TechnologizerSmartphones
I don’t mean to be painfully Pollyannaish, but I’m almost glad that RIM CEO Mike Lazaridis didn’t announce any new products or other major news at the keynote during its DevCon conference in San Francisco, which I attended on Tuesday morning. A year ago, at the 2010 edition of the event, he unveiled the PlayBook tablet. I got all …
TechnologizerSmartphones
When I wrote about the new Droid RAZR yesterday morning I hadn’t seen one in person. A few hours later, I visited with representatives of Motorola and Verizon and got a demo and a bit of hands-on time.
A few additional observations:
It looks nicer in person. In the stock photo I ran earlier, it looks pretty much like every other …
TechnologizerSmartphones
“Every once in a while, a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything.” That was Steve Jobs talking in 2007, as he was about to introduce the first iPhone. He was right about it being a landmark. But he was also correct that it was a once-in-a-while event. Most products—including Apple ones—are merely evolutionary and …
TechnologizerSmartphones
Once again, Apple is releasing a new iPhone. Once again, I’m in line at the crack of dawn at the Stonestown Galleria in San Francisco. This time I’m here with my wife Marie, who’s excited about upgrading from an iPhone 3GS to a 4S. We’ve been here for an hour; there were around 40 folks here when we arrived, along with a few …
TechnologizerHome Entertainment
Roku, which pretty much invented the cheap, easy-to-use Internet TV streaming box, is the sort of scrappy startup which you might have assumed would get steamrolled by mammoth competitors early on.
Instead, it’s continued to do well even as Apple and Google have muscled in on its territory—in part because it’s a fine product, in …
TechnologizerSmartphones
Boy, does Apple’s iPhone 4S event feel like it happened a long time ago. In fact, it was less than a week ago, and as you may recall, many observers declared the new phone to be a disappointment. But now Apple has released preorder data, and it seems to suggest that real folks are excited about the 4S. A million people preordered in …
TechnologizerComputers
Twenty-seven years ago, I foolishly passed up the opportunity to go to a Steve Jobs keynote. I haven’t been kicking myself ever since, but I do feel bad every time I stop to think about it—such as right this moment.
I was a member of the Boston Computer Society, an amazing institution which Jonathan Rotenberg had founded in 1977, …
TechnologizerApps & Software
Slowly but surely, many of the best iOS apps are coming to Android, and their quality once they get there is improving.
Case in point: The excellent air travel search engine Hipmunk, which arrived in a version for Android phones recently. Its Android version is just as good as the iOS one—good looking, easy to use, and brilliantly …
TechnologizerSocial Networking
I touched on the privacy implications of Facebook’s new Open Graph share-everything-forever platform in my latest Technologizer column over at TIME.com—but I didn’t dwell on them. For one thing, neither feature is fully available yet, making it hard to judge them. For another, use of Facebook in general and the Open Graph in particular …
TechnologizerComputers
Everybody’s been expecting Amazon to announce an Android-based tablet for eons. With any luck, we can stop expecting at 10am ET today, when the company holds a press event in New York City. We’ll be there and will liveblog the news–join us, and you’ll hear it as fast as we do. (If you need a reminder, sign up below and we’ll …
TechnologizerTwitter
For my Technologizer column on TIME.com this week, I wrote about the controversy over Google+’s insistence that members sign up with their “common names,” a requirement that displeases people who wish to be able to maintain a secondary identity online (as well as folks who have gotten caught in the crossfire, such as ones who Google has …
TechnologizerSmartphones
The most fully-baked thing about Logitech’s Revue Google TV box from last year wasn’t the Google TV part. It was Harmony Link, Logitech’s technology, drawn from its venerable Harmony line of universal remotes, for controlling an entertainment center full of gadgets from one remote. Now Logitech is readying a stand-alone Harmony …
