Good article this week in the New York Times about Google's relatively quiet effort to build a truly capable translation service. Doing real-time translation turns out to be an incredibly hard computing task and the best way so far to solve it is through brute force: feed a really powerful computer system (like Google's) billions of examples of words and let it crunch the statistical likelihood of what you mean. There are a number of apps, like Jibbigo, that purport to do this now, and I tested a handful of dedicated devices a couple of years ago, but none really lives up to the dream. If Google's system gets truly smart enough, it could roll out to smartphones and finally give us the instant-translator gadget that would truly change the way we travel—imagine being able to have a full conversation with someone in any country, no hand gestures required.

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A pretty crisp photo I took with Palm Pre Plus, of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra performing at Carnegie Hall

In one way at least, I’m grateful to the lowlife who stole my iPhone last month. Without him, I wouldn’t have felt the urgency to find myself a new cell phone and discover that—contrary to what all the Apple zealots in my life tell me—attractive smartphone alternatives do exist. Better still, those other smartphones aren’t shackled to AT&T (if I had a penny for every dropped call, I might be able to afford to buy another iPhone before my contract expires). My two current favorites are the Palm Pre Plus and Google’s Nexus One, both of which I’ve been road-testing over the past several weeks. Neither one is perfect, but I’ve grown so fond of both, for very different reasons, that I’m having a tough time deciding which one I’ll choose for the long haul. Maybe it’s time for another Smartphone Smackdown. In the meantime, here’s how these two phones compare:
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A closer look at the HP V1020H pocket camcorder from ubergizmo.com

A slough of camera announcements over the past week have got me thinking about upgrading my five-year-old point-and-shoot and DSLR. The good news is that today I could pretty easily replace both with a single camera, without breaking the bank, and getting a lot more features. Here are three cool cams in my sights:

Last week I found myself stuck in London for an extra day, and was absolutely paralyzed with possibilities for what to do with it. I ended up wandering the National Gallery and seeing Oliver because I found myself near them, and eating at a horribly mediocre pub recommended by the front desk. I know the "in" thing to do these days is to reach out to the Face/Twit universe in such a situation, but shouldn't there be Web sites that solve this problem for us social-media-challenged people: I'm in a city, what should I absolutely do?

A couple of weeks ago, we wrote about how great a travel accessory the iPad will be, and travel guru Randy Peterson of flyertalk.com offered in the comments a number of additional uses for the iPad on the road: watching movies, reading books and newspapers, browsing SkyMall (he was kidding, I think, but a SkyMall app would be brilliant ... if it worked offline).  So in that spirit, we're trying to think of more scenarios in which the iPad could be game-changing for travelers. Today's idea: the ultimate portable jukebox.
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The guys at Gizmodo, along with their readers, have been running a standardized speed test on as many Wi-Fi-enabled flights as they can the past several weeks to figure out who provides the speediest connection. The verdict: Delta!

But before you go changing your flights, a few caveats. They only tested four airlines: American, Virgin America, Delta and AirTran, and all of those use GoGo as their provider. (Aircell's GoGo uses ground-based stations, while Row 44, the supplier for Alaskan Air and soon Southwest, uses satellites.) And Glenn Fleishman of WiFiNetNews weighs in to say that this may not be as definitive as it sounds, since speeds can vary widely based on how many people are using the service on any given flight. "Speedtest tries to suck all available bandwidth," he adds, "so it can only test how much is remaining or how much is provisioned to an individual user."

Up in the air: Ship deck and lounge chairs taken to a whole new level with the Aircruise

Is slow the new luxury? That’s the philosophy behind a conceptual design for a floating airship / hotel released by London-based firm Seymourpowell yesterday.

The Aircruise is a 265-meter high, kite-shaped airship with four hydrogen-filled envelopes that will carry a maximum of 100 guests and crew on extended voyages floating up to 12,000 feet above the earth.

While the theoretical design is capable of lifting up to 396,000 KG and air speeds of 150 KM per hour, designer Nick Talbot says zipping around the globe with tons of people packed on board is not the goal.

"The Aircruise concept questions whether the future of luxury travel should be based around space-constrained, resource-hungry, and all too often stressful airline travel," Nick Talbot, head of transportation at Seymourpowell, told CNN.
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These people video chat. Do you?

A colleague and I were chatting about the iPad last week and I suggested that the conspicuous absence of a camera might have been a bone to AT&T's already overloaded data networks: no camera, no video chatting. To which my colleague asked, "But who video chats?"

I think the iPhone is the perfect travel gadget, but the newly announced iPad might just take its place with several features that are music to a road-warrior's ears—10-hours of battery, iBookstore, a screen you won't have to squint at to watch movies. But most significant (and surprising) is that the version of the device that connects to a cellular data network is unlocked, right out of the box.

That means that unlike the iPhone, the iPad isn't locked to AT&T's network. So when you go overseas, you can pick up a local sim card (a thumbnail-size plastic bit that tells the device what network to use) and pop online without paying the exorbitant data-roaming rates. (This is also possible with the iPhone, but requires some software hackery.) Unlocked phones are common outside the US, but rare here, since carriers usually subsidize the price of the phone itself. But since you'll be paying for every penny of this yourself ($500-$830 depending on options), I guess Apple convinced AT&T to loosen the cuffs.