Ten of the Shortest-Lived Tech Products Ever
Ten gadgets and services whose existences were nasty, brutish, and short.
Ten gadgets and services whose existences were nasty, brutish, and short.
Only a weirdo would use a thirty-year-old word processor to get real work done. (I know what I’m talking about: I used word processors back then, and don’t want to go back.) There’s nothing particularly strange, however, about playing thirty-year-old electronic games.
Such as Ms. Pac-Man, for instance, a game that’s still beloved and …
All Things Digital’s Arik Hesseldahl reports that sales of HP’s TouchPad at Best Buy aren’t great. In fact, his source says that Best Buy has managed to sell less than ten percent of the 270,000 TouchPads that HP has shipped to the retailer so far. It’s causing Best Buy some angst, Hesseldahl says.
HP’s rapid move to cut the …
Apple buying T-Mobile. Microsoft buying Adobe. We’re all used to reading stuff by tech pundits talking about seismic, world-changing acquisitions in a somewhat fanciful manner. But Google buying Motorola Mobility, the recently-spun-off part of Motorola that makes phones and other consumer hardware, is real–and the most potentially …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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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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 …
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 …
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 …