Technology & Business
Your smartphone has problems too
Fanboys aside, most smartphone users have some complaints about their chosen product. Whether the screen size is too small, the screen resolution is not enough, the battery drains too quickly or a certain feature just doesn’t seem to work. As social creatures, we want to know what problems others are having and now FixYa has the answer. They analyzed data from their 15 million user reports to compile a list of the most common complaints against the best selling smartphones.
Microsoft Windows 8 upgrade priced at $39.99
Apple customers have had fantastic upgrade pricing for the last couple of years. While they were paying less than $30 (Lion was $29.99 and the new Mountain Lion will be $19.99) for their OS upgrades, most Windows users ended up shelling close to $100 to upgrade to Windows7. Many of us anxiously waited to see if Microsoft would respond. We can all sleep easy, knowing that the next major Microsoft OS upgrade (Pro version) will cost $39.99 in 131 markets.
Apple iPad Mini may launch in October
This rumor simply won't go away but when two reputable news organizations pick it up, we should sit and take notice. Bloomberg and the WSJ are both reporting that Apple is working on a 7.85 inch (Sharp IGZO screen) iPad mini that will retail between $250 - $299. Google's Nexus tablet will try to break Apple's stronghold on the tablet market by offering an extremely well equipped consumption tablet (made to consume not create content) for less than $300. Analysts saw this as a competitor to the Amazon Kindle Fire but many new would be tablet buyers may be swayed by the competitive price and nice featureset.
Apple may launch new Retina iMac in October
Digitimes is reporting that Apple will launch a new Retina display equipped iMac in October. Their source said Apple is bringing the Retina display to all of its products so this is a natural extension. Apple may use the fall launch of the Iphone 5 as the platform to announce the new iMacs. Some have even speculated that the rest of the Macbook line (air and pro) may also get a Retina display makeover before holiday shopping starts. This is Apple so we’ll have to wait and see if this turns out to be true.
A social networking privacy experiment
All too often, people forget to secure their facebook profile page and then post stupid self deprecating comments that site can easily scoop up and archive forever. This may be a good time for you to read my post on securing your Social Media information found here. We Know What You’re Doing is the brainchild of an 18 year old web programmer who wanted to show the world just how stupid people can be. Using the publicly available Graph API, his site collects interesting updates and categorizes them into one of these categories:
When buying cloud, think redundancy
Last Thursday, Amazon Web Services (U.S. East data center in Virginia which is one of its oldest and largest data centers) experienced a major outage which impacted some large name brand internet sites for several hours. As expected competitors were quick to jump on social media sites to announce that their services remained available and some enterprise pessimists may use this to justify not moving some of their enterprise services to the cloud. The reality is that outages happen whether your apps run in the cloud or your own datacenter.
Microsoft tablet "surface" won't dent the tablet market
Microsoft announced its new self-made tablet called Surface on Monday. The product looks like it could be interesting but none of the reviewers were allowed to really test the device, it performance or feature set. We don’t even know the cost. After the presentation, we saw dozens of articles about why this product is a failure even before it hits the market and research firm ABI Research is no exception. On Wednesday, they declared that Windows based tablets will have “little impact” on the tablet market for 2012 (they estimate it will account for no more than 1.
Followupthen.com free email reminder service review
If you are anything like me, you probably get a few hundred emails a day. Some of those emails require immediate attention but most are for future actions that I don’t need to look at now. So how do you clean up your inbox without losing the reminder for these future actions? Enter a cool new free service called Followupthen.com. Ubiquitous Using the service is simple, you send the email to a special (time coded) Followupthen.com email address and the service will then remind you at the designated date and time.
A good video intro to Evernote
I love Evernote and I have written about it many times. For those who are more visual, here is a neat video done by Dotto Tech.
DVDs and blu-ray discs to get new piracy notice
If you have watched a DVD or Blue-ray movie, you have surely seen that government notice about piracy and copyright. Well the US government announced that it will now require 2 copyright notices. The first notice is a warning to pirates and the second one is aimed at educating the general viewing audience. All major studios have agreed to the new notices and it should start showing up on new discs in the next couple of weeks. Each notice will last 10 seconds and you will not be able to skip them.