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 …
Gadgets
With Webtop Dead, It’s Time to Rethink Modular Computing
When Motorola announced Webtop in January 2011, I fell for the hype, hard.
Webtop was an accessory that turned Motorola’s Atrix 4G phone into a simple laptop, with a keyboard, trackpad and a full version of Mozilla’s Firefox …
Why Some 7-inch Tablets Will Eventually Be Given Away Free
About 18 months ago, I was one of the first to write about what I thought Amazon’s business model would be for its tablet that launched last fall. I had heard from my sources in Taiwan that Amazon was looking at selling the …
PlayStation Mobile Is Still a Letdown After All This Time
For a company that once denied the threat of smartphone gaming, Sony showed a lot of foresight when it announced PlayStation Suite in January 2011.
PlayStation Suite, now known as PlayStation Mobile, was supposed to bring …
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.
Acer’s Iconia W700 Is a Curious Tablet-Desktop Hybrid
When Windows 8 launches on Oct. 26, expect to see lots of hybrid PCs that combine a tablet and a laptop into a single, convertible device.
Acer’s Iconia W700 is an example of something different: the tablet-desktop …
AT&T Gets Nokia’s Lumia 920 as an Exclusive
Nokia may once again rely on AT&T to make a comeback in the United States.
AT&T announced on Thursday that it will be the exclusive U.S. carrier for the Lumia 920, Nokia’s next flagship Windows Phone. The companies didn’t …
Apple’s Rumored iPad Mini: Here’s What We Think We Know So Far
As my colleague Harry McCracken pointed out recently, Apple’s not great at keeping secrets anymore. So although Apple hasn’t announced a mini iPad yet, the smaller tablet is almost certainly about to break cover.
The latest …
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
…
FreedomPop’s Free Mobile Data Plans: What You Need to Know
A new company called FreedomPop is offering something that seems too good to be true: 500 MB of free mobile data per month through your choice of a wireless hotspot or USB stick.
The service, which was announced last December, …
Who Cares About Neil Young’s Ultra-High Quality Music Standard?
Neil Young claims he’s going to change the way we listen to digital music by pairing a new iPod-competitive Pono music player (I see “Ponyo” — how about you?) with an audiophile-caliber music download service. The claims are …