April 12th, 2008
A couple months ago, I posted a long blog about the many reasons I had decided to forego the temptation to order Apple’s new MacBook Air. Too slow, too limited, missing ports and PC card slots, blah blah blah …
… and yet … and yet … I couldn’t help being tempted every time I saw […]
January 21st, 2008
I’ve been a loyal Apple fan since 1985, and have bought at least one of almost every new computer they’ve produced — especially the MacBook and MacBook Pro laptops, which first arrived on the scene around 1993. So I was as excited and titillated by the rumors of the MacBook Air as everyone else during […]
December 16th, 2007
Bottom line: the XO machine built by the OLPC organization is miniscule; it’s slow; its keyboard is built for tiny hands; the trackpad sucks; and its user interface did not seem quite as intuitive as I had expected. But it’s rugged, it’s got some wonderful UI innovations, and you can’t help but feel like you’re […]
December 10th, 2007
After yesterday’s discussion of whether enterprise applications are doomed to be dull and “unsexy,” I thought it would be a good opportunity to provide a review of Donald Norman’s new book, The Design of Future Things. Norman doesn’t talk about ERP or enterprise applications, nor does he focus on software “products” per se — though […]
November 23rd, 2007
While I’ve been reporting on my own personal experiences with Kindle during the past few days, several other bloggers, journalists, pundits, and techno-geeks have also been offering their opinions. What follows is almost certainly not an exhaustive collection — and even if it were, it would be obsolete by tomorrow. But it will give you […]
November 22nd, 2007
Bottom line: the Kindle machine may be as unattractive as a Commodore 64 (to paraphrase David Pogue’s review in this morning’s New York Times), but it is a remarkably complex, sophisticated device. Indeed, I found myself muttering, “With a little more work, they could have made this as good as a Mac!” — and I […]
November 21st, 2007
Here are a couple of observations about reading newspapers on the new Kindle e-reader. First: reading is a ritual, which most of us begin practicing at an early age. Second: it’s not easy changing a ritual, especially when it’s been reinforced for a long time, on a daily basis. Third: rituals have nuances and details, […]
November 20th, 2007
I returned home from an out-of-town business trip this evening, and found my Kindle machine (which I had just ordered yesterday, courtesy of Amazon’s one-click shopping mechanism) waiting for me. I’ve now had about two hours to play with it, which in today’s superficial world probably qualifies me as a veteran pundit; in any case, […]
October 13th, 2007
Shortly after the Katrina hurricane in 2005, a number of people discovered that the time-honored strategy of putting their “important papers” — wills, birth certificates, marriage licenses, insurance policies — into a bank’s safe deposit box had one fatal flaw: it assumed that the bank would continue functioning even if their own home was flooded, […]
October 6th, 2007
I have a confession: I stopped in at the T-Mobile phone store yesterday, to see if any of the new Blackberry products were sufficiently sexy to lure me away from my iPhone. And I spent an hour on the ATT Wireless web site this evening, checking to see if any of the new Samsung, Nokia, […]
