Nov 19 2009 8:35PM | Permalink | Email this | Comments (8) |
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A sea level follow-up to my long-running high altitude 'Thin-Air ATSC' blog series, which culminated in a recent cover story...

I've reviewed a lot of products and usage scenarios over the years, with a diversity of results logged to date. But I don't know if I've ever been more disappointed than I am this evening as I write these words.

My friend whose been acting as my tech guinea pig of late doesn't have any sort of subscription television service, and she owns a 25" CRT with a 4:3 aspect ratio and integrated NTSC tuner. She is, in a few words, a prime candidate for a DTV converter box. So earlier today, I finally fired up the four...Read More

Nov 19 2009 11:49AM | Permalink | Email this | Comments (0) |
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A few weeks back, I alerted you to a rumoured release of the Google Chrome O/S source code...a heads-up that unfortunately ended up being premature. This time, it's official. Head here for the bits. And stay tuned for my analysis after this morning's press event at Google's headquarters. For now, content yourself with a few minutes' worth of promotional video:

...Read More

Nov 18 2009 8:24PM | Permalink | Email this | Comments (2) |
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Some of you might recall, as contributing blogger Steve Leibson pointed out last New Year's Eve, that Microsoft had a 'bit' of trouble with its first-generation 30GByte Zune portable multimedia players a few months back. The realtime clock driver code (reportedly obtained from Freescale) didn't correctly handle leap year transitions, thereupon hard-locking up the Zune during the New Year's Eve boot sequence...a problem that magically repaired itself one day later, and that Microsoft fixed for good via a subsequent firmware update.

The Motorola/Verizon Droid handset, which I recent...Read More

Nov 18 2009 9:36AM | Permalink | Email this | Comments (0) |
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Continued from 'Analyzing Nokia's Business: Past Performance Is No Guarantee Of Future Success'...

The O/S (and broader consumer support infrastructure) lack of user-friendliness doesn't help, either. Take my friend's E71 (running the S60 v3 flavor of Symbian), for example. Her prior handset was a BlackBerry, so some of her complaints (unclear-function shift and function keys, for example) are at least somewhat understandable impacts of platform migrations. But the unit's display backlight control was ridiculously over-aggressive by default, and figuring out how to adjust it was non-intuitive. Neither she nor I could discern how to activate the unit's speakerphone, even with the assistance of Nokia's documentation, until a random key press produced the desired end result. The handset employs a ...Read More

Nov 18 2009 7:53AM | Permalink | Email this | Comments (2) |
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A friend of mine (as I mentioned the other day) is currently using (and in the process, evaluating for me) the Nokia E71 handset that I previously mentioned back in March:

Nokia's also recently released a successor to the N95 handset I talked about in that same writeup:

along with a descendent of the Internet Tablets I wrote about in February 2008 (and else...Read More