Coast 2 Coast Mom

Sprint 4G LTE Tri-Fi Hotspot from Sierra Wireless

As a travelling family, Sprint offered us the opportunity to try out the 4G LTE Tri-Fi Hotspot while on the go these past few months. Whether it’s been in airports, on trains, buses - even on a 12-hour family road trip from NYC to Chicago - having an internet connection to stay in touch with work throughout our travels was vital to our careers. 

If you’re not already familiar with the tri-fi hotspot, it's a small  wireless device that you can throw in your bag and depending on your location, the hotspot will kick in to either a 3G or 4G mode automatically. What makes Sprint’s 4G LTE Tri-Fi Hotspot different is that it’s a “first-ever device” that gives you access to Sprint’s 3G, 4G WiMAX and 4G LTE network for internet connectivity. So depending on where you are, you could have speedy connection speeds while on the go.

One big negative to just using your smartphone's Wi-Fi hotspot feature is that it just sucks the life out of the battery. So when we started using the Tri-Fi Hotspot, we were blown away. By putting it in auto power save mode when the Tri-Fi isn’t connected, you can get hours of connection time before you need to plug it back in - we made it through two days of press conferences during the grand opening of Fantasyland at Walt Disney World! Terrific for long and busy travel days.

The only downside we found was that the Tri-Fi Hotspot is too bulky to slip into your jeans pocket, at about 2-3x the thickness of a current mobile phone. Which didn't bother me, as I just slipped it into my purse or camera bag. 

In major metro areas like New York City the service was blazingly fast. However, while commuting in between less populated areas, at major airports (JFK, McCarran and Orlando Int’l), and driving the more rural areas between New York and Chicago, the fastest we were able to muster was 3G service.

We could take this with us everywhere we went, and there was solid coverage. In most cases when the Tri-Fi Hotspot had spotty reception, so did our Verizon and AT&T devices. (I mean really remote areas, like driving along I-80 through the Wilds of Pennsylvania. ;-) ) While the 3G service delivered good performance, the 4G service coverage wasn’t nearly as frequent as we were hoping, but as Sprint expands its 4G service area, this should only improve as time goes on. Not a deal breaker.


Using the Sprint Tri-Fi Hotspot on Disney's Magical Express Bus to WDW

If you're interested in buying a mobile hotspot, you can purchase the 4G LTE Tri-Fi Hotspot on Sprint.com for $99.99 or from Amazon Wireless for $0.01 both require a two-year contract, and you’ll get 3G/4G/4G LTE service, 6 menus of information within the built-in screen (like data consumption, battery life, days left in your billing cycle, and active network status), and built in GPS services so you can use it for location-based navigation when it’s plugged into your laptop.

Or you can purchase the newly released Overdrive Pro 3G/4G Mobile Hotspot for $49.99 with a two-year service plan, but this device doesn’t have 4G LTE or GPS capabilities – if you don’t live in a 4G LTE network area, and GPS isn’t important to you, this could be an alternative option.

Data plans range from $34.99 for a 3GB per month plan (which should be sufficient for most people) all the way up to $79.99 for a 12GB plan,

Overall, this was an incredibly useful device to have handy, and despite not having a consistent 4G connection, the speed was strong enough to do what we needed from the road.

eBay Mobile App - Making Selling Easier

There's nothing that has us high-fiving more these days than taking turns finding stuff we've been storing in the basement, grabbing our phone, starting up the eBay mobile app and turning that stuff into cash.

After moving so much the past several years, we never quite purged before picking up roots, in fact when the moving crew showed up at our Chicago house to pack the moving truck to New Jersey, they found 100 boxes in the basement, many of which we'd never even opened during our year and a half in that house. That's dozens of boxes that we've literally hauled from coast to coast that we're not using, but may have items that others may be searching for.

Around here, garage sales aren't that popular (or shall I say, productive?) and locally Craig's List and email groups aren't used as much as they were in the suburbs of Chicago. We'd looked into selling on eBay in the past years, but with fees and PayPal charges struggled with how could we make money on an item worth $20. (Now we know ;-))

Late this summer, a colleague of C2cDad's mentioned his success using eBay to sell things they no longer used or needed, and a lightbulb went off. He answered our questions and we were off and running, giddy with the excitement of having a place to unload some of our more valuable but unused/lightly used possessions. 

We’ve listed a fair amount of items using the eBay website since September, and while I wouldn’t call ourselves experts, we’ve gotten fairly efficient in navigating the listing options for posting an item for sale. We'd been hesitant to try the eBay mobile app, but when the Splash Creative Media ladies shared an opportunity for people selling on eBay, I jumped for the perfect opportunity to give it a try!

From the get-go, selling items using the eBay mobile app was simple and FAST. Ultimately we were impressed with how easy it was to navigate. While it took a bit of getting use to where all of the menus and listing options were, it had most of what you would find on the website and all of the basics for managing the entire selling process from your phone - and in our case, directly from our couch.

     

If you’re selling items that have barcodes, like games or electronics, using the mobile app was a  no-brainer.  We had purchased a Wii Fit Balance Board several years ago that we hadn’t used, so we decided to put it up for sale using the eBay mobile app.

Using my iPhone, we scanned the barcode on the box which pulled up all the description details of the Wii Fit, we set the price of the auction, took photos using our iPhone (which automatically uploaded the pics into the listing), and in a matter of minutes the Wii Fit was up for sale. In fact, no exaggeration, we received two offers within a couple of hours, and sold it by the end of the day.  Clearly this isn’t a typical experience, but it certainly put our first experience using the eBay app down a good path!

(Photo taken with my phone.)
In a short time, we’ve become fans, with the single greatest feature having to be the barcode scanner, which in itself saved a ton of time in listing an item. For whatever reason, typing in the same number on the eBay website can be tedious and doesn’t always produce an exact match, or the item for whatever reason isn’t found.

However, while scanning the UPC instantaneously pre-populates the listings with information within the mobile app, when it comes to other items like clothes or items that don’t have barcodes, we found that typing all the listing information you need on a mobile phone is a little tedious and better suited for the eBay website on your computer.

On the website you can also do things like format text for your listing description, which wasn’t something that you could do on the mobile. It’s not a deal breaker for using the app, it just means that we’ll go to the eBay website to make sure that the listing is formatted the way we want it.

Overall, the eBay mobile app has definitely made posting faster and easier, and something that we'll be using to fund our holiday gifts this year!

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Samsung Social TV in our Living Room

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Samsung Social TV in our Living Room

We've been trying out the Samsung ES8000 SMART TV's Social TV capabilities the last couple of weeks - literally from Barack to Bieber. Like most families, we multi-task when we watch TV, with a remote in one hand and a phone/tablet/laptop in the other. The last several weeks have given us several life-altering "live" events that have kept us - along with millions of viewers - tuned into our televisions and our Twitter accounts like never before.

With the Samsung SMART TV, we simultaneously followed our friends' social media updates while watching Hurricane Sandy coverage, the American Music Awards, and the single most tweeted event in history, the 2012 Presidential Election.

Here's Stevie Wonder singing at the AMA's, you note Eric Stonestreet (Modern Family) has tweeted on the right.

2012 Election night coverage.

Like hundreds of apps that you can download to the Samsung TV, the Social TV app has made it convenient to connect to Twitter, Facebook and Google Talk. Since we DVR (time-shift) almost everything we watch using our Tivo Premiere, live events are really the best way to connect with our friends - and to get all their tweets and Facebook posts overlaid onto the TV is pretty cool.

How it Works
The remote that comes with the TV helps choose three different overlay options and you can choose how the TV content is displayed relative to the social media on the screen. The older model of our 55” TV came with a QWERTY keyboard which made it easier to respond, but not as practical.

The Social TV app automatically updates the total number of posts by placing a number next to each corresponding feed, or by an alert that will appear in the bottom right of the screen. You switch the screen view to hide the updates, and a number will pop up at the bottom right every so often showing you how many status updates have been updated so you can click and switch to show them if you'd like. If you consider that the night of the election there were 31 million tweets, and at one point 327,452 tweets per minute when the election was called, that’s a lot of reading and scrolling on your TV.

I have a feeling we'll be watching some holiday classics this way - perhaps starting with A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving Special tonight. :-)

A huge thank you to Samsung for providing the television for us to try out, and for sponsoring my blog these two months as part of their #FamiliesInMotion initiative.

Lenovo Convertible Laptops Available October 2012

Lenovo unveiled a new generation of laptops that convert to tablets - designed to help you "do more" last week in NYC. What I like best about these convertible laptop is the touchscreen and the flexible shape that's great for working on-the-go commuters, travelers and families - not just passively watching streaming videos, but for people wanting to create and work and do more on their device.

Lenovo brought together five "DOers" from across film, photography, fashion, art and cooking to demonstrate their four new convertible laptops with real-life ways that they're reshaping how we get things done today.

Michelin chef Anthony Sasso was on hand demonstrating the IdeaPad Yoga 13 and its specially designed hinge that allows you to open up the laptop all the way back, a full 360 degrees until flat if you want, so it could be used in the kitchen as a tablet. Or more practically, bend the laptop backwards into a "V" so you can use the Yoga in "Tent Mode" on the kitchen counter for viewing recipes -- gesture technology is built in so you can flip through without the need for a keyboard or even touching the screen.

The Yoga 13 runs the new Windows 8 OS and will retail at Best Buy for $1,099 starting October 26th. Pre-orders are available October 12th.

Equally as impressive was the ThinkPad Twist and the IdeaPad Lynx, with a detachable keyboard docking station. It offers flexibility to use it as a laptop or tablet. The fully docked laptop mode has its advantages though, as Lenovo is touting a 16-hour battery life. The Lynx, part of Lenovo's super thin (only 20mm) Ultrabook line will be available as a tablet for $599, or with its keyboard dock for an additional $149. Both versions of the IdeaPad Lynx will be available in December 2012.



The evening was capped by the action-packed premiere of Lenovo's new television commercial. Directed by Martin Campbell, of movie fame such as Green Lantern and Casino Royale, he brings a high-octane spy chase to the screen. You'll be seeing it in both TV and a theatre near you as part of the on-screen previews.

If you're looking for a high performance laptop with flexible shape and size features that can't be found on other computers, this just may be the line for you. Be sure to check them out in retails stores after they arrive the last week of October.

Read more about Lenovo's new convertible laptops in my article on Techlicious.

Angry Birds Saturdays - Play and Win a Samsung SMART TV

So playing Angry Birds on our Samsung SMART TV is pretty cool, but what if you don't have one and would like to try it out too? Or better yet, what if you'd like to WIN a Samsung SMART TV by playing Angry Birds? It could happen.

Just tweet a photo of yourself playing Angry Birds on a Samsung Smart TV to @SamsungTV with the hashtags #AngryBirdSaturdays and #AngryBirdSaturday for a chance to win prizes including a Samsung Blu-ray player, Angry Birds plushies, or a grand prize of a new Samsung ES8000 SMART TV. Just be sure that you're following @SamsungTV on Twitter.

If you don't have a Samsung Smart TV, you can play the game on one at these stores nationwide: Best Buy, Sears, Fry's Home Electronics, ABC Warehouse, BJ's Wholesale Club, P.C. Richards and Sons or Electronics Expo (see full list here) and tweet a picture of yourself from there. :-)

Their contest runs for the next four Saturdays, so go check it out.

Good luck!!

Thanks to Samsung Visual Display for sponsoring Coast to Coast Mom this month as part of the #FamiliesInMotion initiative, and providing us with a Samsung SMART TV ES8000 to try out all of the great features like the Angry Birds app.

Samsung SMART TV Angry Birds App Fun

Facebook just recently announced that they reached the one billion user mark last week, but one of the most prolific games ever reached a similar milestone months earlier. Which game?  Angry Birds! Rovio officially announced that Angry Birds reached one billion downloads earlier in September.

Now that's a lot of Angry Birds. It's hard to escape them - not only are they on your smartphone, they are everywhere! (t-shirts, plush toys, even Angry Birds Space fruities). But now you can PLAY Angry Birds in a cool way. Through the built-in camera on top of the Samsung ES8000, the Angry Birds app can now be played on your TV. Like Xbox Kinect technology where you are the controller, Samsung motion control technology allows you to play Angry Birds on your TV from across the room with just your hand.

The controls are pretty simple to use, and fairly easy to control, but you need to make sure to keep your hand up continuously so the ES8000 recognizes that you're still there. We found that if we got lazy and our hand was tilted down or to the right or left, that the motion sensor would lose the connection.

Here's a look at the Kiddo playing one of the levels, you'll note how he make a fist to grab the angry bird and then move it around to adjust the trajectory of the bird. In very little time he got pretty good at clearing levels!

Angry Birds tends to be a solitary game to kill time, but playing it on your TV makes it a spectator sport that you can play with the entire family. We actually had a family Angry Birds playdate after flag football last Saturday while it rained. (Which explains why the video is a little dark - we'll have to record ourselves when the sun's out this weekend! :-) )

If you don't already have a Samsung SMART TV, you can try out the app and play to win your own Samsung SMART TV as part of their Angry Birds Saturdays contest at retailers now.

Thanks to Samsung Visual Display for sponsoring Coast to Coast Mom this month, and for providing us with the ES8000 to try out all of the great features as part of the #FamiliesinMotion program

Samsung Galaxy Camera Available Fall 2012

The Samsung GALAXY camera wowed me after AT&T hosted a preview of their holiday gifts last week. The Samsung GALAXY camera is a 4G LTE and WiFi-enabled point-and-shoot camera that's mostly camera, but part smartphone. It's one of those devices that catches your eye right off the bat.

Beyond just its appearance, the Samsung GALAXY camera fits well in your hand, and taking great looking photos with it was easy. The camera has so many features on it, that it makes you look like a professional photographer even if you know very little about photography. If you do know what you're doing, you can easily adjust the manual settings and use the more sophisticated features to show off your great photography skills.

For instance, you can see the array of photo options on the touchscreen to maximize the quality of your photo - based on the subjects you're shooting and the setting that you're in. Using the "Best Face" feature, you can ensure everyone in a group is looking at the camera in your photos.

The advanced mode of the Samsung Galaxy Camera explains some basic features and allows you to easily adjust ISO, aperture, and shutter speed.

More features on this camera give you the ability to edit and apply filters to the photos right within the nearly 5" touchscreen on the back of the camera. The built-in wifi means that you can share your great pictures to upload on Facebook directly from your camera!

Oh, and you can talk to it. Seriously! It has voice commands - so you can tell it to zoom in or out . .  set a timer for a family photo - crazy, I know. Crazy fabulous.

The new Samsung Galaxy Camera hits stores soon this fall. If you're in the market for a new point-and-shoot camera, get in a store and get your hands on it. Available through AT&T, pricing and data packages will be announced soon, but with the holidays right around the corner this camera is sure to be near the tops of some holiday wish lists.

For more details, check out my piece about the Samsung Galaxy camera on Techlicious.

Attending a Taping of The Katie Show

I had a blast attending Katie Couric's The Katie Show to live tweet and blog during an episode taping yesterday with special guest Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook.

I arrived at ABC Studios on time despite the dreary and rainy morning.

HomeAdvisor Re-Launches With New Home Improvement Tools

We've all been there, an appliance breaks, work needs to be done on the house, and you're not sure where to turn first, or more importantly who to trust to do the work. HomeAdvisor, formerly ServiceMagic, invited some press to learn more about their rebranding efforts, new tools and a cool new DIY app. New features add some nice value to what ServiceMagic was already doing - arming DIY consumers with the intelligence to make informed decisions, and setting expectations on costs before they pick up the phone or accept an estimate.

Going to a Taping of The Katie Show

Tomorrow I'm attending a taping of The Katie Show with Katie Couric and special guest Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook. As a member of Katie's blogger crew, I'll be sitting in the front row "live tweeting" throughout the taping on my laptop. I've also written an article for Katie's site about the impact Facebook has had on our lives moving from coast to coast that'll publish tomorrow when the episode airs. I'm super excited! :-D

Katie and Sheryl will be discussing Facebook and social media, and may even touch upon Sheryl's work/life balance as a working mother. What do you hope they discuss on tomorrow's episode? What would you like to ask Sheryl? Has Facebook enhanced your life?

You can follow along on Twitter during the taping at Noon EST/9 a.m. PST Thursday to get a peek of the show that'll air later in the day on a local channel near you.

If you're on Twitter, follow: @c2cmom; @katieshow; @katiecouric; @sherylsandberg; #katie and you can follow c2cmom along on Instagram too.