Technogasms

It’s that time of year again; students have from now until September 7th to pick up a Mac under educational pricing and get a free 8GB iPod Touch as part of the deal.

As Apple famously does not offer big sales on their product line this is about it in terms of deals on current hardware and is probably the best time to buy if you are in the market for a new Mac anyway. Even if you don’t want the Touch they can fetch around $150 on Ebay and help further defer the cost of your new iMac or Macbook. Read More…

I recently wrote a piece over on Android and Me about iVdopia, a mobile advertising platform which brought pre-app and in-app video advertising to the iPhone last year, and became available to Android developers recently. The reader response to the idea of actual commercials on their mobile devices was overwhelmingly negative, mirroring my own feelings on the matter, and I think developers and advertisers would be wise to look at other options. Read More…

This morning I received a lengthy rebuttal to one of my earlier iPad posts and as I ended up voicing my opinion on many of the major iPad debates while responding to it I decided that I would instead turn my response into a post. So thanks to reader Louis Wheeler for his well considered comments and here are my answers. Read More…

I’m a happy Android user at present, so today’s big unveil of Windows Phone 7 Series (WP7S?) is exciting to me mainly if it serves to push forward the rest of the mobile market (and from the sound of things it should do just that). But what peaks my interest more about this release is that a division within Microsoft managed to completely recode and reimagine from the ground up a significant OS within the Windows ecosystem without any significant information leaks prior to its announcement.

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TechCrunch is reporting this week that the Amazon promotion that popped up in January offering a “free” Kindle to their most dedicated readers was just a trial run for a much more ambitious undertaking. If you recall the offer that was extended was to buy a Kindle and if you weren’t thrilled with it you could receive a refund while retaining the Kindle. Purportedly Amazon is hoping to extend this same offer to all Amazon Prime subscribers. Amazon Prime is a $79 a year subscription which offers free 2-day shipping on all orders. While I’m sure it would be a PR win for Amazon, I just don’t see this as that critical for Amazon’s success in the e-reader world and I certainly don’t see it as tipping the scales one way or the other in their upcoming war with Apple and the rest of the tablet manufacturing world. Read More…

I was reading an article on CrunchGear earlier this week about Sony’s rumored plans to re-launch the PSP Go which has not exactly been flying off the shelves since its release last October.

I owned one of the original PSPs for a little over a year and just didn’t end up using it enough to justify keeping it. Despite that experience I always perk up whenever I hear rumors of a revision to the device and hope that Sony has figured out a way to make it relevant. Each time I’m disappointed in the minor tweaking that they do and even the PSP Go which was more of a re-imagining of the device than the previous iterations still fails to deliver. So I offer up my opinion on where Sony needs to go with the PSP in order to breath life into it.

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After CES this year the wrap on basically all of the tablets that were seen was that they were rushed out in an effort to catch consumers’ eyes before Apple released their offering and took ownership of the tablet market for all eternity.

This assertion is almost certainly true as the tablets on display at CES were clearly a little short on polish and just not quite ready for prime time. Ballmer showed off the HP tablet (which as it turns out looks like it was separated at birth from the iPad) and all he managed to demo was a couple page turns in the Kindle app and some fumbling around to finally get a video up and running. Now in defense of the HP tablet I have to believe it is probably a very capable device (they claim it has been five years in the making) and that the awkwardness and brevity of that demo was just a question of Ballmer’s inexpert abilities as a showman.

The Android tablets were much more visible on the floor of CES and while some of the hardware certainly sparkled, the OS looked pretty haphazardly slapped on. Despite Android’s open and customizable nature it was clear that almost no one had taken the time to adjust it to the new screen sizes and resolutions. The icons on the home screen were invariably inches apart and every single device I saw still had the “Phone” icon on the home screen. I will be very interested to see what happens after these manufacturers have a few more months to finish tweaking the OS as I have already seen images. Read More…

It was a bullet point during the opening presentation and I continue to see it popping up in almost every discussion I see regarding the iPad. Yes the iPad will have access to the App Store and all 140,000 apps that are available on it, but stop and think about how many of those apps are actually relevant to the new device. We have all become at least mildly app crazed and this might be a good time to step back and consider what it is those apps are really doing for you.

How many apps in there are similar to the Engadget App, basically an RSS feed for a single website? How many of those apps replicate a function that you can easily find on the web for free, but you use an app because as good as Mobile Safari might be it is not the same as a desktop browsing experience? How many of the games actually translate well to a screen three times the size and even if they do are they really games you are going to want to play in the places you will actually use the iPad? How many apps are only relevant on a device that you have on you at all times? Read More…