Edward Kiledjian

Traditional PC OEMs quickly dismissed the iPad as a PC add-on, but now Forture is reporting information from a Needham & Company that clearly shows that the iPad is eating the OEMs lunch. It seems more and more customers are choosing the iPad instead of a traditional PC. As an example Mac shipments to schools in Q3 2012 fell by 0.1% while overall PC sales dropped by 13.9% (keep in mind Apple sold 1 million iPads to schools during the same period).

As the iPad becomes more capable through better hardware and software, it has shifted from a purely consumption device to an entry level production devices (small video editing, image touch up, simple word processing/spreadsheets, etc).

It will be interesting to see if the upcoming Microsoft Surface tablet will be able to gain any traction in this competitive Apple lead segment.

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If you bought a new windows 7 equipped PC after June 2 2012, you are entitled to purchase an upgrade to Windows 8 PRO for only $14.99 and you can do it now here.

Unlike the older Win 7 upgrade offer which moved you from Vista to a basic home version of windows 7, the new offer moves you to the best Win 8 version available. 

Windows Media Center

If you use Windows Media Center, you may be disappointed to learn that it will be a purchasable upgrade in Windows 8 Pro. Windows Media Center is useful when using your PC as a TV connected set top box or if you want Windows to playback DVDs (or you can buy third party software to enable DVD playback).

64-bit upgrade

If using the Windows upgrade assistant, your new OS will be the same bit level as the one already installed. If you have a 32-bit version of Windows 7 then the upgrade will be to the 32-bit version of Windows 8. Same think for 64-bit. If you want to switch, you will have to do a full re-install.

Download size

Since most upgrade will be delivered online (via download), it is important to remember that the typical upgrade download will be about 2GB. 

During the installation process, one of the options is "Install by creating media". Choose this option to create a DVD or USB Key based installation media (which is a good idea by the way).

Order from the upgrading PC

Make sure you complete the order form from the PC you will be upgrading. Although many have reported that this is not a requirement, it is the method recommended by Microsoft. 

This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone but Apple has finally confirmed that it will hold a press conference on September 12 at 1300EDT. Although they don’t mention what will be announced, analysts assume it will be the next iPhone and iPod. Pundits and Apple watchers believe the 7 inch mini-iPad will now be announced and released in October.

Now we wait and see.

In the latest management report published by the Luxembourg based Spotify, Canadians were given some good news, Spotify will expand into Canada. The world's biggest streaming music service currently operated in 15 countries and their Canadian expansion is part of a larger move solidify its leadership position (other possible expansions include Asia and South America). 

Although revenues are increasing rapidly, Spotify is still losing money hand over fist. The biggest US competitor Pandora still has no announced plans to re-enter the Canadian market (because of the high per song royalty fees demanded in Canada). 

There are dozens of free web URL shortening services (like bit.ly, goo.gl, etc) but what about sharing a bunch of open tabs? Why would you want to share tabs? Students may do it while working on projects, workgroups conducting research, etc.

Instead of having to copy all the URLs one by one, you simply install the tab.bz Chrome extension, click on one button, choose which tabs to share and voila.

What does it do

Do I need Evernote?

Personalization

Security

For various reasons, Google's Chrome browser has won my heart and mind. Sure it has some annoying shortcomings but overall it's an excellent browsing experience. Over the last couple of months, I have discovered some interesting extensions that increase my productivity when working with Chrome.

This blog entry is about one such extension called Awesome Screenshot. Once installed, it allows you to quickly take a snapshot of an entire webpage or her chosen subsection.once the content has been captured, you can then add various annotations (such as circles, lines,arrows and text).

Once you have the snapshot just the way you wanted, you can save it locally or use the inbuilt feature to upload it to common social media sites such as Facebook, twitter and Google.

Awesome Screenshot is also available for Mozilla's Firefox and Apple Safari browsers. 

if you want to know more about 4G LTE, take a look at one of my previous articles entitled "WHAT IS LTE AND DO YOU NEED IT?"

"IBM made an informal approach about possibly acquiring the division, which operates a network of secure servers used to support its BlackBerry devices, said one of the people, who asked not to be named because the matter is private."

My most recent articles have been product reviews and a question I received from 2 readers was related to buying some of these items from online auction sites (eBay being the 800 lb. gorilla). The readers wanted to know :

Is it was “safe” to buy higher end electronics on eBay

Having spent some time in Asia, I have seen firsthand similar looking replicas made available in the open market. Sure you can find fake sportswear, sunglasses and DVDs but you can also find very convincing Mophie branded battery packs, headphones and even electronics (smartphones, music players, etc).

As a test, I recently purchase a Mophie JuicePack Air that was priced below market price (which aroused my suspicion).  The eBay item was packaged exactly like the retail one I had purchased locally. Everything was perfect from the wording and design of the box, to the placement of the stickers and the manual manual (even the manual was an exact replica -  There were no glaring English mistakes or misprint. It looked perfect.)

After 1 week of testing, I quickly realized something was wrong. The eBay acquired device drained its batter 70% faster than the real Mophie JuicePack Air (purchased from a reliable brick and mortar store in Canada. Plus the eBay one seemed to heat up a lot.  I decided to disassemble both the eBay one and an older Mophie JuicePack Air, that I was no longer using, to compare. I discovered that the internal guts were very different. I contacted Mophie support with some of the additional information and was told the device I was holding was counterfeit.

The eBay seller had fantastic feedback and a long history of online sales. The only red flag was the slightly lower than market price for the item and the fact that it shipped from Hong Kong. I reached out to some other blog authors that had written about buying counterfeit items on eBay and learned that some of them came from the UK and even the US, so ship location doesn’t seem to be a good filter. One author even complained of receiving a counterfeit product from an Amazon reseller (not Amazon but someone selling through Amazon).

As long as there are buyers looking for “good deals”, you can be sure someone will try to take advantage of the situation.

Most eBay sellers are honest and will provide excellent service but there are a few bad apples in the bunch. Some manufacturers now refuse to warranty items purchase on eBay and demand a retail receipt for warranty claims. 

If you are in the market for higher-end electronics (headphone amps, headphones, name brand accessories), find out who is an authorized online reseller and buy directly from their ecommerce site. Check out price comparison using tools like Google Product or Amazon.com (in the US). In Canada, you can use price comparison sites like dealgenius.ca, pricegrabber, Nextag or shopbot.

If something is too good to be true, it probably is.  

July 24, I wrote an article entitled “DO I NEED AN AMPLIFIER FOR MY HEADPHONES?” , if you are at all interested in good sound, I recommend you read it. In it I explain that most audio devices are built with cheaper built in headphone amplifiers to reduce device cost and I explain the benefits of a headphone amplifier (headphone amp).

The one question is how to connect the headphone amp to your device? This article concentrates on connecting them to iDevices (particularly to an iPhone 4 or 4s). You could always use your devices headphone jack but this goes through that cheap built in headphone amp which will negatively impact sound quality. For iDevices, the best option is a Line Out Dock adaptor which connects using an Apple 30 pin dock connector. These special cables bypass the devices headphone amp and thus they allow you to have a better (cleaner) sound.

One of these cables that I recently tested was the FIIO L3 cable.

Testing

My testing setup was with 3 different portable headphone amplifiers and my Ultimate Ears Triple-Fi / Grado 60 headphones. My audio came from an iPhone 4S and all audio files were encoded in Apple Lossless directly from the CDs. My testing consisted of listening to a song while connecting the headphone amp to the iPhone’s headphone jack, then listening to it through the FIIO L3 connection.

I could clearly hear a difference in sound quality. The songs played through the L3+headphone amp sounded much crisper. The sound was more dynamic and details much more vivid. An overall improved listening experience. This isn’t the most high tech LOD but it’s value can’t be beat at its super affordable price.

Build

The cable feels well built with gold platted connectors. It fits nicely into the iPhone’s dock connector and to release it requires that you press 2 little spring loaded buttons on the side of the cable (nice design touch). The cable itself is about 4” which is excellent when using it with a headphone amp but may be problematic if hooking it up to a home or car stereo.

After 3 months of solid use, my little cable is still in excellent condition and performing like new. It is important to note that I took care of it (like most of my equipment). If you through this in your pocket and constantly nock the connector and cable, I can imagine that it will eventually break, this is not a design flaw but a reality of rough use.

When you connect the cable to your iPhone, volume control is no longer possible from the iDevice. This is normal, since you are bypassing the iPhone’s built in headphone amp. Volume control has to be done through your external amp (which is a nice benefit).

What about the other LOD the FIIO L9?

I wasn’t able to get a FIIO L9 for testing but it seems (based on the literature) that the only difference is an angled connection and the L9 does not have the spring loaded connector hooks.

Verdict

If you use an external headphone amp and want an excellent affordable Line Out Dock connector cable, get the FIIO L3.

As a business professional, you want the fastest most reliable wireless connectivity available and have likely heard of LTE. But what is LTE? Is there “read” and “fake” LTE? Is this something you should be looking for? These are some of the questions I will try to answer in this article.

LTE is the acronym for Long Term Evolution (whose actual full technical name is 3GPP Long Term Evolution for the Universal Mobile Telecommunications System.) As the name implies, LTE is an ongoing evolutionary standard whose goal is to continuously improve.

The standards body

I don’t want to spend too much time on this point but just want to let you know that the organization responsible for this standard is called the 3^rd Generation Partnership Project which owns the  Universal Mobile Telecommunications System that dictated the widely known and used 3G data system on GSM. This is a globally accepted standard and you know whatever this group ratifies will be deployed will be massively adopted.

Multiple 4G technologies

Carriers have confused consumers by diluting the meaning of 4G based on what suits them. At first, some US carriers started calling their WIMAX networks 4G but WIMAX didn’t  become as popular as they had expected and most dropped (or will shortly) drop it. Other carriers started calling their HSPA+ (3.5G network) 4G because if was faster than traditional 3G networks and sounded great in their marketing copy. Everyone wanted to advertise 4G networking and they were willing to bend the definition as appropriate.

HSPA+ is the top of the mountain for 3G technologies (better than standard HSPA but not as good as LTE) but LTE lays the foundations for a brand new and much faster wireless revolution.

As time passes, most networks are converging to the LTE standard and 4G will come to be synonymous with it but be aware that marketing sometimes takes over and ask your carrier whether their advertised 4G is really LTE.

Global adoption

The GSA (Global mobile Suppliers Association) has announced that 327 operators in 99 countries have committed to commercializing LTE services (267 are in deployment or have firmly planned deployments while 60 others are in the testing phase).

Why all the buzz about LTE

The main driver for LTE is speed. The current theoretical capabilities of the technology are 100Mbps download with 50Mbps uploads. These numbers should be awe inspiring as they are many times faster than most home internet connections.

In the short term, expect much more modest performance with downloads closer to 15Mbps and uploads at 10Mbps. Carriers like LTE because it is a simpler technology which helps increase their network capacity. Consumers will like it because it will provide faster more enjoyable access to content while on the move (Netflix will stream without buffering, the web page will load faster and the video call will be of higher quality.)

As LTE networks become faster and handsets more capable, developers will certainly come up with newer more creative ways to inform, entertain and amuse us. We are at the start of a 10+ year wireless revolution and the best is yet to come.

The downside

Nokia Siemens Networks conducted a comparison between battery performance of their LTE devices and comparable HSPA ones. They discovered that the LTE equipped ones consumed 5-20% more battery, a major drawback for on the go users.

For the more geeky readers, here’s an idea of why LTE drains more of your battery:

• MIMO antenna technology – Your old GSM phone has 1 antenna but your shiny new LTE one has 2 (for now and maybe more in the future). Each antenna requires its own supporting electronics (such as a power amplifier) which means it consumes more power. To make things a little more interesting, some CDMA carriers actually have an additional antenna to connect voice and text back to their CDMA networks (but this will slowly disappear).
• Your phone is constantly analyzing connectivity services offered by your carrier to determine the best way to connect back to the mother ship. Considering most carriers still reply on multiple technologies (such as GSM, HSPA, HSPA+ and LTE), your phone is a busy little boy which again consumes your precious energy reserves.
• If your carrier spaces out towers your phone may decide to boost output power a little to provide a better connection to the network which again needs energy.
• In order to create faster networks, engineers find new ways to pack more bits [of data] in each stream. This new more complex technologies require more computing horsepower from your device and thus just using these newer technologies means you will consume more power, everything else being equal.

It's not all doom and gloom as providers and manufacturers attempt to find better ways of lowering power consumption (more efficient chipsets) and increasing your battery capacity (size of the battery and storage density). This is one of the rumored reasons Apple hasn't jumped on the LTE bandwagon with its iPhone yet.  

Verdict

As a tech enthusiast, I want the fastest, brightest, most shiny device I can get, but if that device won’t last through my standard work day or becomes bulky with an extended battery, I may wait a while.

I’I love the speed promise of LTE and its potential to bring creative new service offerings, but am holding off until the technology become a little more mature. I’m a tech early adopter but can’t risk running out of juice in the middle of my day or having to buy a thick extended battery.

I’m not an Apple fanboy but they generally tend to wait until a technology is general market ready before jumping in. Once they adopt LTE in their iPhone, I may be willing to jump feet first.

Most tech blogs have been filled with wild speculation about when Apple would be releasing the next iPhone and possibly the iPad mini. After having read dozens of different dates, most pundits have now settles on September 12 as the magical date Apple will shine the light of its new devices on its followers.

It seems the deal was sealed when iMore chose this date. For those that don't know, iMore seems to have an uncanny ability to determine accurate release dates for Apple products so the market tends to believe them. This date was further validated by Jim Dalrymple from The Loop.

To be clear, I believe Apple will call the next iteration of the iPhone "the new iPhone" and not the iPhone 5. This is in line with the naming of the new iPad.

The most common Facebook question people ask is 

• how many friends does the typical Facebook user have?

• is 6 degrees of separation real 

The latest statistics I was able to find where published in November 2011 and provides some interesting insight I wanted to share with my community.

I have friends

Examining the 721 million active Facebook users (on November 2011), they had built 69 billion friendship relationships amongst them. Beyond the amazing numbers, the researchers discovered that users are actually much closer to each other than the “6 degrees of separation” and that gap is shrinking as the social network grows larger. They also discovered that most your friends are likely close to your age and from the same geographic area.

50% of Facebook users have over 100 friends and the average friend count is 190. A 1991 paper called “Why Your Friends Have More Friends Than You Do” described an interesting paradox validated by the Facebook data. Even though the median friend count is 100, 84% of users have a higher friend count than that. But how can that be? If you take a New York to LA flight, you may say that is it always more full than your other flights. Or your favorite restaurant always seems to have longer wait times and is always more full than others. This is because these (flight, restaurant and friends) must have more people choosing them if they are more popular. This is why it is completely normal if your friends are more popular and have more digital friends than you.

6 degrees of separation

This term was created in a short story in 1929 by Frigyes Katinthy then used as a movie plot. In 1960, Stanley Milgram decided to test out this theory by asking 296 volunteers to deliver a message to a stockholder living in Massachusetts. The only condition was that they could not send the message directly unless they personally knew this individual.  The result was that most people could get the message use 5.2 intermediaries (which translated into 6 hops).

The University of Milano studied this phenomenon on Facebook and found that 99.6% users are connected within 5 degrees but 92% are connected with only 4 degrees. As Facebook grows and the inter-friend network of relationships becomes denser, it is expected that this will shrink dramatically. In 2008, any 2 users were 5.28 hops from each other while in 2011 they are only 4.74. The gap is closing. This is also the premise behind business oriented sites like Linkedin.