TechnologizerTablets
With all due respect to Steve Jobs, I’ve never been convinced by his stance that 7-inch tablets are a bad idea. But I haven’t been able to mount a convincing case that he’s wrong, either.
The original 7-inch Samsung Galaxy Tab suffered from using a version of Android meant for phones. RIM’s BlackBerry PlayBookhad even bigger …
TechnologizerComputers
Thirty years ago today, IBM announced its first PC, the 5150. It wasn’t the best PC of its era, or even the most interesting—but it was surely the most important one. That’s because it spawned a standard that quickly came to dominate the market, and which continues to this day. If you’re reading this on a Windows computer, you’re using …
TechnologizerTechnologizer
For this week’s Technologizer column over at TIME.com, I said a few words in defense of the beleaguered set of technologies known as physical media. One of the points I bring up: Much digital media, including stuff like Kindle books and movies from Amazon, Apple, and others, is locked up with copy protection. I don’t object to that …
TechnologizerSmartphones
Professor Dennis Galletta has been teaching a summer course at Harvard on Human Factors in Information Systems Design. As part of it, his students conducted some usability testing of the iPhone 4, Samsung’s Windows Phone 7-based Focus, HTC’s Android-based Thunderbolt, and RIM’s BlackBerry Storm. They had people who hadn’t used …
TechnologizerSony
I love the idea of dumping cable TV in favor of the wealth of video that’s now available online. I’ve been thinking about it for years. I just haven’t done it. Mostly because much of the TV I watch is live news, usually on all-news channels–something which is still primarily the domain of cable. But I never stop toying with the idea
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TechnologizerComputers
This might be the best Google-related news of 2011, so far: Gmail just added an optional feature in its Labs section that gives you a preview pane that puts the content of messages on the same screen as your inbox, letting you bop efficiently between messages without having to leave the inbox.
It finally gives Gmail a capability …
TechnologizerComputers
Apple has announced pricing for its upcoming iCloud service. In typical Apple fashion, the company kept things simple. 5GB of online storage is free; 10GB is $20 a year; 20GB is $40 a year; 50GB is $100 a year. (Most other cloud-storage companies price by the month rather than the year, which makes it tougher to judge what you’re really …
TechnologizerLists
And so it begins again. Boy Genius Report has an exclusive scoop from an “unproven” (ooh!) source: Apple is in talks to buy Barnes & Noble, the country’s last remaining national bookseller. As BGR points out, the acquisition would get Apple B&N’s digital books and other publications (which it might conceivably want) and Nook …
TechnologizerTechnologizer
Writing my TIME.com Technologizer column this week was a form of primal scream therapy. It feels like I’m spending more time than ever wrestling with new gadgets that don’t meet the fairly modest bar of consistently being able to do what they’re supposed to do for more than ten minutes at a time without crashing, choking, or displaying a …
TechnologizerComputers
When Steve Jobs unveiled the first MacBook Air at Macworld Expo back in January of 2008, he induced lots of oohs and aahs over its astoundingly thin case. I don’t, however, remember many people declaring that it was Apple’s first pass at building the garden-variety Mac of the future. I sure didn’t–in part because I was too busy …
TechnologizerComputers
Apple may be the most consistently inventive company in tech, but in its own way, it’s a remarkably single-minded outfit. For all of their profound differences, a Macintosh computer from 1984 and a new iPad 2 are soul mates. Each is the coolest, most elegant expression of Steve Jobs’ vision of the ideal computing device that Apple could …
TechnologizerTablets
For products which still haven’t been officially announced, Sony’s upcoming Android tablets sure haven’t been publicity-shy.
Sony first teased them back in April. And on Wednesday, it held press events in New York and San Francisco at which it showed them off and released more details, such as the fact that the smaller S1 will …
