Tag Archives: smartphones

RIM’s Future: Dead, Alive, Reborn?

TweetMuch has been written about RIM’s gloomy quarterly numbers, most of it sensible (with one brain flatulence exception). The attention is a testament—an apt word—to the place RIM once occupied. From its humble pager origins, the BlackBerry, rightly nicknamed CrackBerry, became the de rigueur device of enterprise users. Like most former BlackBerry fans, I have [...]

The Nexus One Puzzle

TweetLet 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 [...]

The “Love Triangle”: Apple, Google and Verizon

TweetAt 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 [...]

Processors: More, yes, but better?

TweetLast 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 [...]

Time to think seriously about the iPhone

Tweet4:00am. 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; web [...]

eBooks and Smartphones

TweetUpdate: 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. [...]

Reading from a smartphone, the smart way

TweetI’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 [...]

The end of Motorola?

TweetOnce 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 [...]

Android: First Impressions

TweetLet’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 [...]

Android Week

TweetSomething 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, [...]