January 10, 2010 – 5:49 pm
Let me state it at the outset: I understand the buzz generated by the Google Phone a.k.a Nexus One. But, the more I look into details and their ramifications, the more I’m puzzled. What exactly is Google trying to do? Make Android, their smartphone OS platform the “Windows” of the new era of really personal [...]
October 12, 2009 – 5:01 pm
At the end of my August 9th Monday Note, “War in the Valley, Apple vs. Google”, I committed to get into Google’s potential weaknesses in this conflict. Since then, things have gotten a tad more complicated.
The enemy of my enemy is my friend.
As discussed last August, Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO, had to leave Apple’s Board [...]
September 27, 2009 – 8:10 pm
Last week’s Intel Developers’ Forum brought the expected crop of new CPU chips. The simplest way to summarize what’s taking place is this:
We’re stuck at 3GHz, so we add more processors on the CPU chip.
Intel continues to lead with small “geometries”, 32 nanometers today, 22 nm tomorrow.
The company pitches its x-86 processors for mobile devices.
More [...]
April 26, 2009 – 12:55 pm
4:00am. I find myself reading an interesting story covering Portfolio’s web site – on my iPhone. As sleep comes back, I reflexively reach for the “save” (for later reading) button that is on every iPhone news application. But I am reading from the magazine’s site, as opposed to running an app on my smartphone; [...]
February 8, 2009 – 8:24 pm
Update: see a presentation of the Kindle2 here.
Another look at an old, but not aging, topic: eBooks. There is visible agitation ahead of Amazon’s expected announcement, probably as you read this note Monday February 9th. Jeff Bezos is set to announce a new version of the Kindle eBook reader, let’s call it Kindle 2.0. [Since [...]
February 1, 2009 – 7:40 pm
I’m quite fond of Bloomberg’s iPhone application. My insomnia companion is my iPod touch, used as an alarm clock, and as a convenient bedtime newsreader. And the Bloomberg app is my favorite: good navigation, a simple bottom toolbar (News, Markets, MyStocks, StockFinder). In the News section, stories are shown as they are published and each [...]
November 3, 2008 – 7:46 am
Once upon a time, Motorola was the king of cell phones. AT&T invented the cellular network, Motorola, already a leader in radio technology, designed the mobile devices and, in 1983, introduces the Dyna-Tac, the first of a long line of clearly superior products, all ending in Tac. In the late eighties and nineties, MicroTacs and [...]
October 26, 2008 – 11:11 pm
Let’s forget, for a moment, the sublime irony at the end of the W years, the right-wing neocons’ parting gift: a socialistic, state-owned financial system. Too depressing.
.
Instead, let’s take a first look at Android, the latest entry in the most dynamic segment of the high-tech industry, smartphones. (The nice folks at T-Mobile will immediately object, [...]
September 21, 2008 – 6:01 am
Something to keep our mind off the Wall Street catastrophe. Who knows, we might be on the verge of a “nuclear winter” as the Bush administration wakes up to another consequence of its intellectual shallowness, of its inability to understand that for markets to be really free they need to be regulated with an effective, [...]
August 17, 2008 – 10:40 pm
Steve shimmers into a bar, materializes next to Dan Hesse, Sprint’s CEO, crying in his mojito and whispers: I can fulfill your fondest dream. You’re the Devil, go away! No, I’m merely Steve Jobs and I want nothing to do with your soul or your chiseled body. Relax, it’s just about money.
A [...]
August 11, 2008 – 6:31 pm
by Jean-Louis Gassée
Simple is hard. Easy is harder. Invisible is hardest. So goes one of the many proverbs of our computer lore. As Apple found out last month with the MobileMe launch misfires, the lofty promise of “Exchange for the rest of us” translated into a user experience that was neither simple nor easy — [...]
Contrary to what I expected, the dust hasn’t settled yet. A week later, people still queue, 2h30 Friday morning before being admitted to the sanctum sanctorum in San Francisco. Besides the long lines, there were glitches: activation problems, trouble with the new MobileMe service, with getting access to software updates for the “old” iPhones. [...]
When a $oftware company experiences a sudden access of generosity and donates its first born to the world of Open Source, what are we to think? They made so much money it was embarrassing? Or, it’s an act of desperation: We can’t sell it, maybe be they’ll use it if we give it away. Uncharitable [...]
No, no, not Steve Jobs but an even higher entity smiling upon the company. As I hope to show, Apple’s hard work years ago is now about to pay huge unexpected dividends on the iPhone. When the iPhone first came out of Steve Jobs’ quasi-divine hands in January 2007, it was a hack, the [...]
“Welcome to the Weekend Web”, said Business Week. Internet browsing differs from weekdays to weekends. In this story, Google Mobile’s chief says that the biggest part of traffic on the search giant’s mobile sites occurs Saturdays and Sundays. The weekend’s mobile web promenade involves mostly classified and local sites. Among them (on the US market), [...]
