My birthday is coming up later this month. For more than a week, my youngest has been asking me, “daddy, what do you want for your birthday?” I don’t really want for much. I just bought myself an iPad (we’ll get to that), so really there isn’t much that I want from the kids besides a hug and happy birthday card. But the question got me to thinking. At dinner, both kids kept talking about dolls (American Girl dolls –…
At work every Monday, we have an editorial meeting at work where we discuss the current queue of articles, what’s going on in the news, and assorted other topics. A frequent topic of conversation recently has been around the strength of iPad sales and how Android tablets can’t seem to make a dent, and how Windows tablets that really try to draw on the strengths of touch are not really hitting any home runs. For a long time, one peer…
Two questions that I often get asked are, “when is the next iPhone coming?” and “what’ll be different about it?”. I’ve had a list of ideas that I’ve been throwing around for a while, and I decided to finally jot these down. First off – when does the next iPhone ship? September. No, I don’t know for sure. But things we know – iPod touches always ship around the time of Apple’s Fall “Music Event” where new iPods are traditionally…
For over a year, I’ve struggled to quantify something that I’ve felt was a truism in the iPhone vs. Android battle. I still can’t fully quantify it with evidence, but I think the market is beginning to bear out what I’ve thought was the case. For a long time, I’ve believed that the consumers who buy Android devices and the consumers who buy iOS devices (I’m talking Android phones to iPhone, primarily) are fundamentally different types of consumers. It’s not…
I’ve been watching a lot of press response to the Windows 8 announcements yesterday. Steven Sinofsky first announced code-name “Windows 8” (Why the codename, guys? Put a line in the sand and name it.) with a new user interface (and the same old interface too) at D9 and Steve Guggenheimer discussed the future of hardware and ARM processors at Computex. Discussing both on the same day in separate venues was actually quite a logical split – it didn’t defocus the…
Since 2009, I have been working on a research project to learn a little bit more about spam. Though I have a fundamental thesis that I’m working on data to support (so far it looks good), the proof, as they say, is in the pudding. Last week, I started analyzing the pudding. Let’s start with the basics – I’m not a developer, I’m a script kiddie at best. I’ve written code before – but it’s in languages you laugh at…
When you travel somewhere, especially somewhere new, somewhere eclectic – do you ever buy your airline ticket, hop on the plane, and eagerly look forward to planning your activities once you arrive? No. No, you don’t. You plan a trip, buy tickets, get everything lined up long before you go. It’s been my contention for some time that buying a new computing device – smartphone, tablet/slate or other, is just like taking a trip. Also, unlike years ago where when…
Know what a loss leader is? It’s something you give a way at or below cost in order to get feet in the door of your store or to get people clicking through to your website. Enter the word, “unlimited”. Really now. Not many things are actually unlimited. Stars and planets exist for a long time, but unlimited? No. The universe goes on for quite a long distance – as a species, we’ll likely never know the answer to the…
This evening, in lieu of a transcript, I listened a few times to Steve Ballmer’s CES keynote – specifically around the 3:06:23 mark. Given my blog post yesterday, I was most curious as to whether I was correct that there would not be any x86 application compatibility for Windows running on ARM. Steve’s words are below, emphasis is mine: “We are very excited about the full set of partners for the next version of Windows. NVidia, Qualcomm and Texas Instruments…
There has been quite a bit of recent discussion and hearsay about Windows on ARM processors – that is, a rumor that Microsoft is developing a version of Windows (full Windows, not CE/Windows Phone 7 – which already run on ARM) that supports the low-powered ARM processor preferred for mobile devices today. Windows NT, upon which all full versions of Windows today are based, was designed from day one to be a “portable” architecture. Though the Intel x86 (and the…