Topic: Gadgets

Android is the plat­form of free­dom and open­ness. Apple’s iOS by con­trast is a «walled gar­den» in which Apple holds strict con­trol over the tools of devel­op­ment and even the con­tent avail­able on its plat­form. Free­dom is bet­ter than tyran­ny, so ide­o­log­i­cal­ly as well as prac­ti­cal­ly every­one should aban­don Apple and get an Android device so that they can live hap­pi­ly, pro­duc­tive­ly, and freely ever after.

At least that is what Android sup­port­ers say. It’s rather trou­bling that there are Android … Read the rest

My Palm Prē Plus is com­ing to end of its life. Even if HP had not aban­doned WebOS all the devel­op­ment was going to be for new­er ver­sions of WebOS — ver­sions HP promised I could upgrade to but reneged on that promise. So despite an oper­at­ing sys­tem that I adore and a user inter­face that makes all oth­er phones look clum­sy and awk­ward, I can’t avoid the real­i­ty about this phone. The bugs will nev­er be fixed, the apps … Read the rest

I’ll give away a hint at the results of my exper­i­ments by say­ing this: round two end­ed up being the final round of test­ing, and the the­o­ret­i­cal win­ner in the con­test of iPad2 WiFi ver­sus first-gen­er­a­tion iPad with 3G and WiFi is: the first-gen­er­a­tion iPad.

More details about my con­straints and deci­sion cri­te­ria can be found in part one, but the basic run­down is: I want to know whether an iOS device with­out 3G or GPS could … Read the rest

With the iPad2 out this week­end, I’ve start­ed to con­sid­er an upgrade from the orig­i­nal iPad to the new­er, lighter mod­el. Mon­ey is a fac­tor, so if I were to get a new one I’d have to sell the old one, and that would still leave me short of a replacement.

I’ve start­ed to con­sid­er whether I could get away with a plain WiFi ver­sion of the iPad, which would knock $130 off the price of the mod­el … Read the rest

My fears have been con­firmed: the rumors of a 7‑inch iPad are only rumors. Steve Jobs has set his foot down and there will nev­er be an Apple device larg­er than the cur­rent iPhone but small­er than the cur­rent iPad.

For all that Apple has going for it in the realm of user expe­ri­ence and user inter­face, how can they be so far off the mark when it comes to ergonom­ics and human mechan­i­cal inter­face issues?

I’m not the … Read the rest

A few months ago Mono­chro­mat­ic Out­look com­pared the iPhone with the Nokia E75, eval­u­at­ing the device with all the fea­tures a user could ask for against the device with a focus on user expe­ri­ence. It was evi­dent that Noki­a’s approach of cram­ming tech­nol­o­gy togeth­er into one pack­age left some­thing to be desired with­out atten­tion to the user interface.

Now for a quite dif­fer­ent chal­lenge: a com­par­i­son of the iPhone with anoth­er device designed with the user in mind. … Read the rest

My five year old Power­Book has been hav­ing trou­bles for some time. I’ve been doing repairs along the way in order to post­pone the expense of replac­ing the lap­top, but when the hard dri­ve start­ed mak­ing sounds like a mar­ble dropped on a steel table­top, I knew it was all over and time for a new laptop.

After a bit of search­ing and research­ing I decid­ed on a refur­bished 15″ Mac­Book Pro. I found one with an anti-glare screen, … Read the rest