Archive for the ‘What I'm Thinkin'’ Category
I’ve been messing with Foursquare for a week or so and there’s something about it that just doesn’t feel right. Come to think of it, the same goes for Twitter and Facebook and Google Buzz.
By now, your surely have heard of Foursquare. It’s been buzzed to death as the next big thing in social networking, a combination Facebook/Twitter/MeetUp that also capitalizes on all those silly Facebook games that let you collect badges and trinkets.
Foursquare uses location detection and is meant to let you find your friends, or tell them where you are.
That’s fine as it goes....
Apple opened pre-orders for the iPad at 8:30 a.m. today and, about 8:35 a.m., I ordered mine.
I decided to take a pass on the WiFi-only model that is avialble April 3 and instead will, impatiently, I’m sure, wait for the 3G model.
I ordered the 64GB WiFi and 3G unit, with lots of accessories, including a case , a dock, an extra power adaptor, a VGA adapter for projector dispolay and AppleCare. The cost, with tax: “$1,117.24
Whew. That is steep. Higher than some full-fledged notebooks.
I’m hoping Apple cuts the price as it did with the iPhone when it was introduced a few years...
I have a general rule I follow when reviewing most tech products: If you have to read the instruction manual to work it, it’s too complicated.
The Motorola Devour with Motoblur, a new Android-based offering from Verizon that is supposed to be heavily geared towards social networking fans, is a handset that fails my test of intuitive simplicity.
Where to start?
Lets begin with the slide-out keyboard. I couldn’t find anywhere on that keyboard that lets me make a capital letter. Trying to set some of my passwords for my various accounts, it eluded me for a good five minutes. Finally, ...
I can get so lost in Google Earth…. and You Tube.
Do a search on secret places and you’ll find several videos there.
This one, of mysterious places and crop circles and bizarre natural features, is one of the coolest.
Read More →
April 3 is the date when the wi-fi Apple iPad will be available, with pre-orders for it and the 3G model ready to be placed on the Apple website on March 12.
That’s a tad later than “late March” when Steve Jobs first promised but not enough to seriously quibble.
What remains to be seen is whether there’s a production issue that is limiting the number of the iPads that will be available.
Some rumor sites have speculated that instead of the 1 million units Apple hoped to have in inventory for sale, that only 300,000 will be available. Other reports said there are no production...
There’s a lot of talk lately about how desktop computers are soon going to be a thing of the past. I think the same applies to laptops
and notebooks.
If my experience today is any predictor, handheld mobile devices are going to replace both a lot quicker than “sometime in
the future.”
I’ve just gone through a complete day in which I did not use my laptop or my desktop computers. Not once. Everything I did, I did on my mobile phone, more precisely my iPhone. I didn’t intend for that to happen today. It just did. I answered e-mail, wrote blog posts, memos, and even...
Bill Dedman is an old friend and one of the nation’s best investigative reporters. For MSNBC.com, he has come up with a powerful and creative and relatively new way to display in-depth reporting: Via a slide show.
Slide shows have been around for years. They’re just not usually used, though, for serious, ong form reporting.
The report is some 2,500 words ‘ong and includes 47 slides, telling the intriguing story of the amazingly wealthy but reclusive Huguette Clark, her father, Sen. William Andrews Clark of Montana, and their lives of wealth, scandal and mystery.
To see the slide...
I was pricing out a vacation trip I’d like to take later this year and, in the process, thought it would be nice to include a GPS unit with the car rental. Until I found the extra daily fee they’d be adding for a unit -$10 a day.
That is $140 for a two week rental. Yikes.
No way, I told the reservation clerk in cancelling the GPS option. I could buy one for that. And indeed, I could. And did. My first stop was over to a new GPS store that from Amazon.
There I could quickly do near side by side comparisons of prices and features between all the different makers. I wanted a portable unit,...
I was pretty disappointed to see that Apple decided to stay with AT&T’s network with the upcoming iPad. But I was really bummed that Verizon didn’t get the iPhone once AT&T’s exclusive deal expires this summer.
You don’t have to use the iPhone long to realize that the AT&T 3G network is often overwhelmed by the iPhone’s data demands.
But another complaint I’ve had since the first version of the iPhone deals with call quality. They often sound muddy on the iPhone.
Word now comes that Verizon Wireless ranked highest among wireless providers and scored...
It’s closing in on three weeks since Apple announced the new iPad and still Apple is not taking orders.
That, of course, is because the FCC apparently has not yet okayed it for sale, a necessary step because of the wi-fi and energy emitting components that clutter up the spectrum that the FCC administers.
In the past when Apple announced new products, the lag from annoncement to order taking was about two weeks. This one seems to be taking longer.
Apple is taking names of those interested and will email them when the iPad goes on sale but a lot of impatient people are wondering why the delay.
When...
I’m impressed by Google Voice, a new and basically free service that gives you a single phone number that rings all your phones, saves your voicemail online, and transcribes your voicemail to text.
Other cool features include the ability to listen in on messages while they are being left and the ability to make low cost international calls.
It’s not officially open to everyone yet. Instead, it’s by invitation only, a tactic Google has used before that...
I’ve been doing a lot of radio interviews around the country on the iPad and what it means for personal technology.
Click here to hear one I did today with Walt Sorg of WILS in Lansing.
My bottom line feeling is two fold:
1) I must have one. I’ll order the 64GB, WiFi/3G unit for $829 and $29 AT&T data as soon as Apple will let me.
2) It’s not perfect. I wish it had a camera and Flash.
The inclusion of a camera would have made the iPad, with Skype, a fullfledged communications device with video conferencing. I suppose I can still use the built in microphone on Skype (I’m...
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