I haven’t had an opportunity to play with an iPad, but I’ve researched your problem and here’s what I found.

To set up mail

1. Tap Mail
2. Select your account type. Tap Other if your account is not listed.
3. Enter your account information and tap Save. Mail configures most email accounts automatically. Otherwise, you will be prompted for any additional settings.
4. Once your account information is saved – you can start sending and receiving email.

You can configure additional accounts by tapping Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendars > Add Account

Check SMTP settings

1. Tap Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendars. Under Accounts, tap the account from which you’re trying to send mail.
2. Under Outgoing Mail Server, tap SMTP.
3. Tap the SMTP server for your email account and verify the settings are correct.
4. If you have multiple email accounts on iPad, try using an SMTP server from another account. Tap the SMTP account and Select On on the On/Off slider.

There you have it; not as easy as turning on the porch lights, but not hard either.

Enjoy your iPad!

There are a number of technologies that can help you do this. First of all, you can get a line-in connection fitted to your car stereo (which is what your friend has). This can work well for you, but isn’t the easier option. Another option which I had seen in the past was a special cassette you could stick in your player with a cable that plugged right into your player. This will only work, of course, if you have a cassette player in your car, which are becoming more and more uncommon.

The option I would recommend is to get a device that can play music from your device over your car radio. You plug in your player, choose a channel and just tune your radio into the channel you’re transmitting on. One such device is the Belkin TuneCase 3 FM Transmitter, which plugs right into your iPod and lets you stream your music over your car radio. It’s pretty simple to use and can be quite effective. It’s also pretty cheap, currently on sale from Buy.com for £14.99 and that price also includes shipping!

The great thing about this sort of solution is that you can use it at home as well as in your car, or if you decide to switch to another car. Do you think this may fit the bill?

It seems like every year they seem to announce cards with bigger and better storage capabilities, and Compact Flash is no exception. To tell you the truth, it’s not my preferred card type, but if you have a camera that uses it, you don’t really have much choice, and most card readers will read any type of card. RAW will consume a pretty large chunk of memory on the card, but it does allow you flexibility that compressed formats don’t allow, so yes, I think you’re wise is seeking a bigger card.

You can get a 32Gb Compact Flash card, the Kingston Elite Pro 32Gb for under $75 as it’s on sale at Buy.com. That’s not expensive when you consider the size of the card and the fact that it will store pretty much all the photos you can throw at it. It supports a sustained write of 133X which is ideal for photographic uses, meaning you can shoot photos at a faster rate and not be constrained by the speed of your card. Check it out, you won’t be disappointed.

I’m not quite sure what you’re after, but if you’re after a collection of USB memory sticks your best option would be to go to a conference. Everyone there is just given out USB memory sticks with demos and sample products. And the great thing is that they come in all shapes and sizes.

Most of the exhibitors tend to produce a logo flash drive so that once you’ve seen their demo you’re carrying their advert around with them. But the reality is that you can use the Flash drive for anything you like, just format it and it’s all yours.

The great thing about 15 year olds is that it’s quite easy to get different ideas for them. Once people get older you start finding that they already have everything they could ever need! Thanks for the idea that he’s into science, I’m sure he loved your telescope. How about going the other way this time? Instead of something that looks out into the depths of space, what about something to peer at very small objects.

I would suggest something like the Carson Optical zPix USB Microscope, which would be a great gadget for someone interested in science to play with. Here are some of the features:

• USB Digital Microscope With 26 – 130X Optical Zoom.
• Integrated Digital Camera captures still images and video clips.
• View prepared specimen slides or place right onto ordinary objects to view.
• Impressive 26-130x digital zoom allows you to see incredible details of ordinary objects plus the Lens has a 5x Optical Zoom capability.
• Battery-free operation – draws power directly through your computers USB Port.

It’s worth keeping in mind that it only supports Windows, so make sure your brother uses a PC and not a Mac. Here are all the bits it comes with:

It comes complete with a specimen base, three blank slides, one prepared slide, forceps, an eyedropper, USB cable, and a CD-ROM with applications software. It claims to be very easy to use and it on sale from Buy.com at $35. That’s pretty good value if I may say so myself!

Most computers have the ability to stream music off the Internet. I used to use a service called Pandora for this, but when it stopped working in the UK, I switched to a new service called Spotify. I’ve found internet radio really fun to listen too, as it always keeps me listening to fresh music. Would recommend it to anyone.

Anyway, listening to it on a mobile device is even better, as you can carry it around anywhere you go. There are applications for the iPhone that let you do this, and I even use one called Imeem for my Android phone. If you’re not able to get your hands on one of these devices, you may choose to invest in a dedicated device, one like the Slacker 40 Station/8Gb WiFi Radio Player.

Once you’ve selected which channels you want to listen to, this device hooks up to a WiFi network (or to a wired connection through a USB connection to your computer) and fills itself up with music for you to listen too. This means you can take your music with you, and that the device will keep refreshing itself with new music whenever it finds a WiFi connection. It looks like a great device which meets all your needs. It’s currently on sale at Buy.com for just under $70 (including free shipping), which is a great offer for all the music you can eat.

It’s interesting to see how the way we consume media has changed over the recent years. I, for one, am really interested to see how the industry develops.

An interesting question, and I actually had to do some research on this one (seeing I’ve never had to do this myself). I have come across a number of different methods you can use, but the one I like best consists of a hardware solution that you can use without even using a PC.

The Pinnacle Video Transfer Device is a special box you can plug your video player into and hook up your iPod at the other end. It’s a bit more generic than that actually, allowing you to plug any analogue device (video player, games console, even plain old TV aerial) and transfer some footage directly onto an iPod, Sony PSP or any other USB mass storage device. It sounds quite easy to use, and means you don’t have to mess around with any software, interim copies, codecs and all the other bits and bobs you need to play with normally.

The device is on sale from Buy.com for under $50, so it’s a steal for something that can deal with your problem quickly and efficiently. It looks pretty easy to use and comes complete with all the A/V cables you need to make it work. If you go ahead and purchase it, let us know your experiences. I’m sure other readers would like to know how it got on.

Well, there are an increasing number of these coming on the market and evaluating them is not always easy. So to answer this question, I’m turning to a post on GadgetAdvisor entitled The Best Online Backup Service. It evaluated a number of different offerings on the market and ends up with recommending Mozy Pro, a product which I’ve never actually tried out myself. They have an Unlimited Home Plan which looks like the sort of thing you’re looking for, so be sure to check it out.

Gadget Advisor is always a good place to look for these sort of answers on what sort of technology is available. Whether you’re after a universal remote, a networked media player or an online backup service, you’re bound to come up with some interesting information from the site. So, pop down and have a read.

My friend Mike was asking this question after he came back from a conference in the US with a huge pile of promotional merchandise (or swag as my American friends like calling it). He was looking to get something similar for his company to give to his existing customers and potential clients.

Well, there are a number of companies who can supply this sort of merchandise and most of them have pretty good prices because you tend to buy the items in bulk. One particular company that stood out while I was looking around was one called Empire Promos. I was pretty impressed by the immense selection of different products they can supply, not just USB drives. Here are some ideas from their website:

USB Memory pen: a 1Gb USB pen that can be produced in any one of a range of colours with your company logo printed on it.

USB Compass Drive: 512Mb USB drive with a built-in compass and soft, rubberized trim. The compass adds extra utility and a theme for your promotional message.

Wrist band USB Drive: 512Mb USB Drive that locks around your wrist.

Now that’s a pretty wide selection of promotional products. They actually have pages and pages of stuff, ranging from gadgets, all the way to kitchen items. I’m sure you can find something unique and attention grabbing there.

I got this question last week from John, the Prince of Mann. Well, the main problem in what you’re asking above is that Outlook Express is no longer supported by Microsoft, and has limited use in a synchronisation environment. Most products on the market seem to target Microsoft Outlook, Outlook Express’ big brother; particularly as Microsoft Outlook has extra functionality around Notes and Calendar which bring additional value to a PDA user.

So, the first thing to do would be to move off Outlook Express and onto Microsoft Outlook. Once this is installed, it will ask you if you want to import your data from Outlook Express and it will take care of this relatively painlessly for you. And this is where the magic happens. If you plug in your Smartphone and you have Outlook installed, it will automatically sync up your Smartphone with Outlook and all your email, contacts, calendar appointments etc will make their way over to your new phone.

This was only half the story though. John’s 6000 contacts hadn’t found their way over to Outlook Express and we needed to find a way to import them into Outlook so that the new PDA will pick them up. There are a number of products on the market that are supposed to be able to do this, including the synchronisation programme that came with the Clie. Unfortunately however, it didn’t support Outlook 2003, and and the newer versions of Intellisync didn’t have his PDA on the “supported PDAs” list.

There are a number of products on the market to do what we wanted and although they are all cheaper than a Patek Gondolo watch, we really didn’t want to spend any money on what would be a one-off process. So we ended up going down the Chapura PocketMirror route. Pocketmirror is a product that lets you synchronise Outlook against Palm OS. There is a charge to use it, but luckily they have a 7-day trial and we only needed to use it once to get his contacts out of his Clie. The software worked a treat and today John is a happy bunny!