Category: Technology

A Digital Video Primer for Geeks – Three Thumbs Up!

About an hour ago I watched A Digital Video Primer for Geeks. This is, hands down and no exceptions, the best instructional video I’ve ever seen. It takes a complex, dry, detail-filled topic and presents it with lucid clarity and a sense of fun.

The smartphone wars: What Gassée has to say

This is interesting. Jean-Louis Gassée, former head of Be Inc. and now a venture capitalist, has spotted what may be another prong of Google’s strategy; break the carriers’ term-contract system by driving the price of smartphones so far down that customers don’t need or want a carrier subsidy.

The smartphone wars: Google goes Taoist, Microsoft uses the farce

A few days ago, I observed that Google is not pushing back against cell carriers’ lockdown of Android phones as vigorously as I had expected in the wake of the Android 2.2 announcement. If this Twitter rumor is true, Google locked horns with the carriers and lost that confrontation, leading to the semi-discontinuance of the… Continue reading The smartphone wars: Google goes Taoist, Microsoft uses the farce

The smartphone wars: a cautious cheer for T-Mobile

T-Mobile announced the G-2 yesterday. They were, of course, the first carrier to ship an Android phone when they released the G-1 back in 2008. I think this announcement signals yet another phase change in the smartphone wars, in which carriers begin to back off the proprietary skins that have disfigured recent Android releases.

More dispatches from the smartphone front

Four days ago I blogged about upgrading my old G-1 to CyanogenMOD and complained that the mod’s home site contained no high-level overview of the modding process to help pepople understand all the details in the modding instructions for individual devices. It took some days of research, but I have now fixed that problem. I… Continue reading More dispatches from the smartphone front

Jobs Crashing to Earth

The stench of desperation must be getting pretty thick on the Infinite Loop. Can it be that the generator for Steve Jobs’s notorious Reality Distortion Field has finally broken down? Two days ago, we learned that Jobs knew of the iPhone 4’s antenna problem before launch. They had warnings both from an in-house antenna engineer… Continue reading Jobs Crashing to Earth

Smartphone, the Eater-of-Gadgets

I’ve been thinking for some time now that the smartphone has achieved a kind of singularity, becoming a black hole that sucks all portable electronics into itself. PDAs – absorbed. Music players – consumed. Handset GPSes – eaten. Travel-alarm clocks, not to mention ordinary watches – subsumed. Calculators – history. E-readers under serious pressure, and… Continue reading Smartphone, the Eater-of-Gadgets

Women in computing: first, get the problem right

Every few months I trip over another earnest attempt to rectify the gender imbalance in software and computing fields. Very few women opt to become programmers, system administrators, or hardware/software engineers. Indeed, the number of women who try seems to be falling rather than rising. This observation is invariably accompanied by a lot of hand-wringing… Continue reading Women in computing: first, get the problem right

The doom of the telecomms carriers

Forward-thinking technologists, including me, have been predicting for some time that adaptive mesh networking would be the doom of the telecomms-carrier and broadband oligopoly. Now comes a scientist from Australia with an idea so diabolically clever that I’m annoyed with myself for not thinking of it sooner: put the mesh networking in smartphones!

The Model M: A timeless classic

I just found an informative article about the origin, life, and astonishing persistence of my favorite keyboard. Nearly every article on this blog was hammered out on the same Unicomp Model M I’m typing on now. The design is 25 years old and still going strong, a nearly unique longevity in computing devices. I endorse… Continue reading The Model M: A timeless classic

FroYo, yum yum!

The over-the-air update for Android 2.2, aka FroYo, landed on my Nexus One this morning. The WiFi hotspot feature works perfectly when tested with my ThinkPad X61 running Linux. I am liberated. No more per-diem WiFi charges in hotels. No more cursing as I discover that the airport hotspots are all pay-for-play. Internet on my… Continue reading FroYo, yum yum!

Apple gets egg on its face — single platform = single doom

One of the predictable responses to my recent writings on the smartphone market and the rise of Android has been a deluge of scornful invective by Apple fans confidently predicting that Android’s 1Q2010 surge in unit share represented a bubble that would pop under pressure from Apple’s “superior user experience”. Then came the flap over… Continue reading Apple gets egg on its face — single platform = single doom

Reports of PC’s Impending Death Greatly Exaggerated

One Farhad Manjoo has attracted some attention by projecting in an article written for Slate that desktop PCs are headed for extinction, outcompeted by laptops and netbooks. I have seen the future and I say “Balderdash!” It is undoubtedly true that computers will continue to get smaller and lighter and more portable. Indeed, I’m expecting… Continue reading Reports of PC’s Impending Death Greatly Exaggerated

Missing the point: The real stakes in the smartphone wars

The responses to my last several posts on the smartphone wars (The iPhone 4: Too little, too late; More dispatches from the smartphone wars; Steve Jobs’ Snow Job; Flattening the Smartphone Market; Now’s a bad time to be an Apple fanboy…; Android Rising) demonstrate that many of my readers continue to miss the real stakes… Continue reading Missing the point: The real stakes in the smartphone wars

Steve Jobs’ Snow Job

One of my predictions in Flattening The Cellphone Market came true today. It suggests that the iPhone’s Android-induced troubles are about to get much worse.