuff just using the P4, with no need for a computer.

Plantronics Explorer 390 Noise-Canceling Bluetooth Headset

Your own car might have built-in Bluetooth for hands-free phone use while driving. But you can't count on a rental having the same capability. Better to travel with your own headset just in case, and the now-discontinued Plantronics Explorer 390 fills the bill at a bargain price. It can do voice-activated dialing if your phone supports it and has WindSmart technology to cut down on wind and other external noise. The package also includes a wall charger and a car cradle/charger.  

A Brief History of the Apple Cloud

That last service, .Mac, gave its name to the next cloud offering, a paid subscription service launched in 2002. In addition to the four services from iTools, .Mac included software for making automatic backups to iDisk.

The changes continued with the launch and renaming of the rebranded, subscription-based MobileMe in 2008. In this edition, Apple dropped iCard, reflecting the growing competition from other online greeting card sites, and added new services, reflecting users' changing demands on cloud services. The primary change was the ability to sync data -- Safari bookmarks, iCal calendar items, Address Book contacts, Mail accounts, and more -- among multiple Macs and with Apple's increasingly popular mobile devices (iPhones and iPod Touches). MobileMe also included browser-based access to mail, contacts, and hosting; hosting for sites created with Apple's basic Web design tool; and the ability to publish galleries of photographs from iPhoto.

But recently Apple announced that MobileMe would soon be replaced by a new service called iCloud. MobileMe subscribers will be moved to iCloud automatically when it's rolled out this fall, and MobileMe will close its doors for good on June 30, 2012. The new service, as with the previous versions, keeps some features and adds some new ones but also drops some existing services, which users will have to find replacements.

First, what's staying the same: iCloud will still offer syncing of mail, contacts, and calendar items, along with access through a browser. (The initial announcement of iCloud didn't mention the Web apps, leading to speculation that it would only support syncing information to devices. But Apple now says that "if you happen to be away from home without your computer or one of your iOS devices, you can access your mail, contacts, and calendar -- ad-free -- from any computer at icloud.com."

New features include document storage and syncing services for compatible programs, as well as music and photo storage and syncing. The music offering has drawn a lot of attention Amazon and Google have also recently launched cloud music services.

What Services Are Going Away

1. iDisk, the online file storage area that's been part of MobileMe/.Mac/iTools since the beginning. The new iTunes in the Cloud and Photo Stream will store your music and photos, but there's no longer the ability to drag files of any sort to an online folder in the Finder. Besides that convenience, users are likely to miss iDisk's public folder, which made it easy to share files with other people.

   To replace iDisk, most people will probably turn to the popular Dropbox, which duplicates most of the functions and the convenient drag-and-drop functionality of iDisk. Businesses and users with more advanced needs could use alternatives like Box.net, which integrates with Google Apps and has its own suite of third-party add-ins, or Egnyte.com, a "hybrid" solution that combines storage, backup and file sharing, or more than a dozen others that are available.

   On the other hand, compatible programs -- notably, to start with, Apple's own iWork suite -- can use the new "Documents in the Cloud" option to push documents to iCloud and sync them to other devices. Apple has provided APIs to enable other developers to make their products work with Documents in the Cloud as well. Whether the service will also support collaborating on the documents with others is not yet clear.

   Finally, users could presumably store some files on iCloud by sending them as attachments to e-mail. This is an old-fashioned and klutzy approach, however.

   Storage on iCloud starts with a free 5 GB. Extra space for mail and documents (photos and music are handled separately) costs US$20/year for an additional 10 GB, $40/year for 20 GB, and $100/year for 50 GB.

2. Photo galleries. The new Photo Stream will let subscribers sync their photos to all their devices but doesn't provide a way to share them on the Web. It's easy to understand why Apple might want to get out of this business, since strong competition has made MobileMe an also-ran in the category. A Yahoo advertising page claims that Flickr has more than 51 million registered members. Google offers the smaller but still popular Picasa.

   It may turn out to be a non-issue anyway. Facebook claims that there are more pictures shared on Facebook than on all other photo sharing sites combined. The whole concept of a cloud photo sharing site may be passé before long.

3. Web hosting. This will be the big hurdle for a lot of MobileMe users. By June of 2012 people and businesses who've used MobileMe to host their websites are going to have to find an alternative. (The future of iWeb itself is also in doubt: the Wikipedia page for the software alternates between present and past tense and refers to the product's "discontinuation," though Apple hasn't made an official announcement on the subject.)

   For people who choose to continue to use iWeb as long as they can, recent versions of the software also allows publishing to a non-MobileMe Web host. Users will have to find a new host and possibly transfer their domain name, but the process should be straightforward.

   Others -- or everyone, if iWeb goes away -- can either find another Web host and another Web design program, or turn to combination website building and hosting combinations. Some of the most popular are Squarespace.com, Weebly.com, and Cloversites.com. These sites offer an interactive, WYSIWYG approach to building a page, as does iWeb, and provide a place to host the site as well. Another site, Jimdo, has even explicitly offered to help users transfer their iWeb sites to Jimdo and provided instructions.
   
   Finally, businesses often complained that MobileMe was too slow, and the support too lacking, to serve as a good web host. For them, a dedicated hosting company with a modern webpage builder might work out better.
   

   ]]> http://readwrite.com/2011/08/10/making-the-transition-to-apple http://readwrite.com/2011/08/10/making-the-transition-to-apple Analysis Wed, 10 Aug 2011 18:03:42 -0700 Jake Widman