Archive


Category: Editor

  • Honeywell gets out of the mobile hardware and scanning business

    A few days ago, we posted Honeywell’s Q2 2026 financials. There were a few surprises. First, Honeywell, a company that’s essentially been treading water in overall sales since 2014 ($40 billion in 2014, $37 billion in 2025), and done actually worse given the 36% inflation since 2014, decided to split itself  in roughly half. Mostly, it appears, because they felt that the two sides — aerospace and automation — were so different. So from now on, there’s Honeywell Aerospace and Honeywell Technologies. With Honeywell Technologies, including all the mobile hardware and scanning they’ve accumulated over the years. Or so it […]

  • The lessons from General Magic

    This is what I approached ChatGPT with: As someone who in the mid 1990s walked away from a successful corporate career as a CIO to become an editor and publisher of technology magazines, I look at today’s emerging AI scene, and it brings back some iffy memories. Like, in the mid-90s, right after the introduction of the first PDAs, a company called General Magic came out with Magic Cap that ran on the Motorola Envoy, the Sony Magic Link and a couple more. Its friendly interface that looked like an office was initially well received, as was its ability to […]

  • Table: Intel Core Ultra 2 vs Ultra 3

    Well, just when we got used to seeing systems with Intel Core Ultra Series 2 processors, Intel has already come out with Core Ultra Series 3. Which is suppposed to offers higher processing performance, significantly stronger integrated graphics, improved AI/NPU capabilities, and better energy efficiency compared to Core Ultra Series 2, which of course is making it a more capable platform for demanding, future-facing applications, especially where graphics or AI workloads matter. Progress never stops. Below is a table of how Series 2 compares with the new Series 3 in various areas: Feature / Real-World Impact Intel Core Ultra Series […]

  • Major Differences in Intel Core Ultra 200 Series Processors

    The Intel Core Ultra 200 series (Series 2) encompasses processors optimized for AI, productivity, and gaming across laptops and desktops. It includes two primary architectures: Lunar Lake (for ultra-low-power mobile, branded as 200V) and Arrow Lake (for higher-performance mobile and desktop, branded as 200U/H/HX/S). Key differences revolve around target platforms, power efficiency, core configurations, AI capabilities (NPU TOPS), integrated graphics, and performance focus. Below is a comparison table highlighting the major differences, based on Intel’s specifications and benchmarks. Values represent top-tier models in each series (e.g., Core Ultra 9 equivalents) for consistency; actual SKUs vary by tier (5/7/9). Feature Core […]

  • What’s your laptop or tablet’s gas mileage?

    How long does a charge of the battery in your phone, tablet or laptop last? How long is it supposed to last? If the tech specs do include battery life, can you trust that number? How was it measured? Can you rely on it? How much does battery life matter? Or is it just something that should last long enough? When Steve Jobs introduced the Apple iPad in 2010, he said that such a tablet should run ten hours on a job, and that sort of became what people expect from a tablet. With mobile computers used on the job, […]

  • No more AdSense

    Ads…. I get it. With TV, having to watch commercials was the cost of getting free content. Until streaming came and pretty much replaced cable TV and its double-whammy of commercials AND charging more and more for the service. When Netflix started streaming, you got a lot of content without commercials for a very modest monthly fee. Now, there are dozens of major streaming providers and they all want a steadily increasing monthly fee. Print news and print magazines are pretty much dead. And they still haven’t figured out how to charge for content. Hiding everything behind paywalls ticks people […]

  • AI — the real Personal Digital Assistant?

    It’s been intensely fascinating to explore the “artificial intelligence” advances that have exploded onto the scene. It’s all covered to exhaustion in the media, including prognostications where it all will lead. As is, here are the two main thrusts. One is “chat bots.” It’s a really stupid term, because the tech is way, way more than that. Sure, you can have a conversation with any of the current systems, but it’s really a new form of how you can use computers to answer questions, help you and do things for you. You can ask those “bots” anything, and they will […]

  • Should we add pricing and “Best of”?

    It’s in the nature of tech sites such as RuggedPCReview.com to periodically review the operation and see if it’s perhaps time to expand sections, add new things, update or retire this and that, and so on. It’s then also time to review the tools and utilities used to manage the site, or perhaps switch to an entirely different system altogether. As far as the latter goes, every three years or so we’ve contemplated switching from our “hand-coded” approach that goes back to the very beginning of RuggedPCReview.com almost two decades ago, to a more integrated website management system. That usually […]

  • Was Intel 11th generation “Tiger Lake” the milestone we thought it was?

    In the wonderful world of technology, there are few things where progress is as mind-blowingly fast as in electronics. Today you can get an iPhone with 100,000 times the storage capacity of the hard disk in an early IBM PC. And the clockspeed of the CPU in that early PC was a thousand times slower than that in a modern PC. That incredible pace of technological progress has revolutionized the world and our lives, opened up new opportunity and made things possible that weren’t even dreamed of just a few decades ago. But that progress also means greatly accelerated obsolescence […]

  • If I were on the board of a rugged device provider…

    If I were on the board of a rugged device provider, here’s what I would ask them to consider. Folks, I would say, there are truly and literally billions of smartphones out there. Almost everyone uses them every day, including on the job. Many are inexpensive and easily replaced. Almost all are put in a protective sleeve or case. That is monumental competition for makers and vendors of dedicated rugged handhelds. To get a piece of the pie, to make the case that a customer should buy rugged devices instead of cheaper consumer devices, you have to outline why they […]

  • Intel’s 12th generation “Alder Lake” Hybrid processors

    Contemplations about a whole new future of mobile chips in rugged laptops and tablets. It isn’t easy to keep up with Intel’s prolific introduction of ever more processors, processor types and processor generations. Or to figure out what truly matters and what’s incremental and more marketing than compelling advancement. That’s unfortunate as Intel, from time to time, does introduce milestone products and technologies. With their 12th generation of Core processors the company is introducing such a milestone, but it isn’t quite clear just yet what its impact will be. So what is so special about the 12th generation, code-named Alder […]

  • The Ingress Protection Rating

    About ruggedness testing and why the ingress protection rating of mobile computers is especially important What sets rugged handheld computers and tablets apart from standard consumer products is their ability to take the kind of punishment that comes with using a device on the job and in the field where conditions can be harsh.  As a result, the specification sheets of virtually all rugged devices include the results of certain ruggedness tests. How much of that data is supplied varies from manufacturer to manufacturer. It can be very comprehensive or just touch upon the basics. There are arguments to be […]

  • Intel generations

    With the rapid succession of Intel Core processor generations it’s difficult to keep track of what’s available, what it can do for you, and what really matters when selecting the most suitable processor for your systems. It seems like only yesterday that Intel introduced the high-end Core processor brand, and now it’s a decade later and we’re already seeing the 11th generation. While initially it wasn’t very difficult to keep the generations apart and determine when and what to buy, it’s become quite confusing as of late. Initially, generations happened at what Intel called the Tick-Tock pace, where Tick meant […]

  • DJI Enterprise — Drones are becoming serious business

    Every time I see a crew set up ladders around a building to examine a reef, assess damage, or determine how to maintain or expand a structure, I wonder why they don’t use drones instead. Drones eliminate the cost of transporting and setting up ladders and scaffolds, eliminate the danger of accidents, and get the job done so much faster. We view drones as an increasingly important part of work in the field. They are your eye in the sky, they go places where humans cannot easily go, and they can easily shoot still images and video that help getting […]

  • The stupid PC On/Off/Sleep button

    There has in the history of the world rarely been a greater disparity in function, sophistication and overall competence than that between today’s marvelously complex, powerful and competent computers and their crude, endlessly frustrating and absolutely useless and non-sensical on/off buttons. Sorry to start off that way, but it simply needed to be said. Computers are binary creations, living and operating in a world of 0s and 1s. For a computer, things are either on or off, 1 or 0. These two simple states allow them to compute anything and everything. The most complex operations, the most detailed pictures, the […]

  • Dec. 1996: Microsoft finally validates the pen with its new Windows CE operating system for handheld computers.

    Almost a quarter of a century ago I wrote the following Editor’s column in Pen Computing Magazine. It was a very different world back then. The first PDAs had been introduced, but no none quite knew what to make of them. Apple struggled with its Newton MessagePad. Palm introduced its Pilot. And Microsoft introduced its Windows CE. Editorial in December 1996 Edition of Pen Computing Magazine: The big news in the pen computing and PDA world, of course, is Microsoft’s announcement of Windows CE, the company’s first operating environment for handheld computers. Leave it to Microsoft to do things at […]

  • Consumer Smartphones vs Rugged Handhelds — How can providers of rugged handhelds prevail against the competition from inexpensive consumer tech?

    What is the difference between consumer smartphones and handheld computers that have specifically been designed to be rugged and capable of withstanding a variety of handling and environmental challenges? That is a question that’s been asked ever since the advent of modern smartphones, which is generally since the Apple iPhone was introduced in 2007. Opportunity or challenge? The question comes up because the massive global (and initially unanticipated) success of smartphones has been both a big opportunity for the rugged handheld industry, as well as a frustrating challenge. It was an opportunity because the increasingly universal use of and ensuing […]

  • How a German/Chinese company views the situation

    In these pandemic times, it’s hard to get definite answers on almost anything, we learn something new every day and week, and a lot of what is happening doesn’t seem to make sense. In short, for almost a year now, we’re all just going along for the ride. That’s why a news communication from faytech this morning caught my eye and attention. faytech’s founder is German but the company is now mostly located in China. Their motto is merging high German engineering standards with attractively priced Asian manufacturing. We reported on the faytech story four or five years ago (see […]

  • How the rugged PC “drop spec” just became different

    The Department of Defense significantly expands drop test definitions and procedures in the new MIL-STD-810H Test Method Standard You wouldn’t know it from looking at almost all of the published ruggedness testing results, but the good old DOD MIL-STD-810G was replaced by the MIL-STD-810H in January 2019. And if you thought the old MIL-STD-810G was massive in size, the new one is bigger yet. While the old MIL-STD-810G document was 804 pages, the new one has 1,089. That’s 285 extra pages of testing procedures. The new standard brings quite a few changes in ruggedness testing. In this article I’ll take […]

  • The uneven performance of cameras in rugged handhelds and tablets

    Recently I ran the usual set of integrated camera test pictures for our RuggedPCReview.com product testing lab with four devices all at once. That meant taking two pictures each of the 20 or so test settings around our offices in East Tennessee. The settings represent some tasks that users of rugged handhelds and tablets might do on the job. Examples are meter reading, capturing information from accessible and not-so-accessible labels, markings, or instructions, and so on. For a splash of color and to test close-up performance we also include pictures of flowers and greenery. The reason why we take two […]

  • Android contemplations 2019

    In this article I’ll present some of my thoughts on Android, where it’s been, and where it’s going. I’ll discuss both my personal experiences with Android as well as my observations as Editor-in-Chief of RuggedPCReview.com. Although my primary phone has been an iPhone ever since Steve Jobs introduced the first one, and although my primary tablet is an iPad, and also has been ever since the iPad was introduced to a snickering media that mocked the tablet as just an overgrown phone without much purpose, I am inherently operating platform agnostic. I do almost all of my production work on […]

  • The Drone in Your Future

    Drones have made tremendous progress and will likely become part of many jobs. In this article I will provide a brief overview of drone technology, and the application and impact it may have on field operations. Because, believe it or not, drones may well become part of your job. Not too terribly long ago I came across an article and an accompanying YouTube video by a man who had attached a small digital camera to a remote controlled toy helicopter. The contraption worked well enough to yield video from high above the trees around his house. It was a fun […]

  • How bright is your screen?

    If you take a handheld computer or a tablet or a laptop outdoors and on the job, it’s really important whether you can still see what’s on the screen clearly enough to actually use the computer. Whether you can or not depends on a lot of things, like how bright it is outside, whether there are reflections, the size of the screen, its sharpness and contrast, viewing angles, and so on. Experts calculate the “effective” contrast ratio in bright outdoor light by estimating sunlight compared to the light that’s reflected back by the typical computer screen with its various treatments […]

  • Ditching laptops for tablets — evolution or disruptive paradigm shift?

    We do product testing adventure trips two or three times a year. That means packing a lot of equipment, including chargers, memory cards of various sizes and standards, all sorts of cables and adapters, suitable software, batteries and their chargers, and whatever it takes to keep the whole thing running. At the center of it all, on every trip, was a laptop powerful and competent enough to handle whatever came our way. Not this time. We spent two weeks in the central American nation of Honduras, on one of its channel islands, Roatan. Roatan, even now, remains wild and primal, […]

  • Why ruggedness testing matters

    Ruggedized mobile computing gear costs more than standard consumer technology, but in the long run it often costs less. That’s because rugged computers don’t break down as often, they last longer, and there isn’t as much downtime. What that means is that despite the higher initial purchase price, the total cost of ownership of rugged equipment is often lower. That, however, only works if ruggedized products indeed don’t break down as often, indeed last longer, and indeed do not cause as much downtime. Ruggedness, therefore, isn’t just a physical thing. It’s an inherent value, an implied promise of quality and […]

  • Make IP67 the minimum standard for rugged handhelds

    Few outside of the rugged computing and perhaps a couple other sectors know what an “IP” rating means, or the specific significance of “IP67.” Those inside those markets, however, cherish the designation for what it is — a degree of protection that brings peace of mind. Really? Well, yes. If an electronic device is “IP67-sealed,” that means neither dust nor water will get in. Specifically, there’s “ingress protection” designed to keep solids and liquids out. Of the two, dust and water, it’s primarily water that most are concerned about. Water as in rain, splashing, spilled drinks, hosing down, or going […]

  • A look at Apple’s HomePod

    by David MacNeill I am the target market for HomePod. It’s an all-Apple house, subscribed to Apple Music and iCloud Drive — we’re all in. You can AirPlay other music services and devices to HomePod, but it’s really designed for fanboys like me. Can I order corn flakes from Amazon with it? No. Would I ever want to do that? No. As a speaker, it is not overly expensive. The sky’s the limit for audiophile-grade speakers so $349 is not outrageous. One aspect that no one has raised in the reviews is that you don’t need a pair of them […]

  • The impact of iPhones on the rugged handheld market

    Apple has been selling well over 200 million iPhones annually for the past several years. This affects the rugged handheld market both directly and indirectly. On the positive side, the iPhone brought universal acceptance of smartphones. That accelerated acceptance of handheld computing platforms in numerous industries and opened new applications and markets to makers of rugged handhelds. On the not so positive side, many of those sales opportunities didn’t go to providers of rugged handhelds. Instead, they were filled by standard iPhones. There are many examples where aging rugged handhelds were replaced by iPhones, sometimes by the tens of thousands. […]

  • A future where quality is king — A look at Zebra’s 2017 Manufacturing Vision Study

    On July 31st, 2017, Zebra Technologies Corporation published the results of their 2017 Manufacturing Vision Study on emerging trends that are shaping the future of industrial manufacturing. The broad result of the global study suggests that manufacturers are adopting IIoT (Industrial Internet of Things) and Industry 4.0 concepts to get better insights and information about their manufacturing process and, most importantly, to improve quality. Why Zebra knows Why should such a study come from Zebra? Isn’t Zebra in the mobile printer business? They are, but not only that. Zebra’s been around for almost half a century, having started as “Data […]

  • GammaTech celebrates its 30th anniversary

    GammaTech Computer Corporation is celebrating its 30th anniversary this month, July 2017. That’s amazing longevity in an industry where big names come and go. And it marks GammaTech as one of the pioneers in an industry and technology that truly changed the world. It’s hard to believe that it’s been 40 years since the Apple II rang in the era of personal computers, seen first just as expensive toys for nerds and hobbyists, but then, four years later, legitimized by the IBM PC. The 1980s were the Wild West era of personal computers. PC trade shows drew huge crowds. Trade […]

  • Apple Watch Series 2 after three weeks

    It’s been three weeks since I finally gave in and bought a Series 2 Apple Watch. While the Apple Watch isn’t a rugged device and thus not something we’d normally report on, it is a wearable device and wearable computing power is playing an increasingly prominent role. That’s because unlike even handhelds, a wrist-mount is always there, always handy and it doesn’t need to be stowed away. So what’s been my experience over the first three weeks with the watch? The good news: I am still wearing it. That could be because I wore wrist watches for decades (albeit not […]

  • Initial impressions of an Apple Watch holdout

    So I finally got an Apple Watch. Series 2, the one that’s waterproof and has onboard GPS. I chose the larger one with the 42mm screen. When you need reading glasses every millimeter counts. That meant a $400 investment for a bottom-of-the-line watch with the aluminum case (as compared to the much more expensive stainless steel and ceramic ones). I picked space-gray with a black Nike sport band. What took me so long? I am not sure. As a native Swiss I love watches and there were times in my life where I collected them. And I love Apple. When […]

  • History repeats itself: it’s now the Surface Laptop

    So the long awaited Microsoft Surface Pro 5 has finally been unveiled as the “new Surface Pro.” In its media release, Microsoft calls it “the next generation of the iconic product line and the most versatile laptop on the planet. The new Surface Pro delivers the most performance and battery life in a laptop that is this thin, light and quiet.” So right off the bat, Microsoft makes it clear that it now considers the Surface Pro a laptop and no longer a tablet. And just for good measure, within the first two paragraphs of the May 23 press release, […]

  • Are “mobile” sites really needed?

    A few days ago I used one of the readily available website analysis tools to check RuggedPCReview.com. The resulting report gave me a stern “site not mobile-optimized” lecture. “Mobile-optimized,” of course, refers to the fact that sites on the one-size-fits-all world wide web are being viewed on a very wide range of devices with a very wide range of screen sizes. And it is certainly true that viewing a webpage on a 27-inch display is a very different experience from viewing it on a 4.7-inch smartphone. That predicament was recognized early on, years and years ago, and for a while […]

  • In search of a prepaid, transferrable SIM

    At RuggedPCReview.com, we often analyze and report on mobile computing devices with integrated WWAN (mobile broadband) capability and a SIM card slot. SIM (Subscriber Identity Module) cards are smart cards that contain a subscribers phone number and certain data. Initially just used for the early GSM (Global System for Mobile communication) networks, SIM cards are now also used by carriers that based their networks on the rival CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access) technology, like Sprint and Verizon. However, those vendors use SIM cards only for 4G LTE. Anyway, it would be nice for us to be able to test device […]

  • Mobile Operating Systems Crossroad?

    Interesting situation with mobile operating systems in the industrial and enterprise space. For many years, Windows Mobile (later named Windows Embedded Handheld) was the OS of choice, but then Microsoft stranded it. The industry hung in there with the abandoned mini OS for a number of years, but then slowly began looking at Android as a replacement. But now, just as Android is gathering steam in industrial handheld markets, Microsoft finally introduced a Windows Mobile replacement in Windows 10 IoT Mobile Enterprise (what a name!). So major rugged and enterprise mobile hardware vendors are beginning to offer devices that support […]

  • Sharp, clear web images

    RuggedPCReview readers who view our site on a modern tablet, smartphone or high resolution monitor have probably noticed that many images on RuggedPCReview.com are noticeably crisper and sharper than those on the vast majority of websites. Why is that? It’s because earlier in 2016 we started serving images in both standard and high resolution. That way, if your browser automatically detects that you’re viewing a page on a device with a high resolution display, it’ll serve a high resolution image. If you’re viewing it on a standard display, it’ll load a standard resolution picture. Let me explain. While high and […]

  • Rocky (not Balboa) has left the building

    Back in 2003 we approached the then-titans of the rugged notebook industry with this challenge: “Send us whatever you consider your best all-purpose rugged notebook computer for a roundup!” Who did we send that challenge to? You’d think Panasonic, Getac and Dell or GammaTech. Panasonic, yes, but back then the other two we chose for the shootout were Itronix and Amrel. Panasonic, of course, had been making rugged notebooks since 1996, and Itronix, too. Itronix, which at time was a subsidiary of Telxon, had sent us one of their X-C 6000 Cross Country computers for review in the mid-90s. We […]

  • Intel introduces Kaby Lake, the 7th generation of Core processors

    In August, Intel officially introduced the first few of its 7th generation Core processors, codenamed “Kaby Lake.” That comes at a time where the news about PCs generally isn’t very good, where Microsoft has a very hard time convincing users to switch to Windows 10, and where it’s becoming increasingly more difficult for vertical market hardware manufacturers to keep up with Intel’s rapid-fire release of new generations of high-end processors. 7th generation Kaby Lake also comes at a time where 4th generation “Haswell” processors are considered quite up-to-date in the mobile and industrial PC arena, 5th generation “Broadwell” makes customers […]

  • Congrats to Xplore Technologies: 20 years of rugged tablets, and only rugged tablets

    At the January 1997 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, I walked into the South Hall of the Las Vegas Convention Center on the lookout for something — anything — new and exciting in tablets or pen computers. Sure, Microsoft had announced Windows CE at the Fall Comdex in response to Apple’s Newton Message Pad and the emerging “Palm Economy,’ and our bi-monthly Pen Computing Magazine was doing well. But, by and large, handhelds and tablets were very far removed from the booming world of desktop computers and laptops and printers and the latest of absolutely-must-have PC software. But there, […]

  • Why we take things apart and show what’s inside

    At RuggedPCReview, we take things apart. We open up handhelds, tablets, panels, notebooks and industrial PCs. We dissect them methodically, documenting our progress, jotting down observations and commentary. What we find inside a product becomes part of our detailed reviews, including pictures of the insides and of interesting details. We do this because ruggedness isn’t something that’s just skin-deep. Truly rugged mobile computing devices are designed from the ground up to be tough and rugged and being able to handle the various kinds of abuse they may encounter in customers’ hands (and falling out of customers’ hands). While the outsides […]

  • The Microsoft Surface mystery

    According to numerous reports online, Microsoft will apparently stop offering the Surface 3 tablet by the end of 2016 and it’s not certain if there’ll ever be a Surface 4. Microsoft, of course, has had a checkered past with its forays into hardware, and many of the company’s hardware partners likely have mixed feelings about the Surface tablets that are direct competition for their own products. Yet, the Surface tablets appeared to have been quite successful. After a rocky start with the wing-clipped Windows RT tablets, sales of Surface tablets running real Windows looked very good. Back in February 2016 […]

  • The Microsoft Surface mystery

    According to numerous reports online, Microsoft will apparently stop offering the Surface 3 tablet by the end of 2016 and it’s not certain if there’ll ever be a Surface 4. Microsoft, of course, has had a checkered past with its forays into hardware, and many of the company’s hardware partners likely have mixed feelings about the Surface tablets that are direct competition for their own products. Yet, the Surface tablets appeared to have been quite successful. After a rocky start with the wing-clipped Windows RT tablets, sales of Surface tablets running real Windows looked very good. Back in February 2016 […]

  • Household items: coding, standards, and “2x” pics

    Back in the day when we published Pen Computing Magazine and Digital Camera Magazine and some other titles in print, we always prided ourselves to be in total control of our own destiny. We did virtually everything inhouse — writing editing, photography, layout, prepress, web, marketing and advertising — and most of us had mastered several of those disciplines. We didn’t want to farm anything out or rely on any one expert. We felt the same about software. We had our own webhosting, our own servers right in our building, and we programmed everything ourselves. That way, no one could […]

  • Household items: coding, standards, and “2x” pics

    Back in the day when we published Pen Computing Magazine and Digital Camera Magazine and some other titles in print, we always prided ourselves to be in total control of our own destiny. We did virtually everything inhouse — writing editing, photography, layout, prepress, web, marketing and advertising — and most of us had mastered several of those disciplines. We didn’t want to farm anything out or rely on any one expert. We felt the same about software. We had our own webhosting, our own servers right in our building, and we programmed everything ourselves. That way, no one could […]

  • Cat S60 — More than the naked eye can see

    They used to say, and likely still do, that a picture is worth a thousand words. That’s certainly true, but it can also be quite misleading as pictures often tell a story rather than the story. There can be quite a difference between these two. The media is very adept at using carefully chosen pictures that tell a story that may or may not be so, or present the story with a slant or an agenda. One could almost say that a picture can tell a story in a thousand different ways. And in the age of Photoshop (generically used […]

  • Keeping an eye on the level of technology offered in consumer tech: Dell Venue 8

    The consumer market is really, really tough. Sure, massive fortunes can be made off it thanks to the sheer size of it, and thus the potential of millions of units sold. But few products ever make it into that sales stratosphere, and the competition is brutal. Make one mistake, be it in technology, manufacturing, marketing or just about anywhere else, and the product tanks, expensively. Add to that the fickle taste of consumers, the unpredictability of trends, a lightening-quick product cycle pace, and the true successes are few and far between. Leaving some very good and often excellent products behind. […]

  • Follow-up on iPad Pro and Apple Pencil

    I’ve now had the iPad Pro for a good couple of months and the Apple Pencil for a month and a half. How do I use them? Have they changed my life? As far as the iPad Pro goes, it has totally replaced my iPad Air 2. I don’t think I’ve used the Air 2 once since I got the Pro. However, I am doing the exact same things on the Pro that I used to do on the smaller Air 2. The split screen functionality is not good or compelling enough to really work with two apps at once, […]

  • An assessment of the Apple Pencil

    A few weeks after the Apple iPad Pro began shipping, the Apple Pencil is now available also. This is big news because it was Apple who finally made the tablet form factor a success, and they did it without a pen. Which is remarkable, as tablet computers initially were conceived specifically as a modern equivalent of a standard notepad that you wrote on with a pen. And remarkable again as Steve Jobs was adamantly opposed to pens and often listed his reasons why he felt that way. But now the Apple Pencil is here, a good 5-1/2 years after the […]

  • Will the Apple iPad Pro herald an era of “pro” use of tablets?

    My iPad Pro came in and I want to share my first impressions, and also my thoughts on where all this is leading. Anyone who first sees the iPad Pro will immediately notice its size. The iPad Pro is big. 12 x 8.7 inches versus 9.4 x 6.6 inches for the iPad Air 2. So the iPad Pro’s footprint is 68% larger than that of the standard iPad. Amazingly though, at 0.27 inches the iPad Pro is barely thicker than the iPad Air 2, which is 0.24 inches thick. And even more amazingly, the big iPad Pro is actually thinner […]

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