http://www.productusp.com/best-tablets-at-ces-2011.html
has a rundown of new Android tablets introduced at the Consumer Electronics Show.
This Lenovo LePad has a very cool concept. A Netbook sized Windows computer, with a detachable monitor that becomes an Android pad when detached. That is COOL.
2011 will be the Year where pretty much everybody got a tablet.
Will even dust bowl era depression migrants be able to afford the iPad 2?
This report, from DigiTimes, makes industry onlookers, and me, hopeful that the iPad 2 will be REALLY CHEAP.
Apple’s orders of iPad 2 are expected to top six million units a month compared to a volume of four million units a quarter for the current version, pushing Apple to expand the number of touch panel suppliers, the sources noted.
They will have to make it cheap if they want to avoid Android making them the Blackberry of tablets.
A price well south of $200 would make me quite happy.
If you are like me, and zillions of others, your life now revolves around e-mail. When I used Outlook I had an easy way to tag a reminder on to an e-mail, but for some unknown reason, Google Mail doesn’t have that feature. Never fear… Followup.CC to the rescue.
Here is how it works… sign up for a free account at the link above. They don’t spam you. In fact, I’ve no idea how they make money to pay for this.
Now, let’s say you want to remind yourself of something. Just forward an e-mail to followup.cc with when as the prefix of the address. So, for instance,
3weeks@followup.cc
tomorrow@followup.cc
4pm@followup.cc
30Feb@followup.cc
Simple. And don’t have to forward an existing message, you could, for instance just send a note “remind me to check pool water” to 30days@followup.cc and it will e-mail you to check the pool water in 30 days.
Slick!
Compare and contrast this 1956 5MB memory stick (IBM 305 RAMAC):
with a new 8GB model:
H/T Lou
Multi-tasking bar. Slick and useful.
Short: What the iPad should have been initially. Multi-tasking works well and is slick.
Removal of screen orientation lock a HUGE mistake.
Long:
The iPad is cool. It goes everywhere with me. But it isn’t perfect. A big flaw was having to exit one app before running another. It made things like blogging and mixing web browsing and writing a huge pain. Multi-tasking works well. Tip: Double click the home button to bring up the tasks.
Mobile Safari also no longer reloads when it doesn’t need to. That was very irritating and made browsing difficult for some dynamic websites (like Amazon). Although not perfect, this new version of Mobile Safari handles it much better.
Oddly… still not as well as Atomic Web, or Opera, other 3rd party and free browsers for the iPad.
What is missing:
Bluetooth with other mobile, non-Apple devices. This should have been how they handled printing.
App screen split. Showing two apps at once is useful for blogging and writing on the device. Alas, because multi-tasking on the iPad is really a fancy app suspend this is unlikely to ever happen.
WHAT SUCKS:
They changed the screen orientation lock switch to, instead, act as a mute switch. What the HELL WERE THEY THINKING. With typical, and unwarranted, Apple arrogance they didn’t even make it an option to keep the old behavior. There is a menu on the multi-tasking bar to address orientation. That could have been a mute button as it is RIGHT BESIDE the music player. Sigh. I think their black turtlenecks are too tight…
You’ve come a long way baby!
China now has the fastest super computer in the world.
The 36th edition of the closely watched TOP500 list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers confirms the rumored takeover of the top spot by the Chinese Tianhe-1A system at the National Supercomputer Center in Tianjin, achieving a performance level of 2.57 petaflop/s (quadrillions of calculations per second).
Awareness is rumoured to occur at 10 petaflops (about what a dumb human brain runs at).
A quadrillion is 10^24, or 1 thousand million millions, or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
Or in other words… big.
Send me a note, or call.
The grail hasn’t been reached. What is the grail? Universal contact, a merging of the various synchronous and asynchronous ways of talking to other humans. Facebook’s new messaging system isn’t bad – it is close. It misses voice, and requires you to be in Facebook, which isn’t onerous, but isn’t my preference. But I like its merging of the various kinds of conversations you’ve had with another human.
What is missing from all of these systems is a universal address. I want one address, let’s say “E30110F43AA” to represent “me”. You can call that. Text it. Send it a package.
Now maybe “sgken@facebook.com” can be that, someday. But for now… it isn’t.
My work PC, a powerful quad-core running Windows Vista with a 24″ monitor lasted longer than any recent work computer. I’m hard on them. Two years in, though, and it was starting to groan under the stress of what I do to it each day. And it was getting slower and slower. So I got a new PC.
The new one is a quad-core iMac with a 1 terabyte drive and 4GB of RAM and a 27″ monitor. It is totally silent, blazingly fast, and capable of running the native Mac, and a virtual Linux and Virtual Windows PC at the same time without my noticing a performance hit. As I write this, I’m porting my old PC over to a virtual PC clone of it on this new iMac using VMWare’s Fusion PC Migration tool. It will take 18 hours but is a hands off affair – most of the time is spent copying data. When done, I will have my old PC available as needed, but running in an emulator on this iMac. Slick!
At the same time, I moved all of my e-mail off the local machine, and use the cloud now – in particular Google’s WebApp’s service. I love that I can access mail from any of my devices – my work PC, my laptop, my iPad, or my Android phone with ease.
My next project will be to move my important data off my local PC and into a cloud file server. I’m talking about pictures and work documents mainly. This will make them easier to backup and less difficult to move from machine to machine. For this I’ll be using Picasa for the pictures, and Dropbox for the documents.
At that point I will be basically machine neutral. Whatever works, I’ll use, where it is, or I am.
I have 3 Gmail / Google App accounts that I manage now. MultiG is an app on the iPhone/iPad that lets me read all three easily without having to log in over and over. Simple, but useful.
http://multig.nicholasschlueter.com/
Useful! As I read last night with the Kindle app, I could occasionally pop over to MultiG and check all my work and personal e-mails. Slick!
In the category of “faster please”…. Google is working on a car that drives itself. And it seems to work pretty well:
With someone behind the wheel to take control if something goes awry and a technician in the passenger seat to monitor the navigation system, seven test cars have driven 1,000 miles without human intervention and more than 140,000 miles with only occasional human control. One even drove itself down Lombard Street in San Francisco, one of the steepest and curviest streets in the nation.
Since I’ve driven probably 12,000 miles in the last 6 months, I’d ready for a computer to take over!
Google, with a market capitalization of $170 billion, is a fraction of the size of the government. But… wouldn’t you say that Google has made your life better over the last decade? Now… how do you feel about government during that time?
It just highlights the benefits of letting people innovate and be rewarded rather than letting the government handle everything. Just imagine if this had been NASA doing this project… it would be hundreds of millions of dollars and hundreds of people and the car wouldn’t have left the lab yet.
versus… 
Here is one person’s view of switching from the iPhone to the Android
Short summary… the phones both rock, but Android doesn’t stick you with AT&T, which is AWESOME.
I like Verizon. Well, in a special “I like my pet lion” sort of way. I like it, but I watch it closely.
I have an iTouch, iPad, and an Android. I prefer the Android in almost all matters except that it does hang on me occasionally. That said, so did my iPad.
No, just good at and focused at what they do.
Digg claims changes in the Google indexing rankings algorithm were responsible for less traffic to its site:
According to Quantcast, an online audience measurement firm, Digg’s domestic traffic has dropped sharply in recent months, from 27.1 million unique users in April to 13.7 million in July. By contrast, Facebook had 145.2 million domestic users in June, according to comScore. While not giving specifics, Mr. Desai of Digg attributes the decline in domestic traffic to changes in Google’s search function that resulted in fewer Digg stories showing up in Google searches.
It believe it could happen. Search on Google rankings and you will find hundreds of people baffled and their businesses in limbo because they fell off the front page of Google search terms they care about.
If Google stopped feeding people to my company’s site, we would not die, but it would hurt… bad.
That’s why I hope Bing gets more success. Every big market needs at least two major players bashing each other competitively.
I wouldn’t call Google a monopoly… users do have a choice as to how they search. But in practical terms, as Google goes, so goes hundreds of thousands of businesses depending on it for sales opportunities.
Wish I had an iPad to blog about this fine meal.
Best Buy says that iPads are cannibalizing laptop sales by 50%. That astounds me because I view them both as largely irreplaceable.
But… if all you want to do with a laptop is browse the web, then the iPad is awesome for that. And a multi-tasking pad will be even better. My evening routine has an iPad and a laptop by my sitting chair. I read on the iPad. Browse the web on the iPad. And check work and read flash requiring sites (&#!!*** you Steve Jobs) on the laptop.
This hardly bodes well for Microsoft, HP, or Dell. Although I suspect Dell will be nimble enough to offer up an excellent Android pad in short order.
Expect this trend to accelerate when Android pads come out at 1/2 or 1/3rd of the iPad’s price.
Yippee! Isn’t this competition stuff AWESOME.
I have bought very few apps for my Android phone. Far less, for instance, than I have for my iPad. Partly this is because more apps are free, and partly because I use it as a phone mostly. But a large part of it is that buying apps is hard due to the payment system.
Verizon is stepping into this void and will bundle a Verizon App Store with its phones. App purchases will go on your phone bill. Good idea.
This chart, via Business Insider, confirms that convenience will be welcome by app purchasers:
Via Digital Daily:
Consider this metric, offered by Nick Fox, Google’s director of product management, at the 2010 Citi Technology Conference Wednesday: Mobile queries from fully featured mobile browsers have increased by a factor of four in the past year.
Mine are up WAY more than that. As in hardly at all last year, and dozens of times a day this year. When out to dinner, we are a conversant family. Mobile search tools are great! When we wonder about an actor, or what is the heaviest element, or if there is a Coldstone near where we are, or who knows what – our Android phones are whipped out and answers sought and found.
What a wonderful time, technically to live, too bad the economic and political trends are so bad.