Displaying items by tag: Android

We have had quite a bit on Microsoft’s next operating system here on the site including gaming performance, Internet Explorer 10 and the Metro UI (which we still do not particularly like). After tinkering around with Windows 8 and seeing the potential underneath we do get that even if Windows 8 is not a blockbuster it will change the way that the tablet market works forever.

The explosion of the smart phone tied to the sudden need for people to post where they are and what they are doing every minute of the day has led to some rather interesting consequences. We all have heard the numerous reports of applications that are taking your personal data right off of your phone and then either selling it or using it to push their own applications… which reminds us… what ever happened to all those congressional requests and demands? Anyway getting back to the point we have even heard how one application (now pulled from distribution) used public Facebook profiles combined with check-ins on the Facebook game Four Square to allow almost anyone to stalk nearby women.

Toshiba has launched a new lineup of tablets under the name Excite. These are all Tegra 3 models and, for now, run Google’s Android 4. While everyone was unimpressed by the 10.1 tablet (its feature set is very similar to the rest of the crowd). What has really caught the eyes of the press is the rather large Excite 13 with is 13.3-inch IPS 1600x900 display. The common question is why go this large with a tablet screen?

As I made my rounds this morning (checking out what the rest of the world thinks is going on in technology) I stumbled across a couple of articles that had my laughing. One of them was just more of what I have been hearing since 1997, the PC is going away. I honestly do not know how some analyst firms can even print this any longer. The PC has been a fixture in the home and work place for so long and it is such an integrated fixture in how people do work that it is very unlikely you will see the PC go away. Still we see this almost every quarter despite both many “PC” related companies posting record quarters and PC sales actually being up between 2-4%.

Although this is not “News” any longer we thought that we would touch on something that has been happening in the Apple/Motorola Mobility/Google legal war. As we mentioned a while ago Apple had demanded that Google (the soon to be owner of Motorola Mobility) had over all documentation on Android Development as part of the patent lawsuit that they have with Motorola Mobility. The law suit pre-dates Google’s bid for the company and seemed out of place with the current fight.

The internet was all a buzz with Apple’s announcement of “The New iPad” which is what Apple has decided to call the 3rd generation of the iPad instead of following a numerical progression or (as some thought) adding HD to the end. So far the technical specifications look impressive with a 2048 x 1536 display (with 264 ppi which is an odd number), a 5MP HD camera (1080p@ 30fps) and video stabilization, WiFi, and even 4G LTE capability. Under the hood Apple has an A5X SoC.

The Apple folks are all excited about today’s injunction awarded to them over Motorola Mobility over a patent that honestly should never have been awarded in the first place. There is a small catch though, Apple did win the injunction, but they have not been able to block sales of any devices as long as they remove the offending feature (the way the screen bounces at the end of the scroll when viewing pictures).

The Mobile World Congress kicked off today in Barcelona Spain. This is one of the yearly events that help to shape the mobile technology world. We have already seen some information slip even before the conference kicked off as companies like HTC tried to get the jump on the competition and rumors popped up about Asus’ next generation Transformer.

So Microsoft is on a push to get out as much information as they can about Windows 8. This new operating system represents a massive change for Microsoft and not just in the way the new OS will function, but also in the manner they are interacting with the public. This is evident in almost everything they are doing, from the building Windows 8 Blog to the public statements, demos and interviews that are happening frequently.

Yesterday a round of happy articles from members of the press that are getting tired of Apple’s dominance in the tablet market hit the internet. Their primary focus was something that we have talked about since the original iPad hit the market; productivity. Although many companies try to use the iPad and Android based tablets they are often web-only options or rely on virtualization applications like Citrix’s Xen or VMWare’s View. These products are expensive to own and operate (in addition to the money for the tablets) and are usually not justifiable by the bean counters.