In less than three weeks, consumers will start getting their hands on Windows 8, with its radically new “Modern” (formerly Metro) interface, and forming opinions about it. Some of them will be buying it pre-installed on a new …
Review: The Return of the Slingbox
In the beginning–before Hulu, before Netflix Watch Instantly, even before the official launch of YouTube–there was Sling Media’s Slingbox.
The ingenious “place-shifting” box let you re-route the TV signal that would normally …
Lytro’s Light-Field Camera Gets Manual Settings
When Lytro released its namesake digital camera last spring, it wasn’t immediately clear what sort of person would want to buy it. On one hand, it was a genuine technological breakthrough: As the first consumer light-field …
Webtop, We Hardly Knew Ye
The most intriguing product announced at CES 2011 was Motorola’s Atrix, a 4G Android smartphone with an optional laptop dock. The dock looked and worked like a thin laptop with an 11.6″ screen, but didn’t have its own processor …
Will the Android Upgrade Mess Ever Get Fixed?
Over at CNET, Casey Newton and Roger Cheng have a good story on Google’s Motorola division and its decision to renege on its pledge to update some 2011 phones from Android 2.3 Gingerbread to 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich.
Apple Without Steve Jobs: The First Year Only Tells Us So Much
This is — as you may have figured out by now — an article about how Apple has fared in the year since Steve Jobs passed away. I suspect that it’ll be one of scads of such stories to be published today, the first anniversary …
Netbot: Good News for App.net’s Anti-Twitter Insurrection
A couple of months ago, I got excited about App.net, Dalton Caldwell's social network which was both a Twitter clone and an anti-Twitter. (It looks and works much like Twitter once did, but charges for service and aims to welcome
…
Paul Allen Reviews Windows 8
Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen ended his day-to-day involvement in the company’s operations way back in 1983, when it was working on a new product called Windows. (It didn’t actually ship the first version until late …
Nest’s Second-Generation Thermostat: Simpler and Smarter
A little under a year ago, a started named Nest Labs announced its first product, a high-tech thermostat which learns from your usage, nudges you to conserve energy and can be remote-controlled from a smartphone, tablet or web …
The Sad State of Japan’s Consumer Electronics Giants
The Washington Post‘s Chico Harlan has a sobering story on the dicey financial condition of big Japanese electronics companies such as Sony, Panasonic and Sharp. Once they were the gold standard in gadgets; now they’re struggling …
Amazon Kindle Paperwhite Review: The Screen Makes It the Best E-Reader Yet
We live in the era of gadgets that want to do it all. The typical smartphone of 2012, for instance, isn’t content to just be a phone. It also wishes to be a PC, a still camera, a camcorder, a music player, a gaming console, a …
Madefire’s Digital Comics Come to the iPhone
Among many other things, the iPad is one of the best ways ever devised to read comics. And one of the more interesting ways to read them on an iPad is with Madefire, an app which lets you download “motion books” — serialized …