| Subcategories: | Page 2 of 7. Six months ago, Verizon Wireless launched the Droid, built by Motorola, as its flagship Android device. At the time, it was a formidable device, but development of the platform is moving rapidly and the Droid was eclipsed in capabilities, albeit not sales, by Google and HTC’s Nexus One, which was not available for Verizon. With the Droid Incredible, Verizon seeks to take the Android lead again.
In mid-April the President of the United States announced his “space program.” It purports to move us toward sending human beings to Mars in a quarter century or so. It won’t do this. Instead, it merely the throws enough money at NASA and space contractors to keep their respective congressional districts happy. It’s a small amount by this administration’s standards of spending. It won’t take us to Mars or anywhere else.
OFB has learned that the cellular enabled version of Apple’s iPad tablet device is still scheduled to ship to customers by the end of April. UPDATED.
The digital age is weird – twenty years ago, organizing a few thousand photographs was a daunting project that could take hours to do right. Today, I have been reorganizing 61,000 digital photos, or, rather, the computer is organizing them while I do something else. When it finishes after a day’s worth of work, it will have my photos far better organized than I would have had I spent exponentially more time doing so by hand. I wish it would hurry up.
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. |
Comp/Tech 
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the definitive Mac OS X reference, features OFB's
own Timothy R. Butler alongside Galen Gruman and Mark Hattersley.