With the release of the iPad, the e-reader market dominated by Amazon’s Kindle for the last few years has been shaken up. Curiously, the Kindle’s maker has done little to respond to the new threat, bringing a cloud over the current frontrunner’s future. That’s a shame, since a handful of changes would go along way to keeping the Kindle relevant in an iPad world.
Ever since the Palm Pre was announced for a premier on Sprint last year, speculation has raged about when this contender for the smartphone crown would show up on the technologically compatible Verizon network. With the Palm Pre Plus and Pixi Plus, announced in January, a souped up arsenal of WebOS phones finally arrive on the Big Red Carrier. Was it worth the wait?
Imagine a new Ferrari. The specs are incredible: great steering and suspension, 0-60 in around four seconds, a top speed exceeding anything you would ever hope for on a public road. On paper, the perfect machine.
For some reason, talk turned to the 1964 New York World’s Fair. You may remember the remnants of that event, especially if you saw the movie, “Men In Black.” The centerpiece of the fair was a huge, skeletonized globe, called the “Unisphere,” and there were two tall, modern-looking observatory towers that in the movie were actually captured flying saucers. My favorite line of the movie has to do with the fair having disguised an alien invasion: “Why else would they hold it in Queens?”
While the January 2007 unveiling of the iPhone was over a year prior to the App Store launch, the iPhone was already stunning at its initial unveiling despite its limitations. I suspect if a nearly empty app store had been unveiled at the same time, if anything, it would have merely been a negative distraction to the overwhelmingly positive points of the device. The lack gave time for the iPhone’s merits to build up a market for the store that in some ways felt like it should have been there from the beginning. The iPhone and, eventually, its app store, also helped create the market for the tablet, and, I’ll up the ante, the product after it.
If you weren’t paying too close of attention last month, you might have missed the HTC Droid Eris in all the commotion over the Motorola Droid. Despite both being “Droids” and both landing at Verizon on the same November day, the Droid Eris comes from a different manufacturer, offers different features and comes at a lower price. Last minute Christmas shoppers take note: the Eris deserves your attention.
Windows Mobile in recent years has become the forgotten mobile OS. On AT&T’s network its phones inevitably sit behind the shadow cast by the iPhone. On other networks Windows Mobile faces a similar problem from phones like the Droid and Pre. Yet, HTC continues to quietly, but successfully create enticing phones based on the OS. The HTC Pure is one of those Windows Mobile devices.
So, you are thinking about giving a new computer for Christmas. Good choice – almost anyone will enjoy getting a nice, fresh, new computer free of the junk that accumulates over the years and with plenty of space and speed to spare. But, while you are at it, have you considered a Mac? (Keep reading for gift ideas for current Mac users too.)
Netbooks are all the rage: they are lightweight, compact and relatively capable computers that generally weigh in at a few hundred dollars. Could one be the perfect Christmas gift for the technology loving person on your shopping list this holiday? Recently, we were able to spend some time with two of Verizon’s 3G enabled netbooks to see how they stacked up.
Imagine, if you would, that a few weeks before Easter it were announced that the body of Jesus had been found, that it had been kept in an oh-so-secret crypt in the Vatican lo, these many years. That disclosure would be big news, wouldn’t it? It would put quite a crimp in the most fundamental tenets of Christianity. It would be pretty difficult to sustain the religion after that.