Archive


Category: Editor

  • Do you have “Grandpa Boxes” in your lineup?

    Unlike Gary Trudeau whose “Doonesbury” strips can be personal and mean-spirited (remember his relentless unfair mocking of the Apple Newton?), Scott Adams’ “Dilbert” presents a lighthearted, humorous, yet keenly insightful commentary on the corporate and technical issues of the day. In a recent strip (August 3, 2011), Dilbert’s working on his computer when a young colleague approaches and asks, “Are you getting a lot done on the Grandpa Box?” “The what?” Dilbert asks. “The people in my generation do our work on our phones and tablets,” is the response. “I also have a laptop,” Dilbert objects. “I’ll text the nineties […]

  • “The Cloud”

    It’s fashionable these days to say that something’s “in the cloud.” The cloud is in. Everyone’s moving stuff to the cloud. Which is really annoying. “The Cloud,” of course, isn’t a cloud at all. In fact, it couldn’t be farther from a cloud. It’s the same old server farms somewhere in a warehouse. That’s all. So why the sudden fixation with “the cloud”? Probably because centralized storage and applications can be huge business and because it presents an opportunity to regain control over users and their data, control that has largely been lost ever since the PC revolution took it […]

  • Another conversation with Paul Moore, Fujitsu’s Senior Director of Product Development

    I don’t often do phone interviews with product managers or PR people when a new product is announced. That’s because, for the most part, whatever they can tell me I already know from the press materials. And what I really want to know they usually can’t tell me because PR folks, by and large, need to stick to a script and company line. Which means I might as well save the time of a PR call to examine things myself, Google this and that, and then form my own opinion. That said, there are industry people I enjoy talking to […]

  • The problem with benchmarks

    When we recently used our standard benchmark suite to test the performance of a new rugged computer, we thought it’d be just another entry into the RuggedPCReview.com benchmark performance database that we’ve been compiling over the past several years. We always run benchmarks on all Windows-based machines that come to our lab, and here’s why: 1. Benchmarks are a good way to see where a machine fits into the overall performance spectrum. The benchmark bottomline is usually a pretty good indicator of overall performance. 2. Benchmarks show the performance of individual subsystems; that’s a good indicator for the strengths and […]

  • Conversation with Ambarella’s Chris Day about the state of still/video imaging in mobile computing devices

    In a recent blog entry I wrote about the generally low quality of cameras built into rugged mobile computers compared to the very rapidly advancing state-of-the-art in miniaturized imaging technology. It doesn’t seem to make sense that high quality, costly tools for important jobs should be saddled with imaging hardware that ranges from only marginally acceptable to quite useless. Still and video cameras are now in tens of millions of smartphones and many of them now can take very passable high res still pictures as well as excellent video. I would expect no less from vertical market mobile computing hardware. […]

  • Conversation with Ambarella’s Chris Day about the state of still/video imaging in mobile computing devices

    In a recent blog entry I wrote about the generally low quality of cameras built into rugged mobile computers compared to the very rapidly advancing state-of-the-art in miniaturized imaging technology. It doesn’t seem to make sense that high quality, costly tools for important jobs should be saddled with imaging hardware that ranges from only marginally acceptable to quite useless. Still and video cameras are now in tens of millions of smartphones and many of them now can take very passable high res still pictures as well as excellent video. I would expect no less from vertical market mobile computing hardware. […]

  • Is the race for tablet supremacy already over? Many developers think so.

    Who could forget Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer stomping around the stage and yelling “developers, developers, developers!” at conferences in the mid-2000s (see Balmer’s developers on YouTube)? Well, according to the Appcelerator/IDC Mobile Developer Report, April 2011, the developers have spoken and the news isn’t at all good for Microsoft, and not even that good for Android. What Appcelerator and IDC did was survey a total of 2,760 Appcelerator developers on their perceptions regarding mobile OS platforms, feature priorities and development plans. The survey essentially showed that while Android smartphones have passed the iPhone in terms of sales and market share, […]

  • Is the race for tablet supremacy already over? Many developers think so.

    Who could forget Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer stomping around the stage and yelling “developers, developers, developers!” at conferences in the mid-2000s (see Balmer’s developers on YouTube)? Well, according to the Appcelerator/IDC Mobile Developer Report, April 2011, the developers have spoken and the news isn’t at all good for Microsoft, and not even that good for Android. What Appcelerator and IDC did was survey a total of 2,760 Appcelerator developers on their perceptions regarding mobile OS platforms, feature priorities and development plans. The survey essentially showed that while Android smartphones have passed the iPhone in terms of sales and market share, […]

  • Microsoft….

    So I’m getting to the next machine in the review queue, charge it, then start it up, just to get nagged by Windows to activate the OS. Would I like to do that online, right now? Huh? Huh? I didn’t think that was going to be possible since the machine didn’t know the password to my WiFi network yet. But Windows wanted to try anyway and so I let it. Of course, it didn’t get anywhere. So then I am in Windows 7, but there’s this nasty message at the bottom right that says, “This copy of Windows is not […]

  • Why are cameras in mobile computers not any better?

    When I founded the original Digital Camera Magazine in 1997, almost no one thought that digital photography would ever seriously challenge film. At best, digital cameras were thought to become novelties or peripherals for computers. Yet, just a decade later, digital imaging had surpassed film and, in one of the quickest major technology upheavals, quickly made film irrelevant. As a result, digital cameras, which initially had carried a steep price premium, became more and more affordable. Today you can get a very good and incredibly compact 14-megapixel camera for less than US$100. In essence, digital imaging technology has become commoditized. […]

  • How we get news

    A big part of the work here at RuggedPCReview.com is getting and spreading the news on what’s going on in the rugged and mobile computing world. How do we do that? And how can manufacturers help get the news out? In the past, it was pretty simple. We went to trade shows to see what all was new, loaded up on glossy brochures, attended press conferences, and left behind a bushel of business cards so we’d be in the rolodex of everyone who mattered in the rugged computing industry. That pretty much ensured a steady supply of news via mailed […]

  • Bye-bye PXA processors? Probably not just yet.

    There was a time, around the year 2000, when Microsoft essentially decreed that Pocket PCs were to run Intel XScale processors. That was a big change, and a rude awakening for some of the Windows CE hardware vendors who had been promised that Windows CE was going to be a multi processor architecture platform. But Intel XScale it was, and the Intel PXA became the de-facto standard processor for virtually all vertical market handhelds for a decade. So product specs for all those handhelds of that era weren’t very exciting. They either had an Intel PXA255 or a PXA270 processor, […]

  • Microsoft announces…. nothing. Google follows suit.

    Well, the much anticipated Las Vegas CES is shedding no light on how the industry will react to Apple’s monster tablet home run. Yes, there were some tablets here and there, but really nothing that we didn’t know already, and certainly nothing earth-shattering. Microsoft, stunningly, showed nothing. Nada. No product, no strategy, no plan. The whole situation was remarkably similar to a time several years ago when erstwhile handheld champion Palm was in the ropes and Microsoft had an opening a mile wide to finally get some traction with Windows CE. What did they do then? Nothing. Well, they came […]

  • Motorola, and the corporation names, corporation games thing

    So on January 4, 2011, Motorola will complete its separation into two companies. The way it actually works is that what used to be Motorola will separate Motorola Mobility Holdings, or Motorola Mobility for short, from Motorola proper, and Motorola will then change its name to Motorola Solutions. So technically it looks more like Motorola jettisoned their phone business to concentrate on the much more stable and predictable vertical market offerings developed and sold via Motorola Solutions. From a stockholder’s perspective, they’ll get one share of Motorola Mobility for every eight shares of old Motorola stock. The old Motorola stock […]

  • “10 tablets that never quite took off”

    This morning, one of my longterm PR contacts brought to my attention a feature entitled “10 tablets that never quite took off.” It was published by itWorldCanada, which is part of Computerworld. Now Computerworld is one of the world’s leading resources of excellent IT reporting, and has been for decades (I used to contribute it in a former life as a corporate CIO), but the “slideshow” was disappointing and missed the point by listing some older tablets and mocking them. Unfortunately, we’re seeing a lot of this sort of stuff in the media now. Most younger editors seem to believe […]

  • The tablet wars: background and outlook

    This whole tablet thing is really interesting. Despite getting soundly trashed by a good number of industry experts when the iPad was first announced by Steve Jobs on January 27, 2010, Apple ended up selling about ten million of them in 2010, and the same experts now predict that a lot more will be sold in the coming years. Everyone is scrambling to also have a tablet. Tablets are hot, tablets will demolish the netbook market, tablets will eat into notebook sales, Microsoft will gag and wither over having blown it with tablets, and so on and so on. So […]

  • What are discrete graphics, and why would you need them?

    If you follow the mobile computing beat, you’ve probably come across the term “discrete graphics.” What that generally means is a computer’s graphics display capabilities that are a separate sub-system and not part of the motherboard or, more recently, processor. Why should you care? Because as with almost everything else in life, one-size-fits-all only applies to a certain extent. Most computers take the one-size-fits-all approach, offering a set of features and performance that is good enough for most intended applications. Most, but not necessarily all. In graphics, that means that your standard mobile computer can handle all the usual functions […]

  • New Intel Atoms, and how Oracle is helping Microsoft

    So Intel has added two more processors to its ever growing family of Atom processor products with all its many branches and suggested applications. The new chips are the single-core Atom D425 and the dual-core Atom D525 both of which run at 1.8GHz, representing a small step up from the existing 1.6GHz D410 and D510. Thermal Design Power remains at 10 and 13 watts, and the stated quantity prices of US$42 and US$63 is also the same as that of the earlier chips (which, however, enjoy “embedded” status). There is one notable difference: the two new chips support DDR3 SODIMM, […]

  • Android contemplations

    Off the cuff, the way I see it is that Android has a better than even chance of becoming the OS of choice for tablets and other mobile devices. Android is really nothing more than another Linux distribution, but one backed and sort of run by Google. Microsoft, of course, will make the usual argument of leverage and security and integration into other Microsoft products, but the fact is that Linux itself can be at least as secure as anything Microsoft makes. Just look at the Mac OS which is also Unix-based, and Unix is the basis of Linux. As […]

  • 4G

    Pretty soon everyone will be talking about 4G. Who has 4G and whose 4G is better or faster. Somehow, marketing from all wireless camps has latched onto the cool-sounding terms 3G and 4G, though they’re avoiding “3.5G” or “3.75G” you often find in tech specs. That’s probably because three and a half sounds like not quite four. Anyway, Sprint is now making noises about 4G and you can actually buy 4G smartphones using the Sprint network. Since Sprint is a bit in the ropes, being first may not mean all that much, but it’s still good to know how things […]

  • Intel vPro technology—what is it all about?

    If you follow chipmaker Intel, you know that the company not only loves code names, but also special technologies that are then used to market certain chips or chip families. At some point it was “with MMX” that made Intel Pentium chips special in hilarious commercials showing Intel engineers in astronaut suits. “Hyper-threading” was big for a while, and for the latest families of Core processors, Intel stresses “Turbo Boost.” Another Intel technology that gets a little less attention is vPro, but vPro is now becoming part of the marketing message of some ruggedized mobile computing products that have been […]

  • “Moorestown” — Intel’s new Z6xx Atom platform and how it fits in

    On May 4th, Intel introduced the next generation of its initial family of Z5xx Atom processor. Codenamed “Moorestown,” the Z6xx family, together with a new I/O controller and signal processing chip are meant to make Intel competitive in the booming smartphone and internet access device market. On paper at least, the new processor family looks very good and may yet help Intel establish itself in the device market (which, interestingly, they abandoned when they sold the XSCALE application processor business to Marvell a couple of years ago). But before we go into details of Moorestown, let’s backtrack and see how […]

  • Publishing and the iPad

    This has nothing to do with rugged computing, but everything with publishing and how information is presented and distributed. As a former print publisher, I spent some time comparing different approaches to magazine publishing on the iPad. Given the amount of hype about the iPad being the savior of publishing, I am surprised there is not an iMagazine app or some such. I mean, Apple could take the lead here yet again, creating the iTunes of the magazine world. As is, everyone’s doing their own thing, with Zinio, of course, having the lead with its hundreds of electronic titles. Problem […]

  • Waterproofing rugged computing equipment

    During the course of testing in the RuggedPCReview.com lab, we examine ruggedness specifications and claims. For the most part, while we report and comment on those specs, we do not put them to the test. That’s because ruggedness testing is pretty involved business, and checking how much punishment a device can take before it fails makes about as much sense as a car magazine running a test vehicle into a concrete wall to see if it is indeed as safe as the manufacturer says. There are, however, exceptions. If a manufacturer claims their product can be dropped from four feet […]

  • Finally: decent HD video on Atom boxes thanks to Broadcom card

    The dirty little secret of millions of Atom N270-based netbooks (and pretty much all other Atom-based systems) is that they really cannot run HD video. If you try it, you get choppy video that creeps along at frame rates of no more than 10 frames per second max even with just 720p video, let alone 1080p. This makes HD video on Atom-based systems impossible to watch. It’s a huge disappointment for anyone who thought a “netbook” would surely be able to handle today’s high definition media formats, and certainly an annoyance for many customers of vertical market Atom boxes as […]

  • Will industrial tablets benefit from the iPad?

    On April 3rd, the Apple iPad tablet will be available in Apple stores. According to various reports, almost 300,000 iPads have been ordered before the device even became available. The hype is enormous, with experts falling all over themselves proclaiming why the iPad will succeed or fail. Fact is, at this point no one knows how the iPad will be received. Apple apparently felt comfortable enough with the tablet form factor to create the device and stake a good part of its reputation on it. Since the iPad is really a scaled-up iPhone rather than a pared-down MacBook, the question […]

  • Consumerization of rugged markets?

    A few weeks ago I wrote an article on Windows Mobile and the vertical markets and concluded with the question, “So what will the small but significant number of vendors who make and sell Windows Mobile devices do as their chosen operating system platform looks increasingly dated and is becoming a target of customer dissatisfaction?” I got some good (and rather concerned) feedback on that column, and I think it’s an issue that is not going to go away. Yesterday I saw an article entitled “Delays Decimate Microsoft’s Enterprise Mobile Market Share” at channelinsider.com, and they asked, “So, what of […]

  • Will the iPad replace my iPhone?

    I wrote this column for the blog at iPhoneLife Magazine, a terrific resource for iPhone owners (or anyone interested in the iPhone) that’s published by my old friend Hal Goldstein who used to be a friendly competitor when we published the print version of Pen Computing Magazine. The article really has nothing to do with rugged computing, but I think it’s relevant here anyway because a) the fate of the Apple iPad will have a big impact on how tablets are viewed in the coming years, and b) because of the mobile industry’s never-ending struggle to find form factors that […]

  • Windows Mobile and the vertical markets

    While Windows Mobile pretty much has ceased to be a factor in consumer markets, it remains very firmly entrenched in industrial and vertical markets where it may have a market share that’s probably larger than that of Windows in desktops and notebooks. The good news is that as long as Microsoft continues to dominate the desktop, the leverage of Windows programming tools and expertise will probably all but guarantee a continuing role for Windows CE and Windows Mobile. That said, the rapid vanishing act of Windows Mobile in the consumer markets simply must be disconcerting to those whose business depends […]

  • A look at Intel’s new Core i3/i5/i7 processors and how they will affect rugged computing

    Just when most manufacturers of rugged mobile computers have switched from earlier platforms either to Intel Atom or Core processors, Intel raises the ante again with new Atoms and the next generation of Core processors. In essence, the Core 2 Duo that has served the mobile community long and well is being replaced by a next generation of mobile chips with higher performance, newer technology, better integration, improved efficiency, and smaller package sizes. The new Intel Core i3, Core i5 and Core i7 processors come in numerous versions with two or four cores, clock speeds ranging from 1.06 to 3.33 […]

  • Talking with Paul Moore, Fujitsu’s Senior Director of Product Development

    The other day I had a very interesting hour-long conversation with Paul Moore, who is Senior Director of Mobile Product Development at Fujitsu. The call was arranged by Fujitsu’s ever helpful Wendy Grubow to give me a chance to talk with Paul about the Fujitsu Lifebook T4410 Tablet PC that’s currently in the RuggedPCReview.com lab for evaluation and testing. Fujitsu, of course, has been into tablets longer than most and probably has the most experience of any Tablet PC and convertible vendors. Fujitsu had the PoquetPAD and 325Point tablets a decade before IBM reinvented the Tablet PC in 2002, and […]

  • Tablet hype at fever pitch

    A day before an Apple event where Steve Jobs will announce a new computing device, the hype about tablets is at an absolute fever pitch. Experts are popping out from the woodwork, showering us with their wisdom and predictions, most apparently believing that Microsoft invented and introduced the tablet in 2001, which couldn’t be farther from the truth. But, perhaps, if enough instant experts say it’s so, history has been rewritten. What will those instant experts do when they discover that the original early 1990s IBM Thinkpad was a tablet, and that we had the same exact tablet hype back […]

  • Slate and tablet computers: learning from the past

    According to CNN, tablet-sized computers are now “a much-hyped category of electronics.” True. The Associated Press says, “Tablet-style computers that run Windows have been available for a decade.” Yes, and a lot longer than that. And a PC World editor states, “Tablet PC’s are not new. The slate form factor portable computer has been around for almost a decade, since Microsoft initially pushed the concept with its Windows XP Tablet PC Edition.” Nope. Microsoft did not initially push the concept with the XP Tablet PC Edition. Microsoft released a tablet OS way before that, in 1991, and even then it […]

  • Getac now offers 5-year warranties!

    Sometimes the most amazing news is not a product announcement. That’s what I thought when I saw Getac’s press release about offering 5-year “bumper-to-bumper” warranties for all their rugged notebook computers. That’s a long time. According to Getac, the new warranty covers all of their fully rugged computers (i.e. the A790, B300, E100, M230 and V100 models) delivered on or after January first of this year. And the warranty includes “damage that occurs due to accidental acts and exposure to environmental conditions”. According to Getac president Jim Rimay, they did that because in these tough economic times, computers are more […]

  • New Atom processors: N450, D410 and D510

    On December 21, 2009, Intel announced the next generation of Atom processors. The new generation of Atom processors includes the single core N450, the single core D410 and the dual-core D510. Up to this announcement, millions of netbooks (as well as related devices such as tablets and boards) used the Atom N270 processor with its two companion chips, the ICH7M I/O chip and the 945GSE graphics and memory controller. The combo of the latter two is known as the Intel 945GSE Express chipset and makes for a total of three chips. Of N-Series processors released prior to this latest announcement, […]

  • The Atom processor predicament

    Well, this is going to be interesting. Despite the Intel Atom chips’ modest performance, consumers have bought millions and millions of those little netbooks. I am quite certain they bought them because of the low price that made netbooks an impulse buy as opposed to spending more for a “real” notebook computer. Whether or not customers are happy with their netbooks largely depends on how they use the computers. The small display with 1024 x 600 pixel resolution is confining for almost any real work as there’s just not enough real estate. And while the term “netbook” implies that the […]

  • Apple stores supposedly transitioning from WinMo to iPod Touch

    Anyone who’s ever been to an Apple store for an appointment or service knows the weird procedure where someone greets you at the door, takes your info, and then wirelessly sends it to some other Apple people who then come greet you when it’s your time. Same for making payments away from the main desk and so on. It all works, but it’s a bit odd, and even weirder is that some of that mobile check-in and checkout is done on non-Apple hardware (Symbol, actually) that’s running Windows CE software. Supposedly it was done that way because Apple mobile gear […]

  • Windows 7

    Well, the much advertised public release date of Windows 7 has come and gone. The equivalent of “War and Peace” has been written on how wonderful it is and on how Microsoft “got it right” this time. Maybe they have and maybe they haven’t. Here at RuggedPCReview.com, we’ve used Windows 7 on some of the rugged hardware we’ve had here for testing and evaluation recently and, frankly, it looked so much like Vista that we barely noticed anything was different. At this point, I have mixed feelings. Almost all the rugged hardware that comes in here still runs Windows XP […]

  • Getac to offer multi-touch on its V100 rugged Tablet PC

    Multi-touch has been all the rage ever since Apple showed the world the effortless elegance and utility of the iPhone’s two-finger pinch and spread to zoom in and out. So what is multi-touch? Basically, it means the touch screen is able to accept simultaneous input from more than one position. While on the iPhone, multi-touch is currently limited to two fingers, there is theoretically no limit as to the number of simultaneous touches. What is multi-touch good for? Well, Apple’s super-elegant zooming certainly go everyone’s attention, but multi-touch can also be used for things like rotating with a two-finger screw […]

  • Gorilla Glass — lighter and tougher display protection

    On October 6, 2009, Motion Computing announced that their C5 and F5 were the first Tablet PCs to use Corning’s Gorilla Glass. What is Gorilla Glass? In its press release, Motion states that it is “thin-sheet glass that was designed to protect against real-world events that cause display damage.” To learn more I scheduled a call with Corning’s Dr. Nagaraja Shashidhar. To prepare myself I checked Corning’s very informative page on Gorilla Glass. They have some videos there that show the glass being bent and steel balls falling onto it. The glass neither shatters nor breaks. In fact, it’s hard […]

  • Gotcha, fool! Your friends at AT&T

    The other day we tested a rugged handheld in the RuggedPCReview.com lab. The device so happened to have a SIM slot because it also worked as a phone and a WWLAN data communicator. I so happen to have an unused phone with a SIM in it, and so I decided to use that SIM for testing the rugged handheld. Why do I have an unused phone? Because it’s on one of the AT&T’s 2-year service contracts. It’s just a crappy throw-away phone, but thanks to AT&T I am now paying for it for another year whether I am using it […]

  • Deal killers: The Telco 2-year contracts

    Years ago, when some exciting new piece of technology came along I simply could not resist buying it. When the first Newton came out I plunked down seven hundred bucks, just to see how it worked and because I simply had to have one. Likewise when Compaq released the Concerto Tablet PC in the mid-1990s. And when that same Compaq came out with its first iPAQs. I bought one. You can’t do that anymore these days. That’s because virtually every piece of technology now includes a phone, and in order to get service you have to sign up for a […]

  • The dangers of product photography

    While most of the press either uses official product photography supplied by PR agencies or press centers, or takes quickie snapshots with their smartphones, we here at RuggedPCReview.com do it the hard way. We do our own product photography and always make sure that the devices are shown in the environment they are most likely going to be used in. That isn’t always easy. I was reminded of that as we recently needed to do product photography on a good half dozen of rugged machines. These were rugged and ultra-rugged computers designed to be used on forklifts, in trucks, on […]

  • Where rugged computers come from

    Where do rugged computers come from? Not always where you think. In an increasingly global marketplace the old business model of companies designing, making, selling and servicing their products is increasingly going by the wayside. These days, it’s more likely that one company thinks of a product, hires another to design it, has it built by a third, a forth one is marketing and selling it, and a fifth one does the service. As a result, it’s becoming pretty difficult to figure out who does what, and where the computers we buy and use are actually coming from. For us […]

  • Palm and Windows Mobile and how the iPhone really changed everything

    With all the hoopla over the much anticipated release of the Palm Pre in early June of 2009, I thought about the ever-changing fortunes of the mobile platforms in our industry. Disregarding some smaller players and initiatives, here’s the big picture: In 1993, the Apple Newton made news when then Apple CEO John Sculley pushed it hard and predicted that such devices and their infrastructure would one day be a trillion dollar industry. Sculley was scorned for that remark, as was the Newton for its various shortcomings. But the Newton, way ahead of its time, was still good enough to […]

  • Atom platform expands, but does it have a clear direction?

    In the days of the 386, 486 and even early Pentium processors, it used to be fairly easy to follow Intel’s chips as they mainly differed in clock speed. These days, staying on top of Intel’s various offerings has become an almost full time job. That even goes for Intel’s low-end Atom chips that, together with resurrecting some older Intel technologies such as hyperthreading, seemed to simplify the matter of processor selection. It didn’t really turn out that way. Intel has been very successful in positioning the Atom processor as new, exciting, efficient and just generally the way to go, […]

  • The Intel Atom processor phenomenon

    Frustrated with the small display and insufficient battery life of your mobile or handheld computer? Is it also too big and just not quick enough? And you can’t stand a fan coming on and the thing getting so hot you can barely touch it? Welcome to the world of mobile computing where optimizing mutually exclusive goals is the order of the day. As a result, manufacturers of mobile gear are fighting a never-ending struggle to find the best compromise — and it is always a compromise — between size, weight, usability, performance and battery life. The screen should be large […]

  • The amazing success of “netbooks”

    These days, “netbooks” get a lot of press. You’ think a “netbook” were some sort of miraculous new device, a technological breakthrough that lets you do new and wondrous things. In fact, “netbooks” are nothing more than little notebooks. There is absolutely nothing new or exciting about them. And there is nothing that makes them earn the “netbook” name. Nor are they new. There have been numerous attempts at selling downsized miniature laptops over the years, going back to the early 1990s and before. None were ever successful. People simply did not want an underpowered mini version of a notebook […]

  • The problem with Linux

    On the surface, Linux should be a huge winner, and in many respects it is. Hey, what more can one want than a free operating system with mostly free software that runs on just about anything? I’ve been using Linux for many years for just that reason. Free. No hassles with activation, copy protection, and other pesky schemes meant to keep pirates away yet only inconveniencing customers. So why hasn’t Linux taken over? Because it’s too complex. Sure, there are distributions that install simply and easily, but you can also spend hours trying to get one little thing to work […]

  • Smartphone & Pocket PC Magazine — the shortsightedness of letting an incredible resource die

    With Microsoft sitting on billions of dollars in cash and spending many millions on comedian Jerry Seinfeld and a silly Vista campaign, the one magazine that has covered Pocket PCs and Windows Mobile for many years has just died due to lack of support. I am talking about Smartphone & Pocket PC Magazine, published by Thaddeus Computing Inc. Those guys were publishing magazines on small Microsoft-powered computers for almost a quarter of a century, yet neither Microsoft nor Hewlett Packard apparently cares enough about real, quality coverage of their products to at least use this incredible magazine as a venue […]

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