Somewhere between Apple’s and Samsung’s last quarterly earnings reports, Dan’s review of the Galaxy S5, Dan & Judie’s Sony Xperia X2s, the Ultra, discussions with friends about a variety of tablets we’ve all used, along with the statement by the Best Buy CEO that ‘tablet sales are crashing’ something occurred to me – we’ve been here before — with Windows CE.
The HTC One M8 has a double tap to wake feature, which is great. The One also has a security feature where 10 failed password attempts resets the phone. These two features came crashing together disastrously for me yesterday afternoon, so for now I’ve turned off the ‘double tap to wake‘ feature as a result.
It's been said for a very long time that the digital camera as a standalone gadget is a dying business. Smartphones are getting better as cameras, and as apps improve shooting and sharing photos, it has become less and less important to have a standalone camera. This past week I had two experiences that really sealed that message for me.
Until recently Facebook was, for me, mostly about communicating with Judie and the Gear Diary team. In the past few weeks however that has changed. And as I have used Facebook more and more I’m finding the “Like” button to be a fundamental flaw in Facebook’s approach. When strong emotions are involved the “like” button simply doesn’t cut it.
My Toyota Prius and I hit a major milestone last night-100,000 miles! I have been counting down excitedly for months, and it hit me this morning why this means so much to me. It’s not about the mileage, but about the memories and amazing life changes that so many of those miles mean.
Judie and I were huge fans of eWallet from its earliest days, back when we used Palms; we synced the info on our Palms to the eWallet program on our desktop PCs. Later on we used eWallet on our Pocket PCs. Once the app became available for iOS, we loaded it onto our iPhones and eventually also on our Macs.
In recent years Apple has pretty much been printing money. They are HUGE. And to look at their decision to close down Apple Care for the July 4th holiday, one might think they are also a truly patriotic company. Think again.
Spammers have gotten more and more sophisticated in recent years. Long gone are the offers of millions if you simply help some poor Nigerian refugee. Now you can get official-looking emails that, if you don’t think before you click, can take you to all sorts of unscrupulous places. One example of this convincing type of spam came this afternoon.
Hypothetical situation: You have the CEO of a major company on your morning news show for an interview. This CEO has been under the microscope for good news (positive sales numbers) and bad news (product issues). So what’s tops on your list of questions? How to fix the products? Why are sales strong? Are they a good parent? Wait, what?!
AEREO was effectively killed this morning, and with it we the consumers lost out big time. The thing is, I’m rather confused about why there is such an issue with a service I’ve been using for the past few months and absolutely loving. Here’s why I’m perplexed, and why the ruling makes absolutely no sense to me.
On Wednesday June 18, Amazon announced their first ever smartphone – the Amazon Fire. While this Fire OS based device (an Android derivative) may be the only phone with Dynamic Perspective (a screen that shifts as you tilt the device) , Firefly technology (Google revamped for Amazon) and Mayday (live help at the push of a button) .
If you listen to a lot of podcasts on Leo Laporte’s TWIT network, you may have heard of NatureBox. The premise is that the service will deliver healthy snacks to your home for as little as 20 dollars a month. That seems like a lot, but this could be a godsend if you, like me, work from home.
Over the weekend we finished season 2 of “Orange is the New Black“. Now my wife Sarah and I are going through withdrawal, which led to Sarah suggesting a brilliant opportunity for Netflix — a documentary with real life prisoners to tie into the popularity of the show.
A huge swath of users jumped up and cheered during yesterday’s iOS 8 announcement when one simple option was mentioned: Swype. iOS 8 will be open to changing keyboards from the default Apple keyboard, much like Android has for years, and Swype is one of the best. If you aren’t excited about this, you probably haven’t used Swype yet.
Target has sold books and eBook readers in their stores for years, and now they are sticking a very tentative toe into the world of selling digital books. No, you won’t be heading to Target.com for your next eBook (yet), but they are partnering with new website Librify, which is a social network/eBook subscription service coming this summer.
About five minutes ago, I shared a post from Fox News on Facebook which reported an incident in Houston TX describing a lawfully licensed handgun owner involved in a shootout with armed robbers. So far this is pretty normal type stuff. But upon clicking POST, Facebook presented me with the prompt: “Do you think anyone will report this post?”.
The future of e-learning is being shaped as we speak in New York City, where Andrew Cohen, Founder and CEO of Brainscape, is at the helm of this forward-thinking study platform. Brainscape’s electronic flash card system is centered upon confidence-based repetition of cards; after you view the answer you have the opportunity to rate how well you understood it.
It is rare that we recommend a device or accessory and then, at a later date, retract that recommendation. When that does occur you can be sure that it is for a good reason; that’s the case with the Bracketron Xolar3000. We reviewed it last week and are now withdrawing our recommendation. The reason? Read on and we will explain.
When the option to purchase the Google Glass Explorer Edition was made available to me, I jumped in with both feet — completely disregarding the fact that I was paying $1500 to be a beta tester of roughly $80 worth of electronics (as it turns out). Dan bought in, too, and then we both decided Glass wasn’t for us.
Of all the phones that I saw at MWC, the Sony Xperia Z2 was the one I returned determined to buy. With its 5.2″ Display, 20.7 megapixel rear-facing camera, 4K camcorder, generous battery, and its IP55/IP58 waterproof and dust-proof rating, the Z2’s specs were pretty impressive. I’ve purchased a Z2, and I’ve made it my daily-driver. Here are some highlights.
I’ve been using the Samsung Galaxy S5 for over a week and a half. and don’t see myself putting it down anytime soon. That’s surprising, since the only time I’ve seriously used Android phones has been to review them; I’m not using this to review it, rather I’m using it because I like it. Here are ten reasons why: