Of the three really big hardware trends in tech of the last five years – netbooks, smartphones and tablets — Dell now competes in none of them. The next building wave, ultrabooks (a.k.a. Apple’s MacBook Air), is on their radar, but all of that other new stuff has been officially jettisoned, abandoned.
Two years ago, the world was asking when Apple would produce a netbook. Why? Because Cupertino clearly couldn’t survive without one. Famously, Steve Jobs mocked the underpowered devices as good for nothing and then stood the industry on its head with the first real tablet.
News and rumor are swirling wildly because Google is hosting their I/O conference in San Francisco. One rumor today has it that Google will have a go at laptop branding and sales in the near future.
Manufacturers have been working on flexible displays for eReaders, tablets, and phones for at least six years now. There have been foldable or rollable eReaders or phones promised at various different technology conferences but these devices have never made it to market. Now companies like Polymer Vision, Human Media Lab and Bridgestone are showing off new technologies that they claim will be available within the next year or two.
All signs point to the start of the Google Chrome operating system for tablets, including statements by Google, but the tablet version might not be the one that is most important to the folks at Google.
Crazy though the rumor may have sounded, it was spread far and wide on the Web these last few days that Samsung was shipping key logging software on their laptops. It is now an official false alarm. They are not.
It is becoming increasingly difficult to define the role of the tablet computer, such as the iPad, and how the tablet compares to laptop computers. It seems likely that the tablet is just one more PC morphology.
It looks as if the problem with Intel’s Sandy Bridge processor, which has kept it from shipping for a short period, is fixed. Now that they have the chip ready to do it with, when will Apple’s MacBooks be updated?
If the supply chain is any indication, Apple may be getting ready to update its high-end MacBooks, the MacBook Pro, very soon. The new Mac laptops are rumored to be coming with much faster Intel Sandy Bridge CPUs.
As the capabilities and weaknesses of the Apple iPad become better known, and as the product is improved by its maker, the question of whether it can replace a laptop computer, Mac or otherwise, becomes more salient.
A researcher was a victim of theft that resulted in losing a laptop with valuable data that could lead to a possible cure for prostate cancer. The researcher is offering up a reward for the return of the laptop with no questions asked.
The tech world seems to have been concentrating on when Verizon will start selling the iPhone, but ignoring the fact that Verizon has a lot of other wireless tasks ahead of it, like rolling out its 4G network.
The amount of hype surrounding the two products is truly overwhelming, but when you think about and compare the MacBook Air and the iPad as useful everyday devices, what conclusions do you come to?
Evernote is one of the most versatile programs that I have ever used and I have tried quite a few. The program is Web-based but can be used on Mac or Windows computers, iPads, Android phones, and BlackBerries. You can also clip items from the Web into Evernote.
Toshiba, maker of the cutting edge solid state drives used in the MacBook Air computers by Apple, have introduced a line of similar drives, some of which have more capacity than those used in the Air.
The MacBook Air computers that Apple unveiled this week will not likely get but a drop in the sales bucket when compared to the sales of Windows laptops, but they show a widening technology gap.
HP’s major investment in acquiring Palm for a cool $1.2 billion is about to pay off. After all, HP bought out Palm just to get to its mystical mobile platform, webOS.
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